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)

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…

The First Open Source P2P Digital Content Transaction Platform in History

To build and launch the first copyright-respecting P2P Digital Content Transaction Platforms in the world is no small feat. We are here because of the extraordinary efforts of volunteers that donate their time to open source software. Linux, Apache, Python, PHP, MySQL, and Lustre are just a few of the open source technologies that we have utilized to build Bitmunk. Each of us believe in open source and its ability to build great technology and community, so it is with great exuberance that we are donating the lions share of our source code and systems into the open source community.

We believe in the democratization of digital content - empowering individuals and corporations to choose the terms that best suit them. Want to watch free Internet-based TV shows with commercials? Want to buy the show directly from the artist without commercials? What about getting your music legally and at a 15% discount from a friend instead of from a large corporation? Maybe negotiating with a music record label - you’ll buy 5 of their albums if they give you 25% off of each one? All these scenarios are possible with the Bitmunk Transaction Platform. This is what we’re open sourcing - the source code and technology to democratize how we buy and sell content. We call it collaborative content distribution.

Read on to learn more about what this means for the world…

or just go directly to our open source community website.

Where does your entertainment dollar go?

Where does your entertainment dollar go? How much should you be paying for music, movies and cable television? You would be surprised to find out how much of it is not going to the places you want it to go.

This article proposes a new method of distributing media that benefits the people that matter the most: the content creator and you, the customer. It is called Collaborative Content Distribution and it could save US citizens $85.4 billion dollars a year in cable and Internet fees, read on to learn more…

Newsvine Article on Bitmunk

Killfile at Newsvine has written a nice piece on us:

“The system is elegant in its simplicity. Bitmunk capitalizes upon the scalability of peer to peer networking, allowing each purchaser to function as a quasi-independent retailer to other customers. This model allows Digital Bazaar to compensate not only artists for their music but Bitmunk users for their contributions of hosting and bandwidth to the network as well.”

Bitmunk: An End To Digital Rights Management?