Posted on 12/19/2004 1:26:08 PM PST by mathprof
Record labels typically view peer-to-peer networks like pirate ships — plundering their profits through illegal song swaps. They have sued the networks. They have sued file-sharers. Now this ironic twist: Record companies are hopping aboard a new generation of paid peer-to-peer networks.
With the scramble to profit from "P2P," a small upstate New York company called Wurld Media staked a claim this month by announcing deals with three of the four major record companies for its soon-to-debut network, Peer Impact.
The privately held company, housed in a refurbished beer warehouse in the middle of a tourist city's downtown, plans to debut, by February, an intelligent P2P network with a half-million songs. Ultimately, Wurld wants to make Peer Impact the download choice for the exploding universe of digital media — from movies to video games.
[snip]
At first blush, record labels teaming with P2Ps might seem like Batman joining up with the Joker.
But the financial incentive is huge. About 1 billion song files are shared every month on file-swapping networks, according to estimates from file-sharing tracker BigChampagne
(Excerpt) Read more at story.news.yahoo.com ...
Analysts agree that P2Ps are efficient, but the larger question is whether they can compete with free services such as Kazaa that cumulatively offer more than a billion files.
Kazaa is dead. They're being sued, and you can't really find anything good on there in the first place.
BitTorrent is the current big thing, but the MPAA is filing lawsuits against trackers, and the biggest one, Suprnova, just called it quits.
Kazaa Lite Revolution is far from dead and still returns more hits for any given search than any other P2P program I've found.Kazaa OTH is chock full of spyware,pop-ups and requires a subscription.If people are willing to pay for the security of downloading without being sued I say more power to them.
The focus of P2P sharing has shifted away from Kazaa-like programs and towards BitTorrent: I can already get far more from a BitTorrent tracker than I could on Kazaa, and with BT, I don't have to wade through misnamed files, low-quality files, or possible trojans.
Do the statistics you cite contain download numbers for all of the different BT clients?
the train may be out of the station, but they own a lot of the rolling stock.
$0.99 is too expensive. Even $0.49 is too high. It has to be too cheap to steal. Even Microsoft's Palladium architects think so. Google up "darknet." Any p2p system that works with the RIAA is dead on arrival. Nobody will trust it.
Big news just coming out. suprnova.org has died. The single largest bit-torent site has faded away. A statement of resignation is on the home page. Several other bit-torant sites have also gone down.
The free flow of information is the only safeguard against tyranny.
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