Joho the Blog
An Entry from the Archives

Prodigem, a legal torrent site, has announced a marketplace that will let you upload a file and sell bittorrent access to it. So, if you had, say, a video of your band performing its hit "Download Me, Baby, and Then Why Doncha Set Me Free?" that you wanted to sell, you'd upload it to Prodigem Marketplace and slap a price on it. Prodigem takes 10% plus the PayPal fee and passes the rest on to you.

It's DRM-free once you've downloaded it: It's just a file that you can redistribute as you see fit. And they're contemplating an interesting licensing scheme:

To accomodate this new method of transfer, we have added a Copyright Plus Prodigem license to the available licensing options. This simple license allows you to retain copyright over your work while making a specific grant of rights to Prodigem and its users. In effect you are saying that it is fine to share your work so long as it's only through the torrent you created, and since access to the torrent is only granted when payment is received, you get exactly what you are looking for.

You are also free to instead license your work under the Creative Commons. Though with a CC license you are technically granting everyone redistribution rights regardless of venue. This is fine by us if it's okay with you, but does mean that people are free to share without payment. Realizing this conundrum, we are busy mulling over something akin to a "Delayed" Creative Commons license, where Prodigem users will be able to stipulate their work as covered under Copyright Plus Prodigem license, and then on some fixed date of their choosing (eg. 1 year, 5 years) it automatically switches over to a CC license of their choosing. It's like peanut butter and chocolate.

I hope the marketplace takes off. But I'm worried about the "small monthly fee" Prodigem will require of users once it's out of beta. It may keep the chicken from ever getting out of the egg. But I assume they've thought this through better than I have.