Thursday, June 24, 2004

FAIRCOPY, P2P and people looking for new music

The author of sharph.net thinks that FAIRCOPY won't catch on. He argues that the service defeats the purpose of P2P for people that want to find new music because they can't listen to it. I think that's not correct, because it's possible to offer a, possibly lo-fi, Creative Commons (CC)-licensed free sample, while selling the hi-fi version. As an example, Brad Sucks offers CC-licensed 64 kbps MP3s of his songs while selling the 192 kbps MP3, as you can see here.

The CC license allows to share this 64 kbps sample on P2P networks, and I think 64 kbps is enough to find out if you like the song, and that if you like it then you'll want to buy the 192 kbps version. So people will still be able to find and listen to new music through P2P.

Note that in FAIRCOPY, the author decides not only the sale price and distributor commision, but also the free sample, the license, and the format of the work on sale, so the previosly mentioned bitrates and licenses were used only as examples. Thus, the free sample could be a 30s. clip, or the entire song at 40, 64, 96 or 128 kbps, or... whatever, because the author can also upload a file that will be used as a sample. As for the sample license, the author can choose between 2 CC licenses and another, more restrictive license. And the author also decides the format of the work on sale, so in the case of a music work, it can be not only MP3, but also FLAC, Ogg Vorbis or whatever.

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