February 4, 2004
Wippit Good?
This article mentions a few new legit services that take advantage of P2P. Wippit seems particularly interesting. It filters in content using audio fingerprinting. The rest is a little hazy to me. The company advertises that you can share filtered in files with others, but this article says you can’t. Pretty sure the former is true. The company advertises MP3 downloads, but that same article says it’s DRMed WMA. Pretty sure the latter is true, at least with EMI on board. According to EMI executive Ted Cohen (in an email to the pho list), songs are currently only downloadable from EMI servers, not from other peers. What is really surprising is that you can supposedly keep all the songs after the subscription ends – these are not rentals; they are sales – I swear I read the opposite somewhere else, but the website attests to that, too.
So a little more research is needed. In any case, it’s heading much closer to blanket collective licensing – not quite an ACS, but similar in terms of the payment and distribution model. A very interesting development indeed.
Filed by Derek Slater at 12:40 am under General news
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