Spine of broadband adoption
p2pnet.net News View:- With Yahoo in the news via its truly unlimited Yahoo Music Unlimited, Broadband Reports` Karl Bode has several interesting thoughts on the subject of broadband adoption.
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Yes, But Can Yahoo Compete with Piracy?
Analysts giddy over restricted fee-based music
By Karl Bode Broadband Reports
Analysts and news outlets, many shackled in one way or another to Yahoo’s ad empire, are a-flutter over Yahoo’s new music service, chattering like winter teeth about stock drops and price-wars. Most are asking if Yahoo can compete with iTunes, when they should be asking: can anything compete with piracy?
Dig through the trough of media and analyst coverage of the launch, and you’ll find that 99% are ignoring the pink elephant in the room: the fact you can go to a site like Torrentspy or ISOHunt, plug in a band name and download an entire album – replete with cover-art – a month before official release – for free.
Whether it’s illegal or not doesn’t make it any less real. The fact is that most broadband users are obtaining their music illegally, and will never be prosecuted by the music industry. Illegal music downloading is the very spine of the broadband adoption boom. ISPs are also ignoring that same pink elephant.
How can one discuss the pay-music business model with a straight face while crack-proof DRM remains a pipe-dream, and the product being sold is freely available to the masses?
Even Apple, the most successful of the music services, makes no money off of music. Steve Jobs once hinted that almost ninety-nine cents of every dollar goes directly back to the music industry. iTunes is essentially a massive iPod ad campaign.
To undercut Apple’s prices, imagine how miniscule Yahoo’s profit margins are per song. What the hell are analysts excited about?
Will anyone who has utilized a music torrent tracker believe that $7 a month to rent Windows Media only, Janus protected music is a good deal? Will any frequent visitor to IRC clap with glee at the device and burning restrictions imposed by Yahoo’s new subscription service?
Yes, you can strip the DRM for 79 cents a song. Does that compete with the fact a user with a 5Mbps cable connection can download a band’s entire discography – without DRM – for free in an hour?
Opera, Firefox, and Mac users couldn’t even log in to the site on launch day. This is the service that will turn users away from the dark side of Bit Torrent or IRC and Newsgroup trading? In a month the DRM will be cracked and one subscriber will freely dole out music to twenty of his closest friends.
Lets paint the service for what it really is: another way for Yahoo to sell ads, while the industry waits for DRM to mature. Now ignore that pink elephant in the corner.
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See:-
truly unlimited – Yahoo Music Unlimited …, p2pnet, June 3, 2005
June 4th, 2005 at 12:51 am
This guy still takes the stance that drm just needs to “mature” in order to work.
I call bs. the arms race between crackers and DRM is not “new” nor is it just going to “go away” because a so called “mature” DRM system has come out.
Contrary to popular belief of entertainment sicophants, hardware secured DRM systems won’t solve the hacking problem.
New Flash: It’s already been tried. They have hardware based DRM in dvd drives to enforce region codes. the majority of users don’t even notice it because a vast majority of open source players already circumvent it. It’s also in xbox. How do you get by it? simple: go to http://www.divineo.com and order your own completely solder free and hassle free modchip for $40-$70 depending on the features you want, get your bios and new xbox os for free, the end.
So much for the amazing glory of hardware based DRM.
June 4th, 2005 at 7:59 am
One value that a service like Yahoo’s would provide to a consumer/downloader would be that subscribing to such a service creates a defensable legal arguement that the payment for your subscription grants you rights to the music that the RIAA might then sue you for downloading somewhere else. Certainly this would not work with un-released works that get ‘pre-released’ in a Torrent.
Perhaps the most important aspect is that it puts an actual market value on the copyright holder’s alleged ‘loss’ because you downloaded the work from a source from which royalties to the copyright holder were not forthcoming.
If you ripped it from an internet radio station covered by the ’small webcaster’ royalty agreement, the webcaster has already paid royalties for you to listen/rip as the royalty unit of measure is “cents per listener-hour”. (1 person listening for 1 hour or 5 people listening for 12 minutes each = 2 streamrippers running for 30 minutes = 1 ‘listener-hour’) I think the current rate is $.007 per listener-hour. That’s “seven tenths of one cent”. Makes the ’statutory’ damages seem “unreasonable and disproportionate” to any infraction committed.
June 4th, 2005 at 8:58 pm
“Even Apple, the most successful of the music services, makes no money off of music. Steve Jobs once hinted that almost ninety-nine cents of every dollar goes directly back to the music industry. iTunes is essentially a massive iPod ad campaign.”
You sure? I heard they keep about 35% of each sale.