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PaySwarming Goes Open SourceFebruary 1, 2010 on 4:51 pm | In Bitmunk | 4 CommentsIn December 2009 we released Monarch, an ultra-fast web application server framework, as an open source project. This month, we’re releasing a reference implementation of the PaySwarm web platform. That’s right, we’re releasing the Bitmunk Personal Edition source code! The software that we are releasing today enables the people that create digital content to distribute it through the Web and receive payment directly from their fans and customers. It is also designed to help fans and customers distribute digital content on behalf of the content creators in a way that is both legal and financially beneficial to the creators, fans and customers. The technology is designed to be integrated directly into web browsers and web devices, finally making legal digital content distribution a first-class citizen on the web. Read on to learn more about the source code, Bitmunk and PaySwarming… Bitmunk 3.2.1 Released – Video and Data SalesJanuary 31, 2010 on 2:09 pm | In Bitmunk, Corporate, Development, Television, Movies and Video | 3 CommentsBitmunk 3.2.1 was released this weekend, which included several bug fixes and the basis of two new really cool features. While we were polishing the Bitmunk 3.2 release, we spent the time to make Firefox integration a bit cleaner:
Monarch – Next Generation REST Web ServicesDecember 14, 2009 on 10:35 am | In Corporate, Development, Industry | 1 CommentNetwork-centric computing has been gaining significant mind-share over the past decade. We have started to shift our thinking of our computing environment from applications and documents that strictly reside on our personal computers to applications and documents that may reside on a variety of websites on the Internet. From Gmail, to Dropbox, to Facebook, to Twitter – the landscape of how we interact with computers is changing. The companies that understand this shift to Web Services and build out technology to track this shift in usage will emerge as the leaders of the computing industry in the next several years. Their infrastructure will be a competitive advantage, specifically – how quickly and efficiently their developers will be able to grow their services while keeping costs down. To help the industry take advantage of this shift, we have released Monarch as an open source project. Monarch is a state-of-the-art Web Services framework. It is used to build the core web services that a company will provide its customers. Scaling up and out while reducing costs will separate the market leaders from the rest of the pack – Monarch provides this competitive advantage. Read on to learn more about Monarch. Bitmunk 3.2 Launched – The Legal P2P Music NetworkNovember 30, 2009 on 9:00 am | In Bitmunk, Corporate, Development, Industry, Music | Comments OffToday, we launched Bitmunk Personal Edition 3.2 – the first piece of software in the world to enable collaborative content distribution. Bitmunk is a plug-in for the Firefox web browser. This release adds the ability to sell DRM-free music from your computer, on behalf of artists, via an open, standards-based, peer-to-peer network. We will be working toward standardizing this technology for web browsers over the next several years. This work will establish a world-wide, open mechanism for the distribution of digital content via web browsers that not only benefit artists, but fans as well. In short – when a file is traded using Bitmunk 3.2, the artist is paid and the fan is paid. You can legally resell the music you buy via the network and get paid for the bandwidth you contribute to the sale. This is a bold new approach to music distribution. We certainly think it is inevitable that digital content will eventually be distributed in this way. Here’s how it works:
The artist will always get the royalties that they set for the song, but unlike all the major digital online music stores, you can get a cut of the sale as well. We are really excited about this release as it is the culmination of years of research and development. Many tireless days, weeks and years of work have gone into addressing the many problems plaguing digital music distribution today. We think that getting the fans involved in the process of distributing music is at the heart of the solution and Bitmunk does just that – it gives people a reason to get involved and be rewarded for helping to distribute music on the Web. If you would like to learn more about Bitmunk, take a look at the Introduction to Bitmunk page. If you’d like to try Bitmunk 3.2 out in Firefox, go to the Bitmunk downloads page. Establishing an Open Digital Media Commerce StandardSeptember 28, 2009 on 11:02 am | In Bitmunk, Corporate, Development, Industry, Music, Semantic Web | Comments OffThis article outlines how Digital Bazaar, since 2007, has been using Semantic Web Technology to establish a set of open mark-up and communication standards for Web-based, peer-to-peer marketplaces. The system that Digital Bazaar has created, called Bitmunk, is used to transact digital media such as music, movies, television and books between independent agents on the Web. The decentralzied nature of the peer-to-peer marketplace requires flexible, open standards for communication and knowledge representation. The Pirate Bay and Building an Equitable CultureAugust 30, 2009 on 5:41 pm | In Bitmunk, Corporate, Industry, Music, Television, Movies and Video | 1 CommentThe latest site to gain the full attention and ire of the RIAA, MPAA, and copyright holders worldwide is The Pirate Bay (TPB). Or rather, it was the Pirate Bay until their owners were raided, sued, tried and sentenced earlier this month. The Pirate Bay is the latest link in a long chain of peer-to-peer companies that have met their end at the hands of international copyright law. It is also the target of a post-litigation buy-out attempt by a company who wants to monetize the over 25 million community members of TPB. Global Gaming Factory X AB, a publicly traded Swedish company, has put forth an offer to purchase The Pirate Bay and all of its assets in a bid to move the site toward legitimacy. In essence, the goal was to charge the community to access content on the network and in return for sharing their bandwidth and storage, the new Pirate Bay would reduce the monthly subscription fee based on the amount you contributed. An interesting plan, but the world has seen this before. First, there was Napster, and then Kazaa and now with The Pirate Bay. Recent history has demonstrated what happens to P2P companies that attempt to migrate to for-pay. Going legit is a desirable goal, especially for those who make a living from selling their intellectual works, but migrating these types of communities to legitimacy has always failed. There is a lesson in this chain of events that all of us can learn to appreciate. These legitimization attempts fail at times due to mis-management, technology, or lack of proper funding. However, even if they are to succeed in the previously stated areas, they are still doomed to fail because of the culture involved in the change… First Editors Draft of HTML5+RDFa PublishedJuly 13, 2009 on 12:19 pm | In Development, Industry, Semantic Web | 3 CommentsThis blog post was written by our Founder, Manu Sporny HTML5+RDFa The first public Editors Draft of RDFa for HTML5 was published earlier today. You can view the draft in two forms:
The blog post explains how this draft came to be, how it was published via the World Wide Web Consortium, and what it means for the future of RDFa and HTML5. Bitmunk 3.1 Released – Browser-based P2P CommerceJune 29, 2009 on 9:02 am | In Bitmunk, Corporate, Development, Industry, Music | Comments OffToday marks a significant milestone in the evolution of the Bitmunk peer-to-peer commerce platform. The software release that went live earlier today is the culmination of over 26 months of development, hundreds of thousands of lines of code writes and re-writes and the dream of a small group of us that are trying to fundamentally change the way people buy and sell digital goods on the Internet. On the surface, Bitmunk looks much like a web-based digital content store specializing in MP3 music sales. People can come to the site and purchase songs and albums for very competitive prices (cheaper than iTunes and Amazon.com). There is, however, a deeper history and a grander goal for Bitmunk. This blog post outlines why today’s software release is such a significant step towards that goal. We are creating an open, standardized, Internet-scale peer-to-peer commerce infrastructure for the purchase and sale of digital goods. This mechanism, dubbed Collaborate Content Distribution, would allow anything digital to be found, bought and then re-sold via your web browser. This technology shifts the purchase of music, movies, television, books, and any other sort of digital good from being a purely corporation-to-consumer experience to a peer-to-peer experience. If we’re successful, Bitmunk will help bloggers, artists, writers, tweeple, actors, novelists, and many other people that produce creative and knowledge-industry based content to make a living doing what they do best, without all of the barriers to distribution that have existed to date. It all started with Bitmunk 1.0… (next page) Admitting that Javascript was a MistakeMay 31, 2009 on 9:57 am | In Bitmunk, Development, Industry | 9 CommentsThere was an interesting article that was written by Guillaume Marceau recently about visually expressing the usefulness of programming languages. The article uses star-line plots to show how different programming languages compare with one another in speed and expressiveness, as each is used to solve a number of common problems. It’s always nice to check your gut reaction to different programming languages against empirical evidence. Language choice can be as varied as our food preferences, often not based solely on fact. Like our palate, we may find that our preference for our favorite programming languages change over time. As we learn more and use our language of choice to solve real problems, the initial love affair may turn into a nightmare. A Collaborative Distribution Model for MusicApril 4, 2009 on 4:23 pm | In Bitmunk, Corporate, Music, Semantic Web, Television, Movies and Video | 1 CommentThe music industry, via Choruss, is shopping a new music licensing model around to universities in the United States. Like some before it, this one attempts to address the still rampant music piracy occurring via peer-to-peer networks by enforcing a pseudo-mandatory collective licensing agreement on every student attending a participating university. There were a number of very interesting parts to the proposal that we would like to work on improving with Choruss and any partner universities. There were also a few propositions that we think are harmful to the industry, artists and fans as a whole. It should be no surprise that we think that any sort of mandatory collective licensing is a very bad idea, as is the “covenant not to sue” approach that Choruss is currently pursuing. Voluntary collective licensing, as proposed by organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, is not a good alternative either. The basic approach proposed via collective licensing is to allow the general public unfettered access to all types of intellectual property, such music, movies and books. One would be allowed to download copyrighted works via BitTorrent, Limewire, and YouTube without worrying about the copyright-owner filing a lawsuit. ISPs would include a collective licensing charge on your monthly Internet connectivity bill, say $10 for movies, $10 for books, and $10 for music, that would be distributed to copyright owners based on what one downloads. While this may seem like a good idea at first, the approach is fatally flawed… Next Page » |
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