The Day Against DRM: DreamHost Releases Files Forever
Yesterday, Oct. 3, was the Day Against DRM (see Defective by Design’s Ten things to do on the Day Against DRM as well as their primer on DRM).
DreamHost Blog » iTunes Music Store
What is it?
It’s a new service (during the beta only open to DreamHost Customers) that allows you to sell your own digital files, a la iTMS.. but with a few key differences:
# No DRM is allowed.. period!
# Once you upload your file to sell, you pay a tiny one-time storage fee, and we serve it FOREVER at a nice, permanent, URL.
# Anybody who buys a file somebody offers via Files Forever get an online backup of it included.. that is, they may re-download the file as many times as they want, FOREVER!
# Any file you buy from Files Forever you can also “loan†to your friends via the service! They are then allowed to download the file as much as they want until you ask for it “back.†(This is awesome, trust me.)
# We handle all the payment processing / shopping cart stuff, and take just 5% 50c for credit card fees. (We combine purchases to minimize these costs too.)
# You can even offer an “affiliate cut†for people who re-sell your files!
Dreamhost is releasing this in protest of iTunes continued use of DRM (Digital Rights Management) restrictions on its multimedia files. This product is a mixture of file-sharing/sending services and a way of selling that content. So while it’s not its own iTunes store, it is the backend for anyone else to set up their own iTunes-like store.