FAIRCOPY

paul e. · Posted: Thu Apr 15, 2004 8:20 am Post subject: FAIRCOPY

was sent this today ---------------

Hello,

Some months ago I started a service called FAIRCOPY ( http://www.faircopy.com ). It's similar to Weedshare, but I honestly think that FAIRCOPY offers better benefits to authors and consumers. These are some differences:

- artists get up to 90% of the sale price if they want (FAIRCOPY only takes a 10% cut on every sale, vs. the 15% cut that Weedshare takes)
- artists set the distributors commissions
- the distributors rewarding scheme is only one level (vs. Weedshare's 3 level scheme)
- FAIRCOPY does not use DRM
- It works on any platform (Mac, Linux, Windows)

Hope FAIRCOPY is of interest to you.

Xavi Caballé Grèbol
FAIRCOPY, S.L.
www.faircopy.com

mosc · Posted: Thu Apr 15, 2004 8:29 am Post subject:

Interesting. Thanks for posting this.

paul e. · Posted: Thu Apr 15, 2004 9:35 am Post subject:

yes, interesting..i wonder.... Question

mosc · Posted: Thu Apr 15, 2004 12:23 pm Post subject:

It's an interesting idea. Give away an encrypted file and sell a key to decode it. I don't see anything in this idea that will prevent someone from buying the encypted file, converting it to mp3 or something, and then pushing it out on the web via P2P or whatever. This company's idea is that you would share the encrypted version and people would go back to this site and buy their own key.

There is a way this would really better, and that's to give a free player that will play the encrypted file, but not allow the decrypted version to be saved to disk. This would make the music less desireable - you couldn't play it on a portable MP3 player for example.

play · Posted: Thu Apr 15, 2004 1:07 pm Post subject:

Except that entirely defeats the purpose of having open standards. What happens when the company that makes the player decides to add spyware to it, as real media did? Or when they decide you have to pay for the player as well. You'd be at the mercy of the company. It sounds like a violation of fair use rights as well. You are allowed to copy anything as long as you own the original so legally they would not be able to withold the key.

Also, imagine what would happen when someone cracked the software. Anyone with the cracked version would be able to download as much as they wanted of the encrypted files and listen to them for free.

The kind of encryption it would require to actually keep people from copying the music is not available to civilians.

I have an idea. We all support a government that gives more money to the arts and the poor instead of building $30 million weapons. That money can be used to 'sponsor' artists so they can spend most of their time working on whatever it is they work on. They'd basically be getting the same amount of money as someone who worked a normal job 40 hours a week. Then we abolish the existing copyright laws and let everyone copy and distribute to their hearts content. The new laws would make it totally illegal for anyone but the original artist to sell the work. The artist has enough money to live AND create art full time and no one has to devote any energy at all to protection schemes or intellectual property. Those cocncepts would just die, thankfully. In my opinion they should never have been born in the first placce.

mosc · Posted: Thu Apr 15, 2004 7:04 pm Post subject:

Hey, not bad ideas, but people will say you are a socialist. But that's OK by me.

You are right, a proprietary encryption scheme is something I wouldn't want to be associated with either.

Still, I'm interested in getting a handle on the distribution issue for independents like us. This is a good try at it, but I don't think it's a great solution.

play · Posted: Thu Apr 15, 2004 7:48 pm Post subject:

It's definitely a far fetched one but that's how I think. I figure it's better to shoot for the moon and fail than settle for a situation you don't want. I do what I can from my end, i.e. free licensing of music but it's not much.

Realistically, there's no good distribution system that will stop people from copying music unless we pass fascistic laws about intellectual property and file-sharing (which is not so unthinkable).

I think iTunes works pretty well, so do labels that sell CDs direct over the net. It's also pretty easy to start a mail-order distribution system. You just have to trust that if people like the music enough they'll buy it.

xavi · Joined: Apr 23, 2004 Posts: 1

mosc · Posted: Fri Apr 23, 2004 11:32 am Post subject:

Hi, Xavi. Welcome to electro-music.com.

You make excellent points. I wish you all the best with your project.