The EMI
Group, which has many well known artists including Janet Jackson, Coldplay,
Gorillaz and the Rolling Stones has made its music library consisting of over
1,000 artists available with Mashboxx. The person behind Mashboxx, Rosso
has so far been working on the product for two years to develop something that
is a balance between a music store and free file sharing. He was
originally the president of Grokster before it ran into major legal problems.
Mashboxx
ties into the Gnutella network and operates much like any other Gnutella
client. Should a user look up a song that is not claimed by the music industry, they can download it for free as with any other P2P client. However, if the song is licensed out by the music industry, the user can download and play it for free up to five times before the user needs to purchase it. This gives the user the ability to sample music without being limited to 30 second clips or low quality playback. However, any songs that were already downloaded before the music industry licensed the music to Mashboxx will be unaffected. Like Napster, tracks can be purchased for 99c/song. Purchased songs can then be transferred to CD a limited number of times or transferred to a Windows Media Audio DRM compatible player.
Unlike
other file sharing networks that tried changing to a legal model after running into legal issues with the music industry, Mashboxx has been aiming to remain legal from the very start, while still giving consumers access to the huge library of music already available through the Gnutella file sharing network. Unfortunately, they do have a drawback in that unlike the well known P2P networks Kazaa, iMesh and so on, Mashboxx will need a means of getting their service promoted so consumers know it is there. They already have made deals with Sony BMG and Universal and have just finished negotiating with Warner Music also.
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The record label, whose 1,000-plus artists include Janet Jackson, Gorillaz, the Rolling Stones and Coldplay, is not the first to license its content for use on Mashboxx. According to founder Wayne Rosso, the New York-based Mashboxx--currently preparing for a beta test launch--already has deals with Sony BMG and Universal, and has completed negotiations with Warner Music. Rosso has spent the past two years building the infrastructure for Mashboxx, an idea that he credits in part to his business ties with former Sony BMG CEO Andrew Lack. In 2002, while serving as president of now-defunct P2P powerhouse Grokster (a position he had left by the time the company started hitting the worst of its legal trouble), Rosso worked with Lack to try to solve the problem of illegal file-sharing. Rather than try to fight the record labels, Rosso wanted to "convert" to a format the labels would support, without resorting to a P2P model that simply filtered out major-label content. Napster had recently tried that, and failed. At that point, Rosso said, a legal P2P that offered a full range of music wasn't possible. "The technology hadn't really matured to the point that it could be done effectively." The full article can be read here. |
Like other music download services that compete with
iTunes, Mashboxx will have the same problem in that the music freely available
will be more user-friendly than the licensed purchasable content. For
example, once a music label claims ownership over a song and licenses it to
Mashboxx, consumers will have to pay 99c to keep the song and be restricted from
playing it on their iPod or any other portable player that is not WMA DRM
complaint, where as if they downloaded that same song 'for free" before the
label claimed ownership over it (or downloaded it from another Gnutella client
or P2P network), the song will have no such limitations. On the other
hand, Mashboxx does seem to have a nice idea of tying P2P into their network as
a means of boosting its library, however this does nothing to solve the whole
problem with iPod support, never mind the whole issue with
DRM.
Feel free to discuss about Mashboxx, Gnutella and other music services on our P2P forum.
Source: c|net News
