File-sharing development and
distribution—company
RazorPop will launch a new unlimited music subscription service ($9.95/month) to
compete with Napster and others. The service, called RazorPop P2P Music Subscription, will pay music copyright owners a
cut of the subscription revenue. An independent clearing house will collect customer fees and distribute licensing fees
based on sample network downloads monitored by an independent research firm.
The interesting part is that the service includes copyright infringement insurance: as the RIAA continues to sue
regular P2P users, RazorPop's customers are protected by insurance that covers $5,000 per subscriber.
PS: This report is based on a Slick post, but we could
not find the press release on RazorPop's website.
1. So let me get this straight. We pay you guys $10/mo for... letting us use each others bandwidth? The insurance idea is good for a laugh, and might even work. But companies can't charge for P2P. There are two reasons:
#1 - You don't get to charge for letting me use my bandwidth I already pay for and other peoples bandwidth they already pay for.
#2 - Your network is open. Want me to spend a few hours banging together an app that generates random hunks of useless data matching the hashes of what's on your network and start feeding that back into it? It's not hard and it'll corrupt the whole system in minutes.
So play nice. Don't try to make money off of other peoples bandwidth. I know it sounds like a sweet deal to the suits, but it's a really bad idea and you'll get your dick slammed in the door.
Posted at 4:29AM on Dec 19th 2005 by Dustin Rodriguez