Re: BMI MUSICBOT - ROBOTS WITH AN EAR FOR MUSIC

On Fri, 17 Oct 1997, T. J. Logan <tjl[_at_]webwarei.com> wrote:
>
> BMI recently announced its "musicbot" technology for cruising the
> internet looking for unliscenced music. Their announcement claims to be
> able to both find infringing uses of music as well as the number of
> times the music is accessed. It is easy to see how a spider "musicbot"
> might be created, but the claim of being able to count the number of
> access to a site, without the benefit of discovery, is hard to fathom.
> Does anyone know how this technical feat is accomplished?

It can't be done -- either communication got messed up between their technology contractor and their PR person, or they are outright making things up for intimidation purposes, or they have lousy technology people.

There simply is no regular way to tell how many "hits" a given web server has unless the owners of the web server tell you, and even then its up to the web master how to do it.

I suspect this is strong arm tactics meant to intimidate folks. I think they are going after the booming MP3 trade. MP3 files let you store radio-quality stero audio (up to CD quality if you want I think) in a highly compressed form. My experience has been that you can put about a minute worth of audio in 1 meg or less.

I think you save about 50% off buying a CD (using 10 cent/meg as a rough average for various types of media). The quality isn't as good and you have to use your computer to play the music (though, with writable CD's, this changes).

The big advantage is in singles. Do you want to spend $4 to buy a CD with one song or would you like to spend 5 minutes downloading a file on to our hard drive that you will listen to for a month and then erase when you get bored of it (we are talking mostly about pop music here)?

One good consequence -- hopefully this will put SOME braking on the skyrocketing prices of music on CDs...

        -Gabe

Gabriel Wachob, J.D.                 http://www.aimnet.com/~gwachob
COO, Findlaw                         http://www.findlaw.com