Digital Media Exchange

In March I met Paul Hoffert at the Europrix Top talent Award in Vienna. He a member of the World Summit Award board, but in his daily life he is doing very interesting things. Presently he is involved in the project Digital Media Exchange (DMX). I spoke with him about the project and we exchanged e-mail messages on the project..

Paul is part of the launching team for the project which is carried by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. The project will have an impact on the content industry. It does not work with the classic paradigms of publishing.

DMX is a P2P online service, operated as a non-profit cooperative of content subscribers and suppliers. DMX provides content and license aggregation, marketing, and distribution, as well as usage accounting and royalty distribution. DMX also provides searching, recommendation, playlist exchange, information, blogs, discussion groups, and access to merchandise services.

DMX subscribers have permission for the unlimited exchange (downloading, streaming, and copying) of music, movies, television programs, photos, games, documents, and the spoken word, with no technical protections or DRM constraints. In addition, many DMX content titles allow users to make derivative works from the content. Unlike services such as iTunes or Rhapsody, DMX’s Peer to Peer (P2P) service allows users to share files amongst each other, without the intervention of a central server.

DMX collects monthly fees from subscribers or their ISPs, and pays all the income to content suppliers (less administrative costs), according to a royalty distribution formula set by its governing Council. DMX’s non-profit cooperative (coop) structure results in lower prices for subscribers and higher payouts to content suppliers.

DMX is fully copyright compliant, with oversight by the Harvard University Law School – Berkman Center for Internet and Society. The owners and administrators of DMX content authorize DMX and its subscribers’ activities. DMX has clear privacy and dispute resolution policies procedures.

DMX does not use technical systems that can limit subscribers from playing, copying, or distributing content. This allows any subscriber to make his or her content available to other subscribers, without the need for special encoding.

DMX offers financial incentives for content owners to make their works available to subscribers for derivations—new content created from portions of existing works, such as remixes, samples, mashups (content combinations), and the like. DMX also offers incentives to content owners to authorize the incorporation of their audio works into videos, films, PowerPoint presentations, and games, creating a library of music that can be legally used in soundtracks.

Tags: content

Blog Posting Number: 406