The launch of Napster 2.0 later this month is one example. Napster was the original P2P music sharing service and is still the best known brand. It was forced into bankruptcy by the music industry's legal assault but is now to re-launch as a legitimate music service, allowing music fans to download a collection of 500,000 tracks for 99 cents each. It appears that the domain name and brand are all that are left of Shawn Fanning's original service, albeit he does endorse the new service, now run by software company Roxio. "It's really great," he says.
Napster will officially launch on 29th October – it had its launch party in New York yesterday – and is just one of many such sites to follow the success of Apple's iTunes. It was launched at the end of April and sold almost ten million downloads in its first four months of operations.
But pay-per-song sites like these, while receiving the approval of the RIAA, are still regarded by critics as failing the music industry. They see no reason to pay up to $18 for a CD, or even 99 cents for a download, when music artists receive only a miniscule percentage of this – after they have paid off their recording label's expenses.
Wired News reports on a new venture that seeks to avoid this criticism, run by small record label called Magnatune.
The California company takes a less restrictive view of copyright restrictions than are found on iTunes and Napster. Its music files are available for download under a "some rights reserved" license that allows further copies to be made, so long as it is not for commercial purposes. The label also ensures that 50% of the sales proceeds are given to the artists themselves.
The P2P companies are also working on licensed music services. In July, KaZaA and Altnet jointly created a new trade association, known as the Distributed Computing Industry Association, through which they say they hope to discuss file sharing with the recording industry and ISPs.
The Association held a General Meeting on Wednesday at which a business plan was put forward, proposing a way to turn file sharing into a legitimate music service.
According to The Washington Post, the plan would:
"roll out in stages, starting with the record companies allowing their songs, protected with copyright tools rendering them unlistenable, to be distributed on networks such as Kazaa. Consumers would pay Kazaa to unzip the copyright-protection shroud, enabling their computer to play the song."
Later stages of the plan would shift the billing to internet service providers, which would be required to monitor which songs users are listening to, raising potential privacy concerns and putting ISPs into a business they may not want to enter."
"We are in an earn-your-trust mode," Marty Lafferty, chief executive of the trade group told The Washington Post. "This plan is kind of like looking at a concept car at a car show".
The RIAA was not impressed. Spokesman Jonathan Lamy told the Washington Post, "it is hard to take seriously proposals to turn [peer-to-peer] systems into legitimate businesses when they continue to induce users to violate the law and wilfully refuse to use available technologies to stop the rampant infringement of copyrighted works on their networks."