About 16 months ago, a music publisher had this to say about a "friend to friend" file-sharing service meant for sharing between small-ish groups of people:
"I'm not so sure that I see a big distinction between this and, say, Grokster because you're at 30 people. Where are you going to draw the line at what constitutes unlicensed use of copyrighted music?"
The service he was referring to in the LA Times was Grouper. You might have heard that, Sony announced plans this week to buy it for $65 million.
Will a big media company be buying the new "F2F" service AllPeers anytime soon? Not likely.
Grouper evolved into a multi-dimensional YouTube-like service, while AllPeers looks locked and loaded on becoming the first ultra-light P2P application that runs as an extension to a browser (in this case, the open source Firefox). Jon Healey of the LA Times notes its significance while tossing out the "N" word:
When Shawn Fanning released the original Napster software in 1999, he didn't invent file-sharing. He just made it easier than ever before to swap songs online. That ease of use, combined with the allure of free music (and the joy of sticking it to the music industry), led tens of millions of people to install Napster before it ran afoul of the 9th Circuit.
A similar watershed moment may be coming for the BitTorrent peer-to-peer protocol, whose efficiency and speed make it more suited to share large files than earlier applications like Napster and Kazaa. AllPeers, a UK-based company that uses coders in Prague, is completing work on software that will build BitTorrent file-sharing into the Firefox browser. Users will be able to share files of any kind with people on their AllPeers buddy list simply by dragging and dropping icons from one folder to another.
That's a huge leap forward not just in usability, but also concealment -- all communications on AllPeers are private and encrypted. As a consequence, it's hard to see how the entertainment industry could attack bootlegging through AllPeers...
But, fear not, entertainment industry, AllPeers supports the Grokster Supreme Court decision and promises to not "actively induce" copyright infringement... (from the AllPeers blog)...
The United States Supreme Court ruled in MGM vs. Grokster that a company cannot be held accountable for potential copyright infringement committed by its users, upholding the earlier Betamax Decision (which otherwise would have resulted in the banning of the VCR, to the media industry’s great detriment). They did rule that a company can be sued for “actively inducing” its users to infringe on others’ copyrights. This is a vital distinction, as a number of companies based their business model directly on profiting from the illegal copying of commercial media files. While I don’t agree with the way that media companies have thus far reacted to the digital revolution, I think it is reprehensible for a company to try to make money in this way, so I support the Grokster decision wholeheartedly. We don’t and never will base our business model on encouraging copyright infringement on the part of our users. In fact, we hope in the future to contribute actively to developing innovative new ways for consumers to acquire digital content legally, and at a fair price, without succumbing to the oppressive restrictions inherent in today’s DRM technology.
And, we thought the content copyright wars were getting a bit too quiet.
But, let's also remember that Napster had a single focus and purpose: To share music files. Tools like AllPeers will genuinely be highly used for easily sharing big PowerPoints among work colleagues, photos between family members and vacation videos with friends. Sure, you could have done this last week with another BitTorrent application, but you would have needed to have been a geek to do it.
The LA Times Healey also puts his optimistic hat on and suggests:
Imagine people sharing promotional songs, games with try-before-you-buy DRMs, trailers, TV pilots or movies with DRMs that allow viewers to watch the first 20 minutes for free. Communicating with buddies is already well ingrained among Internet users, as is sharing files through instant-message programs. Latching such a tool onto a browser would make it much easier for people to share the things that catch their fancy online, accelerating the viral distribution of hot properties and increasing the reach of products that appeal to niche tastes.
LxGmrv Internet is written with the capital letter in a sentence, by the way. And hundredths are written not with a point but with a comma. This is according to the standard. And actually everything is very good..!!
Posted by: cheap oem software | February 11, 2012 at 12:15 AM
I'm not so sure that I see a big distinction between this and, say, Grokster because you're at 30 people.
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