The MegaBox

Late last week we saw the announcement of yet another file sharing site that will allow content owners to monetize digital content. The point of difference in this case is that the founder has had almost all his assets frozen and is under house arrest while he defends copyright infringement, racketeering and money laundering charges. I covered this in an earlier blog post.

In a tweet last week, Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom announced that "The major Record Labels thought Megabox is dead. Artists rejoice. It is coming and it will unchain you". At least I think it was Kim Dotcom. There's a new twitter handle @KimDotcom with his picture on it.

Last year Dotcom posted in TorrentFreak that Megabox would be "a site that will soon allow artists to sell their creations direct to consumers and allowing artists to keep 90% of earnings".

In addition to allowing content owners to sell content, Megabox would use what is referred to as Megakey. The idea (I think) is that users will be exposed to advertising while downloading content from the site. Megabox gets paid by the advertisers for presenting ads to users. Megabox pays the content owners whose content is downloaded. By using the Megakey, artists sharing content on Megabox would earn income from users even if they download music for free.

It will be interesting to see how the payback for Megabox will compare with Megaupload. Movie files tend to be larger than music files. Large files take longer to download than short files. The opportunity to advertise to movie downloaders is therefore greater than the opportunity to advertise to music downloaders.

As I said in a radio interview this morning, the concept sounds good. However, there are risks for artists. Musicians looking at this service and other similar online services should ask what rights they are giving up, and for what purposes people can use their music. And be sure to keep backups of their work.

The audio segment is available here:



Photo courtesy of author John Swords under Creative Commons licence.