Mercora - why you will need this. (Oh, and did I mention "Free"? - for now)

[RideFree]

Originally posted by: emeraldsky

Originally posted by: RideFree
Just because I wore out a record, does that mean I have to pay for it again?

You don't have to buy the music again if you were smart enough to back it up on tape or CD or MP3, etc. Do you expect somebody else to replace something you've ruined?

Some of us are old enough to predate MP3 and CD and tape.
How about my original collection of Elvis 33s & 45s?

I've bought Dark Side of the Moon at least a dozen times (and worn out all but the last two CDs).
At what point do I no longer have the right to listen to them by any means at hand?

 

[emeraldsky]

Originally posted by: RideFree
At what point do I no longer have the right to listen to them by any means at hand?

You can beg, borrow, steal or buy them. Do whatever makes you happy. What's the issue again?

 

[mm60]

Originally posted by: Condor

Originally posted by: RideFree
Just because I wore out a record, does that mean I have to pay for it again?

Yeah, since it is about the IPR, once you buy the IPR, why isn't it yours for life?

It is more like you are buying the rights to listen to the music "on that piece of plastic" than the rights to listen to that music. I know that they claim that you are buying the rights to listen to that music in perpetuity, but if the CD breaks no one is going to give you a new copy just because you "legally bought it"

 

[dhoytw]

Originally posted by: RideFree
Mercora
Soon to be about as ubiquitous as Micro$oft, but probably you will not $pend much, if anything.
Mercora = "Sliced bread?"

I have been using this for over 6 months now, the only problem is they will be charging for it soon, the only reason it's been free is to get the word out, then they will charge.

 

[ThunderRiver]

It only works if multiple people with high speed broadband sharing the exact same music file.

Honestly, it is very unlikely that could happen unless people pirate the same exact file.
In the scenarios where people rip the same song from their legally bought CDs will not result in the same exact digital file. The MD5 hash check will be different for each file.. Worst of all, even the file size may vary depends on the mp3 encoder you use.

I am casting doubts on this.

 

[schwinn8]

Originally posted by: emeraldsky

Originally posted by: RideFree
Just because I wore out a record, does that mean I have to pay for it again?

You don't have to buy the music again if you were smart enough to back it up on tape or CD or MP3, etc. Do you expect somebody else to replace something you've ruined?

Great idea... until they start copy protecting CDs and DVDs... oh wait, they are already doing this!

Granted, we are defeating these for now (and doing it illegally, according to the letter of the law, I might add) but why should we have to fight for this ability?

 

[dhoytw]

Originally posted by: ThunderRiver
It only works if multiple people with high speed broadband sharing the exact same music file.

Honestly, it is very unlikely that could happen unless people pirate the same exact file.
In the scenarios where people rip the same song from their legally bought CDs will not result in the same exact digital file. The MD5 hash check will be different for each file.. Worst of all, even the file size may vary depends on the mp3 encoder you use.

I am casting doubts on this.

The service works great, this guy is making life more complicated then it needs to be, he is right, but hey the service works perfect for me with a high speed connection.

 

[LTS]

Originally posted by: VirtualLarry
Wow. I don't buy any of those claims listed in the TH article. For example, "Once you install the client, it sets out to locate the MP3s that are on your hard drive, and begins broadcasting the songs across the Internet." - ok, not legal, without a license for "public" broadcasting of that copyrighted material.

"Mercora gets around the issues of other music sharing services like Kazaa and Morpheus because MP3 files do not get transferred across the Internet: it is strictly a real-time streaming service. "We own the end-to-end encoding of the stream so we can ensure its security," said Sampath."

I don't care if they own the IP over the encoding format used, but the data, as streamed, would most likely be considered both a public broadcast as well as a derivative work of the original work.

So, who wants to start the pool, for how long before this service gets "investigated" like that Russian MP3 site, or simply shut down?

Best that I can figure is that this could be legal if they pay for a compulsory radio music broadcast license, but how will they pay the royalties/fees on that, if they are offering the service for free? And based on the terms of that license, can it even be applied to the end-users who are effectively the actual "broadcasters"? I just don't buy that this thing will work out. That Canadian TV streaming site was supposedly legal according to the laws up there too, but it eventually got shut down regardless.

I would be as careful participating in this scheme, as I would if I were theoretically sharing MP3s over the internet with Kazaa. You never know if the RIAA is likewise recording IPs, in case they eventually raid this place too, and then turn around and launch suits against the users whos IPs they logged.

You know, relying solely on one source of information might prove to make you look foolish.

First, the songs that are streamed are tracked by Mercora. They track how many users listen to that stream. They then pay the broadcast royalties to the proper organizations who then distribute the money to the artists, just like any other broadcaster would. The difference here is that people are sharing the CDs they own. You can also control WHERE the client looks for music to stream. You don't HAVE to stream anything.

Second, the entire application adheres to the other broadcasting standards and therefore does not let you search playlists for what will be coming up. You can't automatically tune to a particulr song. Broadcasters can only play so many songs from one artist in a certain period of time. If you attempt to do more than that the client will automatically pull other items out of your collection and share those to keep the stream legal.

The point is.. it's not illegal. Period. They have signed contracts with those RIAA members for how the product works.

As has been said, at some point they are going to charge. They are also still going to offer a some kind of free version. The client does allow google ads to be inserted in various areas, so they could be making some money that way. Certainly not enough to pay the broadcast royalties.

Only time will tell, however for the moment. If you want a legal way to audition music this would seem to be a good bet.

 

[RideFree]

Originally posted by: schwinn8

Originally posted by: emeraldsky

Originally posted by: RideFree
Just because I wore out a record, does that mean I have to pay for it again?

Great idea... until they start copy protecting CDs and DVDs... oh wait, they are already doing this!

Granted, we are defeating these for now (and doing it illegally, according to the letter of the law, I might add) but why should we have to fight for this ability?

Exactamente!

----------------------------------------
"You don't have to buy the music again if you were smart enough to back it up on tape or CD or MP3, etc. Do you expect somebody else to replace something you've ruined?"
What kind of a dumb question is this!
The first time you played any vinyl or a tape, the quality was degraded.
Only CDs are free of this degradation.
Thanks for helping to define this, Schwin.

Emerald, you are apparently flawed into thinking that just because someone told you the glass was half-full that it therefore must only be half-full.

 

[mscdex0]

Originally posted by: ThunderRiver
It only works if multiple people with high speed broadband sharing the exact same music file.

Wrong. How Mercora works is like this: you have one person that is broadcasting a song, say one person is now listening to that song, then say another person wishes to listen to the same song, the first person listening is now transferring the broadcast with their own bandwidth to the second person. And so on and so on. That's what makes it peer-to-peer.

Also, this way it uses less bandwidth on the broadcaster's end, which is a good thing. Instead of having 15 people connected to the broadcaster, you only have 1.

This is information right from their website/program, where it explains how it works.

So there is no sharing of the exact same music file. One broadcaster streams a music file to one person and then on down the line as explained above. Nobody except the broadcaster needs the music file.

 

[Bekker]

I have tried it and have mixed feelings ... as some have said, it depends greatly on the speed of the transmitting computer ... dial-ups are killers.

I am bothered by one section of the aqgreement, although I do not purposely violate the policy. The service searches for all songs on the local computer and then broadcasts a small subset randomly. The agreement states that one cannot broadcast any illegally obtained recordings. To my knowledge, I have none since I am about deaf as a stone and seldom listen to any music. But my grandchildren sometimes listen to various sites and without either my or their knowledge downloaded some protected material. I did not think I had any songs to speak of on my drive and it still found several (not in the hundreds or anything that severe). I recognized a few as some I had listened to online but had not recorded (to my knowledge). Most were country so it would have been me who recorded the material since my kiddos don't like that gen're. Therefore, I don't know if I am technically violating the law and agreement or not. Neither do I know if there is some way I can control what is available for broadcast and what is not. I don't want to engage in illegal activities in violation of IPR and am not sure of whether I am or not.

Finally, I have broadband service and a fairly fast system but it seems that the service slows my computer down. I don'[t care for that.

Just my 2 cents

 

[VirtualLarry]

Originally posted by: LTS
You know, relying solely on one source of information might prove to make you look foolish.

Well, relying on TH exclusively for information, would likely make anyone look foolish, I think that goes without saying. I was commenting based on my understanding of the legal issues, which may well be an incomplete picture.

Originally posted by: LTS
First, the songs that are streamed are tracked by Mercora. They track how many users listen to that stream. They then pay the broadcast royalties to the proper organizations who then distribute the money to the artists, just like any other broadcaster would.

But the difference here is, they are only tracking the songs that are played, are they not? They are not the actual broadcaster, of the copyrighted works - you are (as an individual user of the service). That would make them almost like an agent for the arm of the recording industry that collects royalties for the broadcast of audio works. But as far as violations of copyright law, without a legal and legitimate license, you could still be found liable, regardless of if someone paid royalties or not, as I understand it.

Originally posted by: LTS
The difference here is that people are sharing the CDs they own.

And guess what - those CDs are sold with am implicit (or explicit) license for private listening/use only. Buying a CD in the store, does NOT automatically grant you the legal license to publically broadcast/exhibit that work. That's a seperate right under copyright law. Just because you bought a bundle of CDs, doesn't give you the right to play them on your own new radio station, nor even to use them for commercial purposes, such as playing as background music in a store, or DJ'ing them for a party/wedding, etc. A lot of people don't realize that.

Essentially, even though they may be paying the appropriate royalities, there's still the issue of legal licensing to consider, in regards to copyright law, and it's highly unclear to me, that one 3rd-party can legally negotiate, and enter into a legal licensing contract, with another 3rd-party, on my behalf. IOW, even if the royalty fees are paid to the appropriate agency by someone, it's not clear to me that, as the actual broadcaster of the copyrighted works in question, that I have a clear, legal license to do so, unless I personally enter into a licensing contract with the copyright holder or their agent, directly.

It's like the "allofmp3" thing - they may have the right, under their laws, to have a collection of those files on their server in .ru, but that doesn't necessarily translate directly into me, being a citizen and resident of the US, having the legal right to download them. IOW, they can't extend their[/] protection under the law to me[/i]. That's much of the same as what I see Mercora attempting to do, except under the guise of contract law. If they sign a copyright-licensing contract, how does that apply to me? The only way that I could see that happening, is if all of the various recording studios licensed their collective works to Mercora, with the additional right to sub-license them to others. Somehow, I don't think that the "greedy" recording industry execs would be willing to give up so much control over the distribution of their works to some internet startup.

Originally posted by: LTS
You can also control WHERE the client looks for music to stream. You don't HAVE to stream anything. Second, the entire application adheres to the other broadcasting standards and therefore does not let you search playlists for what will be coming up. You can't automatically tune to a particulr song. Broadcasters can only play so many songs from one artist in a certain period of time. If you attempt to do more than that the client will automatically pull other items out of your collection and share those to keep the stream legal.

It sounds to me, like they have essentially created an ad-hoc "internet radio network", essentially. Clever, but I'm sure that it won't last. The RIAA had a heavy hand in hammering out the existing agreements; I'm sure that they will swiftly revise them if they feel that someone has found a "loophole".

Originally posted by: LTS
The point is.. it's not illegal. Period. They have signed contracts with those RIAA members for how the product works.

And am I a direct party to those contracts? Do the benefits, as well as the penalties apply to me? Especially if I didn't read/sign/agree to that contract myself? If so, that would appear to be legalized slavery. As far as copyright licensing goes, unless I recieve a license for public broadcast for those works, if I subsequently "broadcast" them, I am in violation of copyright law, it seems to me.

Originally posted by: LTS
As has been said, at some point they are going to charge. They are also still going to offer a some kind of free version. The client does allow google ads to be inserted in various areas, so they could be making some money that way. Certainly not enough to pay the broadcast royalties. Only time will tell, however for the moment. If you want a legal way to audition music this would seem to be a good bet.

Sounds a lot like the "legal" CanadaTV site to me. We all know how that went, and how swiftly it happened.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Originally posted by: mscdex0
Wrong. How Mercora works is like this: you have one person that is broadcasting a song, say one person is now listening to that song, then say another person wishes to listen to the same song, the first person listening is now transferring the broadcast with their own bandwidth to the second person. And so on and so on. That's what makes it peer-to-peer.

So it's kind of like a "listen-and-share" (or a better analogy, "puff and pass"), kind of like a real-time streaming-audio version of BT, I guess. Interesting. Makes sense, as far as the technology goes.

Originally posted by: mscdex0
So there is no sharing of the exact same music file. One broadcaster streams a music file to one person and then on down the line as explained above. Nobody except the broadcaster needs the music file.

I don't understand how those two statements agree. It's not the same file - but yet, only one file is needed? Doesn't that imply that further "streaming generations" will indeed use the exact same file? Does the app use analog re-sampling to re-broadcast the file? Is that how they are getting away with this?

 

[VirtualLarry]

Originally posted by: Bekker
I am bothered by one section of the aqgreement, although I do not purposely violate the policy. The service searches for all songs on the local computer and then broadcasts a small subset randomly. The agreement states that one cannot broadcast any illegally obtained recordings.

That doesn't make any sense. If the "broadcaster" is licensed properly for the public broadcast of such works, AFAIK it doesn't really matter how they were obtained. Purchasing a copy of the work for oneself, doesn't give anyone any more rights to publically broadcast/exhibit that work under copyright law than if they "stole" it.

IOW, what really matters here, is the "legal broadcast" or not, not the "illegal obtaining" of the source material. That suggests that Mercora does not have a license for public broadcast with the right to sub-license that same right to the users of their "service", and is relying on the private purchase of the works to be broadcast to obtain the rights for the end-users to broadcast those works. Sorry, copyright law doesn't work that way. I don't see how this service can be legal, on the whole. I'm sure that the courts will likely hash this out of the next few years though, after the RIAA lies in wait for a few years until Mercora becomes a financially fat enough pig to slaughter.

Originally posted by: Bekker
I don't want to engage in illegal activities in violation of IPR and am not sure of whether I am or not.

It's pretty simple - do you have a legal license allowing the public broadcast of those copyrighted works? (Btw, simply buying the CDs legally does not confer those rights.) No? Then don't broadcast them, otherwise you will (likely) be in violation of the law.

Then again, some of the laws that are being referred to, also make it illegal to, say, sing "Happy Birthday" at a birthday party held in public, for example. Whether you will actually have legal action taken against you, is another story, and generally depends on how "juicy" of a financial target you are.

 

[Bekker]

VirtualLarry,

Thanks. I agree with your assessment, which is one of the reasons I probably will not use the service unless there is some way I can prevent it from accessing and broadcasting anything from my computer. It may be possible for me to block such broadcasting by doing such things as placing all music files in one folder and then protecting it (not computer savvy enough to know for certain). If many subscribers do this, the service may not be viable in the long run as there will eventually be too few broadcasters.

 

[RideFree]

Originally posted by: VirtualLarry
It's pretty simple - do you have a legal license allowing the public broadcast of those copyrighted works? (Btw, simply buying the CDs legally does not confer those rights.) No? Then don't broadcast them, otherwise you will (likely) be in violation of the law.

I think we're in a pretty grey and murky area, here.

Does the industry have a right to control who listens to the sound track(s) or views the content? See! It depends on how you view it.

VL, I agree with pretty much everything you've said and my point is this...
If I buy a book, am I allowed to copy a page (or chapter) and send it to a friend?
And if I send it to a stranger? Then what?
If I ruin the book reading it...then it's my fault.
If the book degrades while being read to the point where it is no longer usable...then what?

I do not violate the Spirit of the Law. I copy (and have copied) everything. The caveat is that I owned the record, tape, book, CD & the like. I did not give away copies.
I made the copies (in violation of the letter of the law) and used those copies in order to preserve the fidelity of the original.

Eventually, the copies would break down and I would make another...sometimes two.
Gradually, the fidelity was gone to the extent that I was forced to buy another original.
It always pissed-me-off.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Don't get me wrong, RideFree, I'm not defending the practices of the industry. Just pointing out how Mercora seems like it may be using "creative loopholes" to semi-flout the law, and that it's not 100% clear to me that it's "fully legal". (The odds of anyone busting down your door for using it, or Kazaa, or anything else, are far smaller, and likely pretty-much negligible. (But one possible outcome, might be RIAA monitoring of "playlists" from certain IPs, to find people with large collections of MP3s on their HDs. Just a possible "conspiracy theory" thought.)

I'm fully in agreement with the line of thinking that if we are primarily paying for an "intellectual property license" when we buy a media containing copyrighted works for private/home usage, then if the producers of such don't want us to be able to copy that limited-lifetime media, either legally, or technologically, then they should likewise be required by law to provide a trade-in replacement plan for damaged/defective media, at only the cost for the replacement media and a small cost for time/labor involved. Thus far, that has not happened, thus I wouldn't suggest that anyone was morally wrong in duplicating their own paid-for works privately. But this Mercora thing is a bit of a difference scenario.

 

[RideFree]

Don't get me wrong...

I didn't. I was also commenting on another issue by another poster.
Besides that, as close as we are in our thinking, looks like one of us is useless.
I volunteer.

 

[emeraldsky]

Originally posted by: RideFree
as close as we are in our thinking, looks like one of us is useless.

No. Both.
Sorry. Couldn't resist.

 

[mscdex0]

Originally posted by: VirtualLarry
I don't understand how those two statements agree. It's not the same file - but yet, only one file is needed? Doesn't that imply that further "streaming generations" will indeed use the exact same file? Does the app use analog re-sampling to re-broadcast the file? Is that how they are getting away with this?

What I meant was, there are no physical files involved on the listeners' end, only on the broadcaster's side.

 

[LTS]

Here is how this works and why it is 100% legal.

Mercora is an agent acting on your behalf. They have obtained the necessary licenses required by law to broadcast music. You are entering into a partnership with them. Your partnership agreement allows you to provide the music to Mercora for broadcast. Mercora is the broadcaster here, not you. The network is owned by them, however it is designed on the basis of a P2P network. Mercora is not a true P2P network as they are responsible for tracking the traffic that flows through their client.

Here is the exact phrasing from their website:

The Legality of Webcasting with Mercora

AGREEMENT BETWEEN USER AND MERCORA INC
Mercora lets you webcast music on the Internet using the Mercora client running on your PC and the Mercora servers located on the domain mercora.com. We have obtained a statutory license for the non-interactive webcasting of digital audio as per the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), 17 U.S.C. § 114 (requires Adobe Acrobat plug-in). This license pertains to the digital performance rights of sound recordings and the associated reporting and royalty payments to SoundExchange® (the independent non-profit organization that represents over 500 record companies and associated labels). We have also obtained all U.S. (and in somecases international) musical composition performance rights through our licenses with ASCAP, BMI and SESAC . These pertain to the performance rights and associated royalties due to song writers. We take care of all the reporting and royalty payments that are due to these various organizations. You (the end user) do not have to worry about any of this.

If this were illegal they would not be in any contact with SoundExchange, ASCAP, BMI, or SESAC. Simply listing this would provide grounds for a lawsuit.

The point is, Mercora is the broadcaster. You are donating your musical library to their service for the purposes of webcasting. This would be no different than obtaining the same licenses on your own and webcasting your purchased works. The reason you aren't violating the broadcast license is that you are not broadcasting. Mercora is. It's a very important distinction.

And as a final statement, the service does NOT automatically search your drive looking for ALL MP3s. Even if it did, and it found illegal MP3s well that's your own fault. However, I will state it again. You CAN let it search (and it's readily apparent that people are broadcasting illegal mp3's looking at the ID3 tags that are used) however, you can also restrict where it looks.

I think we should give credit where credit is due. What you have is a way to find new music and listen to it without having to worry about being illegal. That's a very good thing. I think people are so used to stealing music they're now too greedy to even accept the webcasting rules. (No publicized playlists, etc.) The idea is solid. The execution might end up lacking and that will be its downfall. However, with phone service and television quickly adopting streaming technology for the broadcast why is it hard to think that such services as these can't replace the radio?

 

[mscdex0]

Originally posted by: LTS
Mercora is not a true P2P network

It is a true p2p network, it's just not used for filesharing.

The point is, Mercora is the broadcaster. You are donating your musical library to their service for the purposes of webcasting. This would be no different than obtaining the same licenses on your own and webcasting your purchased works. The reason you aren't violating the broadcast license is that you are not broadcasting. Mercora is. It's a very important distinction.

How is Mercora broadcasting any of the music? They aren't. You're streaming it from your own machine, your own bandwidth. When they say Mercora's servers are used in the process as well, those servers I imagine are only used to "catalogue" what every user has available (for searching) and they also probably do all the negotation between listeners and broadcasters. Other than that, they really have no part.

 

[shoplifter]

not free anymore. it's $47.88/year or $4.99 a month.

 

[wfay]

Originally posted by: mm60

Originally posted by: Condor

Originally posted by: RideFree
Just because I wore out a record, does that mean I have to pay for it again?

Yeah, since it is about the IPR, once you buy the IPR, why isn't it yours for life?

It is more like you are buying the rights to listen to the music "on that piece of plastic" than the rights to listen to that music. I know that they claim that you are buying the rights to listen to that music in perpetuity, but if the CD breaks no one is going to give you a new copy just because you "legally bought it"

I should be allowed to take my broken CD back to any retail store and exchange it for a new copy of the exact same CD.

This service would be funded by the RIAA etc and all stores (Walmart, Fye, Target etc) which sell CDs would participate.

The same service should be available for DVDs as well.

 

[isekii]

Mercora is free, but it's such a pain in the ass.

When you're connected to a user, it'll just stop for no reason and cut your music.

So you have to connect to a different user to stream music again.
It's a pain in the ass when you just want to lay down and listen and all of a sudden it cuts out.

It's easier to either buy cd's or download/purchase music and play those instead.