Blog @ Digital Bazaar

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.

Bitmunk 3.0 Website Launches

Today, is a big milestone - the release of the Bitmunk 3.0 website. This is a release that has been in the making for 18 months. While much of the functionality facing our customers has not changed, everything behind the scenes has received a huge update. You can still search, browse, and purchase music and video through any web browser. We have kept everything that worked well the same, but have also made big improvements to the behind-the-scenes stuff that will help us start to tightly integrate Bitmunk into a variety of websites, web browsers, and mobile devices.

Read on to find out what has changed, why we’re excited about the changes, and what it means for the future of collaborative content distribution…

The Next Generation of Bitmunk Technology

In the next several months, we will be releasing technology that has been in development in our R&D labs for over a year and a half. This will be version 3.0 of our technology and it is a massive leap in speed, size reduction, and interoperability. What follows is a quick run-down on what we’re working on for Bitmunk 3.0.

Historically, most of our underlying technology has been written in Java. While it helped us prove the concept and get something into our customer’s hands, let’s face it - nobody likes running Java applications. All of our systems have undergone a full re-write to native C++. We have focused on making the next generation technology completely cross-platform, so there will be native versions of the Bitmunk buying, selling and management software for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.

We have also focused on speed and size reductions to make sure that the Bitmunk software can be put anywhere that there is a computer connected to the Internet. This includes not only palm-tops and laptops, but mobile phones, web browsers, media players, home entertainment systems and a variety of other multi-media devices. Not only is the new Bitmunk software much smaller than the old Java stuff, but it’s fast. For example, the old software could perform about 50 transactions per second. Not bad, until you see what the new stuff can do. The new Bitmunk software can handle close to 4000 transactions per second. That means that at the most basic level, it’s 80 times faster than the old software. While we have made many optimizations, most of the slowness was attributed to the Java Virtual Machine.

Digital Bazaar’s R&D labs have also been working on a really cool new technology with the World Wide Web Consortium called RDFa. This technology will help us create a world-wide standard for expressing media such as songs and film in music blogs, movie sites, and other media-related pages.

We are also working hard to make integrating Bitmunk into next generation browsers such as Firefox, Songbird and Miro an easier task for those developers. Don’t be too surprised if you see our technology in some of those browsers before the end of the year.

While that’s all we can say for now, there will be a number of really cool initiatives that we’ll be announcing on this blog in the coming months. Get ready to see some really cool stuff.

Over One Million Songs Available on Bitmunk

When Bitmunk launched over three years ago, we had 3,280 songs available for sale. Bitmunk was the first peer-to-peer distribution platform out there that was DRM-free and rewarded fans for trading songs by giving them a cut of the sale. It brought the record companies, music fans and music distributors together. We knew we were on to something - creating a community that was fair to everybody just made sense. We also knew that it would be a very long, hard road ahead to convince the artists and record labels to trust their fans to distribute their content.

Three years later…

Bitmunk Launches World’s First Open Music Recommendation Service

Finding independent musicians is hard enough when you’re trawling through music blogs. With the advent of the Internet, the number of indies out there has exploded in the past several years. Wouldn’t it be great if you could just enter the name of an artist that you like and get a list of suggested albums based on that artist?

Bitmunk now has the ability to recommend great indie music to you…

Bitmunk Blazes Path in Film and TV

Bitmunkers around the world have something to celebrate on this 4th of July - the launch of a full line of film and television services via our website and secure file distribution network. High Definition digital distribution of television, film and video shorts have arrived on Bitmunk!

Read on to learn more about the exciting new film and television services that we offer…