[IP] McAfee founder returns with 'legal p2p radio'
Begin forwarded message:
From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: June 7, 2004 7:38:32 PM EDT
To: Dewayne-Net Technology List <dewayne-net@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: [Dewayne-Net] McAfee founder returns with 'legal p2p radio'
Reply-To: dewayne@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
McAfee founder returns with 'legal p2p radio'
By Tony Smith (tony.smith@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx)
Published Monday 7th June 2004 16:49 GMT
<http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/06/07/mercora_p2p_radio/>
A former McAfee CEO appears to have found a way around the legal
minefield hindering anyone attempting to enter the music sharing
market: by a licence to webcast content.
Mercora is a P2P - "person to person", is how it defines the term -
network that allows users to share songs without actually downloading
them. It's an approach the company dubs "P2P radio".
The software allows users to share and catalogue digital photos, and
provides instant messaging functionality too. But it's focus is sharing
music. Essentially, it streams the music files on a user's hard drive
out onto the Net. Other Mercora users can tune in and listen.
The company's reckons it's safe to do so because it has acquired a
non-interactive digital audio webcasting licence as mandated by the
notorious Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). "This license
pertains to the digital performance rights of sound recordings and the
associated reporting and royalty payments to SoundExchange (the
independent non-profit organization that represents over 500 record
companies and associated labels)," Mercora says.
"We have also obtained all US (and in some cases international) musical
composition performance rights through our licenses with ASCAP, BMI and
SESAC."
The upshot, it believes, is that "you (the end user) do not have to
worry about... the reporting and royalty payments that are due to these
various organizations".
Next, the software "ensures that any webcasts you make satisfy various
rules governing the statutory licence for non-interactive webcasting".
That includes "conforming to the sound recording performance
complement, minimum duration for looped programming, identification of
song, artist, and album," etc.
This clearly involves a level of randomisation, since one of the
company's rules is that users aren't allowed to tell anyone what
they're webcasting, or respond to requests for specific songs to be
webcast. It's that level of uncertainty in the programming that makes
it possible to get away with all this using said "non-interactive"
licence.
Mercora's terms and conditions also insist that users may only include
songs they've ripped from CDs they own or have acquired by downloading
from a legal site.
It all sounds feasible enough, but despite the company's insistence
that what it (and its users) are doing its legitimate, it seems oddly
unwilling to reveal who's behind it beyond mention of the "executive
and technical team that previously was instrumental in building
companies such as Netscape and McAfee.com". There's a contact-by-email
form, but nothing more concrete.
Looking up mercora.com's domain ownership, we discovered the site is
registered to one Srivats Sampath, who founded McAfee and was at one
time the anti-virus company's president and CEO. He handled the
company's 1999 IPO and its 2002 merger with Network Associates. Before
McAfee, he was head of marketing at Netscape.
Sampath's service promises "no ad-ware, spy-ware, or other slimy
gimmicks from us". Yet it's unclear where the money's coming from. We
calculate Mercora will have paid at least $500 for a year's webcasting
license, if it counts as a non-commercial webcaster. The fee rises if
it becomes a "small" commercial webcaster or even a commercial
organisation.
Where does the money come from? Not the users - the software is free
and so, it seems, is using it. With no ads, the cash can't be coming
from there.
However that question is answered, Mercora is at least a novel take on
the P2P music world brought into being by the original Napster. We have
always argued the benefit Napster - in its first incarnation - provided
as a way of getting more music to the ears of more people: essentially
a college radio for the 21st Century. Had the Recording Industry Ass.
of America (RIAA) exhibited a more sensible, less knee-jerk reaction to
the P2P phenomenon, it's possible Napster might have converted into
something not unlike Mercora, funded like so much commercial radio, by
advertising yet provided free to the listener.
But perhaps not. In any case, Mercora sounds like it is delivering that
concept. Time will tell whether the litigious RIAA will allow it to
continue, or what revenue streams will maintain it.
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