Bitmunk's business model is similar to that of Weed and a couple of others: it is primarily designed for independent artists, who can put their works up on the network and receive royalties every time copies of their works are sold.  Bitmunk separates the notions of artist and seller: artists get royalties, while sellers get whatever fees they decide to charge.  One interesting difference between Bitmunk and the other services is that Bitmunk gives artists flexibility in defining what rights they wish to make available -- standard copyright bundle, copyright with redistribution rights, public domain, or a number of Creative Commons licensing options.

But is Bitmunk truly copyright-respecting?  In considering Digital Bazaar's watermarking technology, our opinion would fall somewhere between "sort of" and "not really."  (A major record label or movie studio would simply say "no.")  Bitmunk's watermarking scheme is similar to that of Activated Content, Interoute, and other services that use watermarking to track limited-distribution content releases, such as pre-release copies of music tracks sent to critics and radio stations.  If the copyright owner of a work distributed on Bitmunk finds her file somewhere that it ought not to be -- such as on Morpheus or KaZaA, or on another user's hard drive -- then she can examine the file and determine the identity of the user who downloaded it.

The content industry would consider this type of watermarking use for general content distribution to be unacceptable.  Digital Bazaar claims that it is letting its users retain their fair use rights while providing some kind of channel for addressing infringement claims against users.  A Big Media representative would object that such a channel is not adequate; the whole idea of encryption-based DRM technology is to proactively inhibit consumers' ability to copy and send content anywhere at virtually no cost.  Watermarking schemes like that of Bitmunk have been around for a couple of years now, and the content industries have simply not embraced them beyond the limited uses mentioned above. 

We have been saying for some time that this is the year in which DRM and P2P move towards each other in the marketplace.  MusicMatch, which uses Microsoft Windows DRM and which introduced a limited sharing feature a couple of weeks ago, represents one side, while a growing number of independent services that feature some sort of protection on top of architectures that combine file sharing with financial transaction processing  represent the other side.  We suspect that Bitmunk will be one of the latter that will neither attract much attention from nor influence the direction of the established media industry's future online content services -- although that may ultimately bother the people at Digital Bazaar not at all.

Get DRM Watch Newsletter

Click here to subscribe to DRM Watch