Until recently, Sony has been trying its best to discourage and prevent piracy, such as introducing its secure Super Audio CD format, DRM for its Atrac3+ format and recently planning to copy protect all CD releases. It was only towards the end of 2004 that they finally introduced MP3 support to its digital audio players due to poor sales and customer demand.
Now, Sony has become the first to allow consumers to share its licensed music legally by striking a major deal with Sony BMG. The Playlouder MSP service, which is effectively a broadband ISP, will allow subscribers to freely share Sony licensed music. This music can be shared in any format using any popular file sharing network, such as Kazaa, eDonkey, Limewire and so on. The BPI welcomes this move by Sony as "Innovative thinking", since P2P has been proven to be a very efficient way of distributing content. However in this case, the copyright holders get paid based on the broadband subscription revenue.
Sony recons that if all broadband providers took on this approach, the music industry would take in over £300 million of revenue a year in the UK alone or $13.5 billion globally. However, to prevent consumers outside of the network from accessing subscriber's shared music, Audible Magic's technology will be used to monitor and control network traffic using digital watermark recognition to ensure that only subscribers can tap into the music shared by other subscribers. Playlouder is due to launch at the end of September. Their basic 1Mbps broadband package costs £26.99 a month, which is on par with some other UK ADSL providers. Thanks to Siswell for using our news submit to let us know about the following news:
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Playlouder MSP, launching at the end of September, will let its customers share Sony licensed music with others on its network. In return, Playlouder will pool some of its broadband subscriptions to share with music rights owners.
"Ensuring record companies are adequately and reliably recompensed for the use of their copyrights on the internet is the number one issue for our business," said BPI - the UK recording industry body - chairman Peter Jamieson. "The BPI welcomes the innovative thinking which has gone into the creation of Playlouder MSP and we give it our full support." Acts under the Sony BMG umbrella include Beyonce, David Bowie, Macy Gray, Oasis, Travis, Will Young, Outkast, Alicia Keys and Dido. |
This is an interesting move by Sony and is about time that a label has thought about using P2P as tool, rather than keep trying to get rid of it. Unlike other legal P2P developments which control sharing using DRM protected tracks, Sony will allow users to share its licensed music in any format using any popular file sharing network. Hopefully, this will show the music industry (especially the RIAA) just one example of how to deal with P2P that does not involve lawsuits or other forms of legal action. Let's just hope that if other music labels try this approach, that it will not mean that a consumer will be stuck with one label depending on which label backed ISP they chose.
Feel free to discuss about file sharing on our Music Download, Peer to Peer (P2P) & Legal Issues Forum.
Source: BBC News - Technology
