Digital Music Library

[mirhagk]

Hey guys,

I believe Tony had this idea a while ago, and I've been trying to research the legality of it, and seems to be legal.

The basic idea is to have a service where people can borrow songs from a server, listen to those songs, and return them all legally. Basically a library (like those physical buildings, not like a music library on itunes) that allows users to borrow music.

I'm not sure exactly how to make it so that we aren't giving copies to others to borrow, and I think making a DRM solution along with a legal agreement saying that anyone who copies the song is breaking copyright law, and they are solely responsible. The other biggest hurdle is obtaining music. I don't think we could ever allow others to upload their copy of a song and trust them to delete all other copies they own, rather we'd need people to purchase songs through the service for their own personal collection, and gives those songs to others to borrow. The service could even advertise and use advertising funds to purchase new songs.

Here is tony's take on it, and I fully agree.

http://compsci.ca/blog/legalizing-p2p-scheme-legally-borrow-music-from-the-internets/

I think the most important thing is to put our code where our mouth is. We could make such a service, and I think we should make such a service. We would need to be careful not to stream the content (as that would fall under a different set of laws) and make the DRM so that the digital copy of the file is useless without a key. I think to be completely fair to the music industry the best way to do it would make keys that expire once a week, and when you borrow a song you borrow it for a week (it generates a key for that week). I think the instantaneous borrowing might be legal, but it'd be very intense and would probably be fought by the music industry.

You would sign up for an account and buy music for the service, and then borrow others music. I'm thinking of something where you purchase a song, the service generates keys for you to use automatically renewing until you lend it and when it gets lent, you get tokens from the people who borrow it. You can then use those tokens to borrow another song. This could be done several ways, either by a static token value, a pre-emptive bid (if such and such song ever comes available, I will give 100 tokens for it), or a default lending value that could be changed by the lender on a lending by lending basis.

If you want to borrow the most premium music, you'd have to buy premium songs to lend to others, or buying lots of non-premium songs to lend to others. This way the music industry does nothing but profit because obviously people want to build up their libraries, get lots of token, and borrow all the hottest songs.

I'm also thinking of some cool features where for instance your account automatically spends X number of tokens on N songs that you've never heard before. This way you could try lots of music that's new to you, and others who have old songs can still lend it out and get a little bit of tokens for them.

In order for the service to really take off a mobile application needs to be developed, and it needs to be cross-platform (it'd be stupid to target only 50% of your potential market), and at my university we're creating a mobile development club, and looking for something to do. This is what we probably will do. Is there anyone who has server development who'd want to help with the back end and web version?

[Sur_real]

This sounds like a pretty good idea. But since this is a pretty new concept, not sure how the public will react to it though...
pricing, lending time, etc will have to be key

[mirhagk]

Price would be free, well sort of. You'd have to purchase music (which would just be purchasing it from an authorized distributor like itunes) and then lend that to others.

I think 1 week would be a good default lending time, and there could be something where you pay a premium to lend for longer (or automatically renew when you run out)

[2goto1]

I'm sure that you've evaluated existing borrowing models that most libraries already offer right? I.e. the audio book and music download that most of them offer and that expire and do everything you're trying to reinvent?

[mirhagk]

yeah I don't know about others, but my local libraries suck in that regard. Perhaps this is useless nowadays.

[Tony]

Amazon has implemented something very similar to what I originally described, although for digital books and with some extra limitations. http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=200549320

Quote:

Kindle books can be loaned to another reader for a period of 14 days. ... The lender will not be able to read the book during the loan period.

The additional limitations are that publishers might choose to mark their titles as un-lendable and the steps required to find someone to borrow from.

Although Amazon itself offers a 180,000 title library to borrow from http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html/?docId=1000739811 and there are multiple webapps that aim to match up lenders/borrowers on as-needed basis.

[2goto1]

mirhagk, what about your local library "sucks in that regard"? Almost all local libraries offer ebook downloads which you can then download and read on practically any laptop / mobile device that you have. Is there something else that sucks in that regard?

Tony, interesting model that Amazon supports. On the Canadian side, Kobo books allows downloading of purchased ebooks on up to 6 different devices I believe. It's not quite a lending model but can be used to share books in perpetuity with your friends or family, although I believe that Kobo intends on an honorary basis that the device owner to be the purchaser on all devices.

There are other library-like models as well. One fee-based on that I have used a lot in the past is http://my.safaribooksonline.com/. The model has you pay a monthly subscription fee, which depending on how much you pay allows you to borrow up to 10 books per month, or any number of books. They also provide access to draft/pre-publication books which can be useful for more bleeding edge technologies.

[mirhagk]

@2goto1 yes there is something that sucks. The books the library offers at eBooks are a very small selection. For the most part the books are classics, or books that you could download for free anyways from project gutenberg or others. I am interested in tech books, and I couldn't find pretty much anything on programming or artificial intelligence or anything.

I loved my free trial of safaribooksonline, and I would go back in a heart beat if it wasn't so expensive. .You can buy a physical book once a month for about the same price, only you get to keep it, and I usually can't read more than a book or 2 a month anyways so it's a waste. If they lowered their price to be like netflix, then I would go back instantly.

[2goto1]

Ok, "sucks" to you means that there is a dearth of selection of ebooks through your library. I thought you had framed "sucks" based on your evaluation of the ebook and audio/music borrowing service itself offered through libraries. Since your topic that you started is about your music borrowing service that you're going to develop.

The only other similar services that I know of that might be tangentially related to your design would be streaming services like last.fm, pandora, Apple (who are developing a service to compete with Pandora), etc. But the audience for those services differs since the model with those is more about discovery than specifically choosing your actual music files, which is more like the library model of borrowing.

Best of luck with your service, hopefully you're able to improve upon all of the existing services that have already been created, and it's a project of realistic scope for you.

[mirhagk]

@2goto1 nah I've never really been in the music game. I went through Tony's blog and saw it, and thought "hey I should try and make something like this for school". Not really worth it though, my time is probably better spent on other things that are more useful and could maybe net me some benefit (financial or just to put in my portfolio)

[2goto1]

Oh, I didn't realize it was just for a school project since you seemed to frame it a bit differently from your first post. Good luck with your future ideas.

[mirhagk]

mirhagk @ Sat Sep 29, 2012 9:59 am wrote:

, and at my university we're creating a mobile development club, and looking for something to do. This is what we probably will do. Is there anyone who has server development who'd want to help with the back end and web version?

I mentioned this whole thing because I was looking for something to do, and I thought this could be useful. After thinking more on it, it'd require a much larger organization to do it, and legally might be iffy.

[ecookman]

My friend and I were going to develop a similar idea last year, working sort of like satellite radio combined with a media server. Allow users to create a playlist and have it stream to a mobile device, and try to market it to the auto market, turns out a company exists that already does this...and media rights are a pain.