Blog @ Digital Bazaar

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…

The Semantic Web in 6 minutes

We’ve been heavily involved with the World Wide Web Consortium over the past several months working with the RDFa task force, chartered by the Semantic Web Deployment group. While the semantic web is many things to many people, it is quite simple at it’s core. Explaining that simplicity in less than 30 minutes, though, is quite a difficult task. We put together a very simple, playful, video that succinctly explains why the Semantic Web is such a big deal:

A high resolution version of this video and all source material used to make the video is also available under a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike License.

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…

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)

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…