Related link: http://www.boycott-riaa.com/article/6540
This article on Boycott-RIAA.org is a proposal for a P2P net that 100% consists of creative commons-licensed materials. A good idea! The problem being that just like Napster couldn't get music label content off, how are you going to stop people from putting the latest Madonna tracks on it?
The obvious problem being that just like Napster couldn't get music label content off, how are you going to stop people from putting the latest Madonna tracks on it? But if it's all CC content then it should be simple for the machine to check for the existence of a cc license. But do we have the technology to put cc licenses in audio files? Or should the system consist of placeholder html files that contain the cc license and a link to the content? Perhaps Adam can answer these questions fairly easily.
In any case, I agree in principle with the idea that there should be a thing that consists of OUR content and OUR technology. As the author points out, the P2P era revealed the possibility of artists and listeners finding each other directly.
The question with Napster, as Cory pointed out when I interviewed him recently, Napster was only really good to find stuff you already knew existed. A cc-p2p would be exclusively about finding stuff you don't know exists. So it's not clear that p2p would be better than a cc yahoo, or some centralized effort to let people browse what content exists.
As far as the payment model goes, you still don't get paid for putting your stuff online. But why should artists be different from writers and bloggers and visual artists and programmers? The only people who get paid for putting stuff online are people working with established sites who have an advertising-based revenue stream based on audience size, which is based on compelling content. So there can be advertising-based music sites. There's no need to replicate the old model here.
In any case, a start of something is available at the Archive/ETree page of free concert recordings. They're up to 200 artists. See: http://www.archive.org/audio/etree.php
Anyone want to take this on? Can CC people answer some of these questions?
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Read More Entries by Richard Koman.
Alluvium
From another O'Reilly blogger, "Brandon would like to make freely available music available (preferably Creative Commons or Open Audio licensed content) in Alluvium streams to give emerging artists more exposure."
There's no reason why a P2P client couldn't be built around this other function as well. Think, "I like that last song I just heard on the Alluvium stream, let me mark that as one to download and share".
Putting licenses in audio files
Most of the audio formats are already perfectly good containers, what we need is a standard. Arguably, we could create ad hoc standards today. For MP3, the RDF tag could go in a user-defined ID3 frame, like TXX (2.2) or TXXX (2.3+), maybe with some sort of Creative Commons header as the first part of the data (actually, I suppose the RDF is pretty unambiguous as it is). For MPEG-4/AAC files, put it in a 'udta' ("user data") atom.
In both cases, it might be worth CC engaging ID3.org and the MPEG-4 people (or Apple) to get an official ID3 frame or MPEG-4/QuickTime atom declared for this purpose.
Only part of this idea I don't like is that it's easier for media players to parse that kind of data than it would be for the p2p app. If every file format has a different way of encoding its license data, it'll be burdensome for a p2p app to parse all those formats. Maybe instead the content could be wrapped in zip (or other container) files containing the conent and the license - nothing gets shared without an appropriate license, but the app hides this implementation detail from the user.
On the other hand, how do we keep someone from attaching a CC license to content they don't own and sharing it?
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