Blog @ Digital Bazaar

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…

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…

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, Microformats and the Semantic Web

If there is one thing we do well at Digital Bazaar, it is think BIG. One of our desires is to enact globally positive change in the music industry. This blog post is about one of our internal projects that is going to do just that. It is cryptically called the “Semantic Wusic” project – a melding of the “semantic web” and “music” – and it is going to change the very nature of music on the web.

In the next two years, the semantic web is going to change the way you use the Internet… (read more)

Bitmunk acquires over 800,000 songs – 63,000 artists

Bitmunk achieved a very important milestone today, with over 800,000 DRM-free songs on our network, we continue to be the largest legal DRM-free peer-to-peer network in the world. Over 63,000 artists have signed up with Bitmunk so far – we pay each artist almost ten times as much as a typical large record label – can you blame them for showing us some love?

There is much more on the way as well – we are expanding into movies and television in the next couple of months. Our engineers are very busy building out capacity to store hundreds of DRM-free movies and television shows.

Things are going great – more content means that there is a much greater chance that somebody on the Bitmunk network is selling something that you want. Or better yet, somebody out there wants to buy something that you have via Bitmunk. Track us via RSS, much more to come…