Nickname: Dongler

Review: How about a central server where anyone who wants to publish could host their content, annual licence fee allowing access to all files for all users. I'd gladly pay £100/year for universal access. Payment to artists would be calculated by number of people downloading. Anyone could publish anything, continued storage requiring only a minimum interest value, minimum N requests per X timespace. Think of the upsurge in creativity as artists realize they no longer have profit obsessed sharks between them and the public. Create, upload, and let demand bring in the rewards. Reward would increase by orders of magnitude. People don't realize the tiny proportion of market price that actually makes it through the clingy hands of the publishing companies into the pockets of the creators. In these days of massive bandwidth, storage, and connectivity, charging per copy is dead. It is about time it was buried, along with the anti-creativity leeches who call themselves the RIAA and the MIAA.

Date reviewed: May 16, 2006 3:44 PM

Nickname: yobigc99

Review: Damn straight, Don't be so naive. Where there's a will (to pirate) there's always a way.

Date reviewed: May 10, 2006 4:21 AM

Nickname: JethroDethro

Review: Devil's advocate says there are hidden costs in everything. If you go to the video store, do you consider the gas you use to get there, or the cost of bus fare, or food to fuel you on your skate deck? Hidden costs. Devil's advocate also says that it will be nice to have access to TV shows that won't get DVD release. (The Fugitive!) But the devil in me says bollocks to progress; the dinosaurs in the MPAA and RIAA are completely out of touch with seeders and leechers. If you "buy" an episode of Hazzard, are you really going to leave it seeding at as a bandwidth expense to you? And if I can't copy it, I'm not bloody likely to pay for it. Kudos to Bram Cohen and BitTorrent for giving torrent some clout with these geezers. I suspect, though, that this system won't work.

Date reviewed: May 9, 2006 10:07 PM

Nickname: Corriander

Review: I wonder if people will bother to seed files they had to pay for? That might be a complication.

Date reviewed: May 9, 2006 9:18 PM

Nickname: RobotsThink

Review: Nicely said, Francesco and poilbrun. Shouldn't the user charge the source companies if his PC and bandwidth is used as a node for the companies to charge other peer users? Or should we develop a better "Affiliate Management System" where everyone is benefitted.

Date reviewed: May 9, 2006 2:41 PM

Nickname: poilbrun

Review: I think it is really a shame that movie studios are going down the distributed-sharing way. That method of file-sharing puts the bandwidth-burden on its users rather than on the company selling the content. More and more companies are going that way to distribute files, which is understandable from the company point-of-view, but as a paying customer, I don't want a hidden cost in my purchase, in this case the cost of the bandwidth that is used afterwards to re-upload the file to other users. Blizzard is using this system to distribute its updates to their game World of Warcraft, and it does not take long before the files are available on a download server. I expect the same to happen here, especially since it should not pose a legal problem, as the DRM rights will be sold separately.

Date reviewed: May 9, 2006 10:51 AM

Nickname: Francesco

Review: The idea of using distributed peer-to-peer file-sharing to sell movies is great: big companies using small users' own bandwidth and computing power to distribute their own things! Making a profit selling them to the same users that have helped the distribution! Unless users get great movies for very low prices in exchange, I doubt they would let Warner or anyone else use their own computer to make profit And all the faith in DRM is astonishing. You really believe that DRM protected movies cannot be copied? If it can be seen or listened to, it can be copied! There are already great software programs (Ambrosia Software's Wiretap) that easily copy to everything that is sent to the the audio card! It records what you are listening to (protected or not) in digital quality. Protect your audio file from that! Whoever thinks it can't be done with video is a fool DRM is just a great marketing word to let someone invest some money and to fool investors into thinking their company is safe.

Date reviewed: May 9, 2006 8:59 AM