Blog @ Digital Bazaar

PaySwarming Goes Open Source

In 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 Sales

Bitmunk 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:

• We now support Firefox 3.6.
• Only one tab is created for the Bitmunk Personal Edition software. That tab is focused whenever you purchase anything via Bitmunk
• Firefox will now auto-discover the page that you use to control your Bitmunk software.
• The interface has been made a bit more responsive.

Read on for more…

Bitmunk 3.2 Launched – The Legal P2P Music Network

Today, 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:

1. You find a song you want via the Bitmunk website.
2. You purchase the song using the latest Bitmunk Personal Edition software. When you buy a song on Bitmunk, the MP3 file pieces are downloaded from a number of P2P sources (just like BitTorrent). Unlike BitTorrent, getting commercial music through Bitmunk is perfectly legal.
3. The song that you bought, a DRM-free MP3, is added to your personal media library.
4. You are added as a download source for the song at a markup that you decide. Let’s say that markup is 10 cents.
5. When the song is downloaded from the network, you will get paid for each piece of the song that is downloaded from your computer. For example, if your markup is 10 cents, and there are 10 file pieces, you will get 1 cent per piece. So, if 5 pieces are downloaded from your computer, you will get 5 cents. If 7 pieces are downloaded from your computer, you will get 7 cents. While it may not sound like a great deal of money, there may be hundreds or thousands of people buying the song from you.

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 Standard

This 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.

Read on to find out more…

The Pirate Bay and Building an Equitable Culture

The 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…

Bitmunk 3.1 Released – Browser-based P2P Commerce

Today 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 Mistake

There 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.

At Digital Bazaar, our initial fondness for Javascript is turning into a deep distaste for the way Javascript has evolved in the browsers…

A Collaborative Distribution Model for Music

The 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…

Absorbing Costs Considered Harmful

Bitmunk was founded on a number of principles that we have, unfortunately, not codified on the website yet. One of those principles is the concept that we will always strive to give a detailed break-down of the costs associated with the purchase of any digital good on our network. While some of our customers may not care about where the money goes, others do want to know exactly how much is going to the artist. The fundamental principle at work here is transparency. We believe that transparency regarding how we run our network, manage our costs and reward artists, buyers and sellers is a fundamental operating principle for Digital Bazaar.

Displaying credit card fees have been a part of this transparency. We list all fees that credit card processors charge so that our customers know where their money is going. Typically, this has been about 4.17% per credit card transaction. That is money that goes directly to the credit card agency and we include it as a line item on our website so that our customers know that we aren’t profiting in any way from that charge.

Credit card processors vary widely in the services that they provide as well as their technical sophistication. We have been appalled at how backwards some of the transaction systems are in the banking industry. Credit card processing is no different. Typically, when you use your credit card, some online stores don’t check your address. In other words, they bypass address verification completely because many people enter their addresses incorrectly.

The seedy under-belly of credit card transaction processing…

Bitmunk 3.1 Website Launch

The Bitmunk 3.1 website quietly launched on Wednesday 8pm EST. This release comes six months after the Bitmunk 3.0 release and went a great deal more smoothly than the 3.0 release. The only major hang-up was an issue with IPv6 and DNS AAAA records, both of which we have disabled for the time being. We will bring the IPv6 side of our service back online when we have the time to work on the issue. Apologies for the handful of people that were hitting our website via IPv6.

This release contains fairly minor updates and bug fixes to the Bitmunk front-end website. WebBuy still looks the same as it did, but the entire back-end has been swapped out. The majority of the updates concern back-end web service updates, database updates and new P2P web services in preparation for the Bitmunk 3.1 peer-to-peer Firefox 3 plug-in release in the coming months.