Kazaa To Return As a Legal Subscription Service

suraj.sun sends in this excerpt from CNet: "One of the most recognizable brands in the history of illegal downloading is due to officially resurface, perhaps as early as next week, sources close to the company told CNET News. Only this time the name Kazaa will be part of a legal music service. Altnet and parent company Brilliant Digital Entertainment attached the Kazaa brand to a subscription service that will offer songs and ringtones from all four of the major recording companies. For the past few months, a beta version has been available. The company tried recently to ratchet up expectations with a series of vague, and what some considered misguided, press releases. The site will open with over 1 million tracks." The NYTimes has a related story about how the music industry is trying to convert casual pirates by offering more convenient new services.

The pay step

[ammorais]

As long as the complexity of downloading files trough a "legal" service is bigger than the complexity of the alternatives, people will always prefer the easiest choice.

The complexity of "legal" services will always be bigger than the alternatives, since you can always subtract at least one step: the pay step.

Re:Why do they even bother?

[nine-times]

Right, that's what I was thinking. If it didn't work for Napster, why would it work for Kazaa? At the time Napster went legit, it was still pretty much *the* name of music downloads. It was to online music almost what Xerox is to photocopying.

Now? Napster may be making money, but they don't seem to be any kind of a market force. Any music store has to contend with the 900 pound gorilla in the room, which is iTunes. Fine, I know there are people here who think Apple and the iPod are overblown, but they are a huge player and we may as well acknowledge that. Besides iTunes, Amazon isn't exactly a lightweight. So how's Kazaa going to compete?

And it looks like their approach is a DRMed subscription service. Have DRMed subscription services been doing well? Has there been a recent surge in WMA DRM players, or has the iPod started supporting Microsoft's DRM? I can't imagine wanting to compete in that market.

Amazon.com

[thetoadwarrior]

I've just been buying music from Amazon. It's DRM-free, good quality and the pricing is generally just right. If they want to stop piracy just make everything available to everyone in this sort of format.

This whole idea of things being available in certain territories is outdated and makes no sense on the internet but as long as it's around then people will just steal what they can't buy.

Only the searches are onion-routed

[tepples]

When will they get around to fighting the completely decentralised and encrypted services bound together by nothing more than a loose collection of opensource tools?

For performance reasons, only the searches are onion-routed in popular peer-to-peer file sharing networks; the downloads are direct from someone who has a piece of the file. So when you download a multi-gigabyte Blu-ray Disc rip, the machine on which it is shared still has to reveal its IP address. A copyright owner could log on to one of these services, download a piece of the work, and get an IP address, a time, and a block of the file: evidence that a piece of the copyrighted work has been distributed. Then the copyright owner can get a judge to compel the owner of a netblock to find the customer whose Internet access was used to distribute copies without authorization.

Or would you onion-route the downloads too? Let me know when Tor has become efficient enough to run BitTorrent or eMule Kad Network over it.

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