A Copyfighter’s Musings

• A nice article from News.com on P2P users shifting away from KaZaA, primarily to eDonkey.  It covers a couple interesting issues, including how this might make it easier to acquire movies and software.  It also might lead to greater privacy protections and perhaps spoofing countermeasures.  From what I know (and I haven’t investigated this thoroughly enough), Sharman has not added any sort of proxying and encryption into KaZaA, nor a peer-rating system that could help defeat spoofing.  Systems like Morpheus have been much more willing to add proxy support.  I don’t know the extent to which eDonkey or other systems have added these features or are willing to.  I also don’t know the extent to which users are seeking out systems with these features; regardless, if they migrate to the systems simply because they are more efficient for sharing files, they might also adopt privacy protecting features if they happen to be available.
  
• More on taking advantage of the mobile market and turning cell phones into digital music players.  As if the silliness about the ring tone market weren’t enough, now this: 
  

  
  

  “Michael Nash, a senior vice president at Warner Music, says his company is already in discussions with its constituent labels about having studio producers create mobile mixes–such as the abbreviated 90-second or two-minute versions of songs used by T-Mobile-type download services–at the same time as the full versions of songs are created. This could help create a new market for music, in which people listen to PC-based and phone-based songs differently, he said.

  
  

  “From our perspective, it is a much more desirable outcome to have the mobile channel and online channel be differentiated,” Nash said.

  
  

  Yes, from your perspective, indeed.  It ain’t gonna happen.  You will, however, lead people to circumvent or route around your DRM (burning to CD and ripping, or recording from the soundcard), and to download from P2P rather than buy at all.

Filed by Derek Slater at 10:40 pm under General news
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