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[FYI] How to infuriate the RIAA and stay enragingly legal
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=10452
[Das Micropayment ist wohl das grösste Problem an der Idee
-- Matthias]
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[..]
We (OK, you saw through this, me) at Inquirer Labs US propose a new
webcasting radio station, or a whole lot of them. This company,
dedicated to bringing you the music you want and deserve, the way you
want it, would be done in an "all request" format. No programming at the
hands of bought and paid for "program directors", simply channels that
you the listener make and maintain. Of course, this is not a 1 to 1
thing, no webcast radio station could support the bandwidth, that much
is obvious. You simply can make a channel you want, and pick the
programming you want from a large selection. Others can tune in, and
listen to what you are playing if they want to, or make their own, or both.
[..]
But isn't this sort of streaming illegal? Not if you tithe properly.
Won't the bandwidth be rather expensive? Yes, it is, that is why you
need to cache the music in various places around the internet, and
stream it once to these network edge caches, whereupon they can be
streamed out to other local listeners. A good place to have the cache is
on the computer of the channel creator/'dj' for each channel, but others
can be sub-caches if the channel becomes very popular. If you wanted to
go a step further, you could make the song selection stream the music
from other local channel owners who have the songs in their cache.
[..]
So overall, you have a custom, caching, webcasting software, that lets
the user control what songs they listen to, and better yet pays its dues
in a legal way!
[..]
The only downside is that this will be a non-commercial radio station,
so in order to pay the RIAA its blood money, it would have to charge a
monthly fee to users. Fair enough. If you look at a channel operator in
this setup as a "worst case" scenario, and assume they have been in the
DJ business for a long time, they might have a 20GB cache of MPx and OGx
files built up. Assuming 4MB per song cached, and played 10 times per
song cached, you have the following math to do:
.07 cents per song played
Played 10 times per cached copy
4 MB per song
20 GB total cached songs
20,000/4 * .07 = $3.50
I don’t know about you, but if you charge $1 per month per user, you can
pay the RIAA their $3.50 per 20 GB downloaded, a 50 cent tip on top of
that, and with 35 million users, still have enough to pay the rent.
Legally. Cool.
[..]
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