MoreCooler.com: It's more cooler with the thing

Oh, look. Kazaa wants to make up with the RIAA and the record companies, hold hands, and sing "We Are The World".

http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/10/09/10656760..

"No hard feelings, right guys? ...guys?"

The issue will be how much they plan on charging per download. If it's anywhere in the neighborhood of iTunes, it'll never fly. With iTunes, you can assume that anything you download is a high-quality version of what it claims to be. Not so with Kazaa and friends. Sometimes it's as simple of a mislabeled artist (Tom Petty does NOT sing Runaway Train), sometimes it's a live track that's called a studio track, and sometimes it's just plain wrong. It's going to be next to impossible to get a paid P2P service going unless you charge a flat rate.

Of course, this is most likely a pointless post since the record industry is not likely to place nice with Kazaa.

I share a file. Joe Schmoe downloads it. Kazaa charges him a buck.

I see some of that action, right? After all, it was MY bought-and-paid-for bandwith that provided that service, correct?

This will fail spectacularly without some sort of monetary compensation for the sharer. Included in that compensation would, of course, be the requirement that all information shared be of reasonable quality and properly labeled.

Otherwise, this will fail spectacularly.

If they treated it like they do CD-Rs, and just take a cut out of each sale and throw it in a pool for the RIAA to hand out, it'd be okay. They do that with blank audio tapes as well (not sure about video). If everyone's ISP bill was two bucks higher, that'd probably be okay with most folks.

Then, you're charging people who don't download music for things they're not buying, and you're just giving money to the RIAA for nothing indefinitely.

I would like a system that involves a mandatory (maybe; possibly make it a service tier with other benefits) $5-$10/mo "tax", like you describe, from the ISP level, but with a twist: websites carry a code snippet that allows a user to microdonate from their built-up tax at any time. Say, one click drops 50 cents in the bucket. And these buttons could be included in software like Kazaa: one click gives 50 cents to a band you like, or whatever.

When the amounts hit a certain limit, say $50 or whatever, the ISP (or rather, the central organization that all the ISPs pay to handle this service) cuts a check to the organization. It could even keep $1 or so out of the monthly tax to cover overhead for handling this process. At the end of each month, any leftover in the account from this tax would be split up among various certified charities.

You'll notice the RIAA gets nothing in this scheme, which is fine by me, although it could be easily modified to appease those litigious bastards (say, one 50 cent click sends 49 cents to RIAA and 1 cent to artist - unless they've not paid their recording dues o_o;; ). And sites like penny arcade, slashdot, etc. can survive without implementing their own pay sections or begging for paypal scraps.

It would be a difficult system to implement, I'm afraid, as many would object if the "tax" was mandatory, and I think a system whereby 50 cents is donated directly with each click would fail. Once people pay the tax, it's no longer "money" - indeed, you could even seperate it by another level by saying the $10 tax gives you 20 "tokens" or somesuch. Another interesting option would be to let the ISP add some sort of flag to outgoing traffic from accounts that haved signed up for this plan (if it were optional), and let the receiving end do with that what it will; i.e. slashdot could present a no-ad service to those who have tokens to hand out, under the goodwill assumption that the user will eventually donate. Recurring token payments could be set up, as well; say, at the end of the month, ONLY if you've not used up all your tokens, it could be set up to automatically send tokens to your favorite webcomics, news sites, etc.

Hell, while we're at it, gambling and gaming sites would love this. If you put in a system where a site could award tokens back to the player, or you could drop a token in the slot for some sort of online game or somesuch. And there could be a web portal, maintained by the service keeping track of all this (hopefully a non-profit, at the very least a very carefully watched open company) that would track newest, most often donated, etc. info for sites in the program.

I don't think this is a totally new concept, as I've heard the term micropayments tossed around a bit, but I believe the missing link here is to get the ISPs involved. Of course, one central organization would handle the payment system, and security would be a considerable issue, but safeguards such as a reviewable payment history for the user could be put in place to make it as inpenetrable as possible. And as long as we're going pie-in-the-sky here, let's make that system open source, so we can catch any loopholes early on.

Gosh, that went longer than I intended. I think it's an idea with merit, though. Whaddy'all think?

What they are trying to push is basically an ISP-RIAA tax. In a sense, your ISP account would have the RIAA tax (like the CDRs in Canada (do they do that here now?)) And the RIAA would just bundle it up and distribute it based on popularity and such (they wouldn't do it any other way.. they would _NEVER_ go for a system that would force them to pay $x to some little-known or indie artist as they like pushing the big money to the "big/popular" artists (which of course have a lot of that $ siphoned off..)