P2P-Zone - View Single Post - Odyssey study: filesharing is here to stay

Mazer · 18-04-02, 09:08 PM

For a couple of years now I've had an idea rolling around in my head concerning p2p payment models. It goes like this: if you download a song you owe a fee (myabe 5 cents), and if you upload a song you get paid the same amount, and the fees and payments are balanced in an online brokerage account (like trading stocks, but not). I originally thought it would be a good way to stop leaching (back in the Napster days) but it seems kinda dumb to me now. There'd be those who would leave their broadband connections on all day and night and get paid for doing nothing, and I've always believed that the originators of music shoud be paid rather than the distributors, including p2p sharers. Still, I'd like to see how many people would subscribe to such a service, it would be a way to test fee based p2p's.

But the issue isn't really as clean cut as fee vs. free. PressPlay and Music Net are scams that attract suckers, they get people to pay for something they're not getting. I imagine the only subscribers to those "services" are people who feel guilty for doing things that the music industry says are illegal. Given the choice between three pay services, one that advertizes high quality rips, another that advertizes direct payment to artists, and the third that advertizes that it's legal, which would you chose? I can confidently predict that the first two would get a lot more traffic than the third, even if they were deemed illegal.

In the case that pay services become high quality, server centered, fast and friendly and unrestricted, I think that there would be a reversal of roles in the p2p world and only the suckers would use the free p2p's. Like ranger points out, you can't expect a lot for free. Like it or not good information costs good money, but in this mad world there are those that charge for bad information and those that give good information for free. The trick is gathering people who will share good information for free in one place, like here on NU. The net is just like the real world, the only people you can really trust are your personal friends.

18-04-02, 09:08 PM	#13
Mazer Earthbound misfit Join Date: May 2001 Location: Moses Lake, Washington Posts: 2,563	For a couple of years now I've had an idea rolling around in my head concerning p2p payment models. It goes like this: if you download a song you owe a fee (myabe 5 cents), and if you upload a song you get paid the same amount, and the fees and payments are balanced in an online brokerage account (like trading stocks, but not). I originally thought it would be a good way to stop leaching (back in the Napster days) but it seems kinda dumb to me now. There'd be those who would leave their broadband connections on all day and night and get paid for doing nothing, and I've always believed that the originators of music shoud be paid rather than the distributors, including p2p sharers. Still, I'd like to see how many people would subscribe to such a service, it would be a way to test fee based p2p's. But the issue isn't really as clean cut as fee vs. free. PressPlay and Music Net are scams that attract suckers, they get people to pay for something they're not getting. I imagine the only subscribers to those "services" are people who feel guilty for doing things that the music industry says are illegal. Given the choice between three pay services, one that advertizes high quality rips, another that advertizes direct payment to artists, and the third that advertizes that it's legal, which would you chose? I can confidently predict that the first two would get a lot more traffic than the third, even if they were deemed illegal. In the case that pay services become high quality, server centered, fast and friendly and unrestricted, I think that there would be a reversal of roles in the p2p world and only the suckers would use the free p2p's. Like ranger points out, you can't expect a lot for free. Like it or not good information costs good money, but in this mad world there are those that charge for bad information and those that give good information for free. The trick is gathering people who will share good information for free in one place, like here on NU. The net is just like the real world, the only people you can really trust are your personal friends.