First legal P2P music site hits a major roadblock
Qtrax, a startup site touted as the world’s first legal and free P2P music file-sharing service with more than 25 million songs in its catalog, has taken a nosedive from revolutionary to a total wreck.
After excessively spending £500,000 or close to $1 million to promote this ad-supported music download service, the company forgot to seal one crucial deal – the support of the record industry. The four major record labels EMI, Warner, Sony BMG and Universal all informed Times Online that there no firmed up agreements with Qtrax. Universal and Warner both confirmed its ongoing negotiations with the startup site.
Pirate Bay may soon face charges
Over the past few years the torrent site ‘The Pirate Bay’ has become a favorite of those who hate the draconian tactics of the RIAA and MPAA. The merry pranksters have consistently taunted anyone and everyone who has attempted to shut them down. The Pirate Bay has become so influential that the Swedish-based site has even tried to form their own political party. Sadly the Pirate Bay may be winding down. For the first time, the administrators of the Pirate Bay may be facing charges from the Swedish government.
Warner Brothers signs with BitTorrent for P2P content distribution
After years of illegally distributing music and video content, BitTorrent has gone legal. You may remember back in March when BitTorrent came to an agreement with the Motion Picture Association of America. More recently, Warner Brothers has signed a deal with BitTorrent in an effort to distribute large movie and television files over the net. By using BitTorrent’s technology, Warner will be able to avoid excessive bandwidth costs/issues related to sharing these files. They haven’t yet announced if the video files will have DRM, so we’re going to have to wait to hear about that.
The service, which is headed for launch early this summer, will make available over 200 Warner Brothers titles for download via BitTorrent.com. Included are such films as Harry Potter, and TV shows like Babylon 5. Prices are not yet set, but BitTorrent is expecting TV shows to run about $1 per episode, and movies to cost around the same as DVDs.
Check out more of Gadgetell’s coverage of BitTorrent.
Via [Boing Boing]
Read [Yahoo! News]
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