Nine Inch Nails have released their latest album on BitTorrent:
Nine Inch Nails has just released the first volume of their new album “Ghosts” on BitTorrent sites as a free download. The band encourages its fans to share the album with friends, post it on websites and play it on podcasts
“Ghosts” is released under a non-commercial Creative Commons license and can be shared freely, something their fans weren’t allowed to do when the band was held back by a record label.
In the release notes the band writes: “Now that we’re no longer constrained by a record label, we’ve decided to personally upload Ghosts I, the first of the four volumes, to various torrent sites, because we believe BitTorrent is a revolutionary digital distribution method, and we believe in finding ways to utilize new technologies instead of fighting them.”
This demonstrates once more that the old business model for selling information, based on the idea of putting that information in a physical package that’s difficult to copy, and then selling copies of the physical package, is obsolete. Furthermore, it isn’t going to be replaced by a model that’s the same but just substituting “DRM downloads” for “physical copies” — bits are inherently copyable and trying to make them not be so is like trying to make water not wet. People still using the old business model need to wake up and realise they’re not living in the 20th century any more. And if anyone’s thinking of setting up a new business based on this model, my advice is: don’t.
So what business models will replace it? There will probably be many, but one that I think has a large chance of success in the Street Performer Protocol:
The Street Performer Protocol (SPP) is a way of encouraging the creation of creative works in the public domain, described by the cryptographers John Kelsey and Bruce Schneier[1] of Counterpane Systems (although the underlying idea is much older). It assumes that traditional forms of copyright and creative compensation will not work in the future, because of the ease of copying and distribution of digital information.
Under the SPP, the artist announces that when he receives a certain amount of money in escrow, he will release a work (book, music, software, etc.) into the public domain. Interested donors make their donations to a publisher, who keeps the donations in escrow, identified by their donors. If the artist releases the work on time, he and the publisher are paid from the escrow fund. If not, the publisher repays the donors, possibly with interest.
What does this have to do with Includipedia? The foundation of Includipedia is an inclusionist fork of Wikipedia, but over time we hope to make the project a lot broader in scope than that. We aim to be a repository for an ever-increasing amount of open content — for example open-content maps, directories of every film, book and piece of music (including reviews), a directory of all open-source software programs (again, including reviews), how-to information, recipes, etc — eventually, as our tagline says, to bring “all the world’s information to all the world’s people”.
So it’s quite likely that Includipedia will at some stage get involved with producing open content works funded by the Street Performer Protocol (or some variation thereof).
(Ghosts I is available from the band’s site as well as The Pirate Bay.)
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