Mindawn vs Cdigix at UCal
p2pnet.net News:- The music and movie cartels plan to use Cdigix to pump corporate ‘product’ into the entire University of California School System. And now another entity that hopes to get rich on music downloads says it, too, will be ‘partnering’ with the UCal system.
However, there are very considerable differences between the two, principally:
Cdigix is trying to sell corporate downloads polluted with DRM and other goodies
Mindawn, launched last September, says it’s offering unrestricted indie downloads in both Ogg Vorbis and FLAC.
‘Having happy customers’
On copyright protection, “A lot of noise has been made about Digital Rights Management (DRM),” says Mindawn. Mostly the record labels want it and the customers don’t, and “With something like iTunes or Napster, you are really just renting the song instead of owning it, because they limit what you can do with it.”
But, it promises, with Mindawn there’s no difference between buying a “perfect copy from us” or having an original CD.
“You can still send around perfect copies if you want to,” it says. “We believe that in general people don’t want to give away something that they paid for. We further believe that just because someone does happen to get a pirate copy doesn’t necessarily mean that is a lost sale.
“We feel that having happy customers by giving them free rein with what they paid for is going to be better for all of us in the long run.”
Ogg vs FLAC
Nor is the company promoting cartel product. Rather, it says, “We’re geared more towards supporting independent artists and small record labels. Our system is also not closed to anyone, and we are adding content at an exponential rate.”
Mindawn also has an interesting payment system, although inexpensive it definitely isn’t. It goes like this:
$0.99 per 10 minutes of (Ogg Vorbis format) (each 10 minutes in length is another $0.99)
$1.24 per 10 minutes of (FLAC format)
$6.99 per album for (Ogg Vorbis format)
$8.99 per album for (FLAC format)
Mindawn clearly wants punters to go for FLAC over the significantly less profitable Ogg format, laying heavily into the latter’s ” ‘lossy’ compression” over the former’s “lossless files”.
Demos are available via Ogg for up to three listenings, after which “the local copy of the file will self-destruct”. And, “The file is not playable outside of our player software, and our player ‘knows’ how many times it has been played.”
The Mindawn player and MARS software run on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.
On video, it’s available, “but works a little differently than audio”. The artist sets the price and format, and there’s no preview function.
Something you think we should know? tips[at]p2pnet.net
See:-
DRM and other goodies – California sucked in by Cdigix, p2pnet, July 18, 2005
July 19th, 2005 at 8:29 pm
I guess I know which system I would choose if I decide to purchase music, and what I choose does not begin with a “C.” If It were not for my family liking a few of the shows on satellite, I’d cancel the service.
I myself do not use cartel “entertainment” products.
However, there are still a majority that do. If we want the cartels to get the message, then we got to get as many people as possible to stop paying for cartel crap. Only when people stop buying will the cartels begin to listen.