Blog @ Digital Bazaar

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…

Monarch – Next Generation REST Web Services

Network-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 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)

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…

W3C: RDFa 1.0 is Official

RDFa became an official World Wide Web Consortium Recommendation today. This means that it has undergone an intense amount of design, feedback, development and scrutiny to become a recognized world-wide standard for the expression of web semantics. Manu Sporny, Digital Bazaar’s Founder, has been directly involved with the RDFa Task Force and the standardization work involved with this new Web technology.

We would like to thank Ben Adida (Creative Commons), Chair of the RDFa Task Force, and Mark Birbeck (webBackplane), the primary designer of RDFa, for their vision and tenacity. In addition, we would also like to thank members of the task force – primarily composed of Ralph R. Swick (W3C), Shane McCarron (Applied Testing and Technology), Steven Pemberton (Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica), and Michael Hausenblas (JOANNEUM RESEARCH).

The Web is based on a core dedication to standards. It is individuals, such as those listed above, and their respective organizations that continue to lead the way in standards innovation on the Web. It is a largely thankless job, which is why we would like to extend our deepest appreciation and admiration for an excellent job on RDFa and all that those involved with the W3C continue to do for the World Wide Web and its citizens.

RDFa will have an effect on hundreds of millions of people around the globe. It is a great privilege and honor to be a part of that effort.

POSIX Threads Don’t Scale Past 100K Concurrent Web Service Requests (Part 1/2)

Hard times are upon our financial sector. The US financial markets are in turmoil. Many companies will be cutting spending as a squeeze is placed on operating budgets over the next couple of months, if not years. This is usually good news to the technology sector as most cost cutting measures depend on technology to keep productivity at the same levels as they were before the sky (and stocks) started to fall. These are exciting times as well in the IT sector. We are seeing a shift in the way we compute – from centralized IT to cloud computing, from one core per processor to many cores per processor, from closed data storage to open data portability, from a web of documents to a web of meaning.

At the heart of this transformation is the concept of a Web Service. Web services are used to perform operations on the cloud. They are used to read data from one place on the Web, process and transform that data in another location, and then send the data to yet another location on the Web. It is through this method that we get mash-ups like Google Maps, Facebook apps, Flickr albums and Twitter streams.

These web services are the workhorse of the current Web. They are highly available, highly concurrent, and usually have tens if not hundreds of thousands of people slamming them at a time. This can lead to heartache for software developers. The fine folks at Twitter have had scaling issues over the past two years that required painful changes to their service to avoid continued downtime.

This is a two-part blog post about how traditional software development does not prepare you for the realities of writing scalable web services. Our company focuses a significant portion of our R&D efforts on scalability. One of the lessons that we have learned over the past three years is that pure POSIX threads do not scale for web services.

Check out the graph below and note how the red line (the pure POSIX threads approach) does a very abrupt nose-dive while attempting to reach 400 concurrent web service requests.

You do not want to be in this position, EVER. Most software developers will inevitably choose to use pure POSIX threads for their application servers in order to scale their web services. They do this because most education institutions and websites drill it into our heads that to have concurrency, you must use threads. “I would never make that mistake!”, you exclaim. However, if you use a standard Apache 2 configuration (which uses MPM_prefork) and PHP for your web services (each PHP instance is run in a separate process), you have already made that mistake.

Read on to find out how to scale past 400 concurrent requests…