Wednesday, January 28, 2004

There's an interesting interview with Michael Weiss, the ceo of StreamCast (Morpheus) in the eCommerce Times. He's not a fan of the music industry:

"Somehow, the RIAA has taken music's freewheeling image of rebellion and rock 'n' roll and turned it on its head. In their quest to control distribution, pricing and technological innovation, the major record labels and the RIAA have embarked on a journey filled with false accusations and half-truths. In an attempt to portray P2P file sharing as the root of all that is evil with society, the RIAA has resorted to lying to the American public and deceiving Congress.

There are solutions that can be worked out to ensure that artists and copyright holders get paid for their works, such as compulsory licensing. However, the RIAA appears to be more interested in compulsive litigation."

On the uses of P2P:

"There are so many great uses for distributed P2P technology, ranging from searching to content distribution to communications. One of the best uses is the enabling of free expression, free from the censorship of oppressive governments and the de facto censorship of news, information and political speech by the consolidation of media and news companies in the control of the entertainment and media conglomerates."

Last week they interviewed Sharman Networks (Kazaa) CTO, Phil Morle. He doesn't rate Morpheus:

"Morpheus ceased to be our main competitor, or indeed a trusted solution for users, a long time ago. eDonkey/Overnet is a strong competitor. They have cool technology and millions of users. I am consistently impressed with their releases that show a passion for P2P and what it can accomplish.

I am also surprised that Shareaza stays under the radar. Mike, who develops it, is a very ambitious young man, and I have to wonder when he sleeps. Shareaza is a well-made application that is a pleasure to use."

He doesn't like the music industry either:

"I have the benefit of many years thinking about P2P and its potential, and they have not got past the stage of fear. I am naturally disappointed that we are all wasting time and money on futile legal battles when everyone
could be growing their businesses and benefiting users today."

He seems to find the issue of privacy a problem because it interferes with the performance of the technology,
people don't have anything to hide and if they did we shouldn't facilitate it:

"Where I differ from some other file-sharing CTOs is that I don't believe users have anything to hide. Creating default "darknets" through technology defines the purpose of the network as illegal and encourages a certain kind of activity. This is not what we are here for because P2P is an enabling technology for all and not somewhere to hide. The modules found in Kazaa Lite that claim to bring privacy to the user can cause problems with other Internet applications, decrease the performance of the software and are ultimately possible to work around"

Interesting similarities and contrasts.

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