A novel, perhaps bizarre, music industry replacement scheme
“The Honest Thief” is a Dutch company that grabbed attention in the limited circles of the file-sharing world a couple of weeks ago by publicly announcing their presence as for-profit, anti-music-industry do-gooders. Dismissed at the time as hype and vaporware, they have now released some details of their strategy. Which may or may not be vaporware, but is definitley kind of interesting and mostly weird.
The plan as far as I can make out: produce a peer-to-peer filesharing application – that is to say, a napster replacement, for those of you who haven’t been following the terminology – which would have a twist. The twist is that by using the app for filesharing, you would also be agreeing to allow Honest Thief to use your computer as part of a distributed computing network. Similar I imagine to seti@home or Compute Against Cancer. When you aren’t using your computer, the Honest Theif would be, as one node among many to complete heavy processing tasks. This distributed processing capacity would then be leased to research institutes for whatever task they wish. The money thus raised in leases would (I’m not making this up folks, they are) then be used to pay the artists. I assume this means specifically the artists whose work is being distributed.
So that’s
artists—> you—> research institutes—> artists.
Via “the honest theif” in each case.
Forbes article: