Ezmo

[Teho]

Have you heard of Ezmo? It's a new way to share music online, and completely legal (in Norway at least).

Thing is, according to norwegian law it is completely legal to let your close friends, no more than 10, copy music, movies etc from you. Close friends in this regard means persons who you spend a lot of your spare time with, for example your colleagues at work are not considered as close friends according to this law. As for online friends? Who knows? That's the grey area.

This law has been in effect in Norway since the VHS, Betamax and audio cassette days, where it became an issue. And there are no plans to change it anytime soon. Friends copy from friends, that's just something publishers have to live with.

Cue Ezmo, an online service that lets you do just this, share your music with your close friends while at the same time let you access it from any PC with an internet connection. This is not a P2P service, you have to upload all the music you want to share. But you can upload your entire collection, there is no limit to how much you can upload. So the way it works is that you upload your music and send invites to up to 10 friends to download freely from it. Or maybe they just stream it, I'm not sure as I've not gotten started properly with this yet myself.

The site and player is completely in english. Allthough it bases itself off a norwegian law, it's apparent that anyone in the world is expected to use this (if legal where they live, according to the ULA).

The site has just launched and is still in a beta stage, so is sometimes slow. This is something they are working hard on they say, because allthough this is web-based they want it working as fast as if it was an application on your computer. It did work fast to start with when they launched it on friday. But then it made a top norwegian news-site and traffic just exploded, so it's slow right now. They promise to fix this within the week.

Here's how they describe themselves:

Ezmo is a music player that makes it easy for a group of friends to share music. The music player is online rather than on your computer. The music is played directly from the web site. This means that the sharing has nothing to do with "peer-to-peer" sharing. It also means that once you use Ezmo, you have your and your friends' music available wherever you find a computer with an internet connection (at work or school, at parties, when you travel, etc.).

We are building Ezmo because we love music and dislike what has become of it in the digital era. Ezmo is very much a rebellion against the hassles of using digital music today - the lack of legal ways to share music experiences, the mp3 player that is one gadget too many in your pocket (and still is at home when you need it), the corrupted files you get on peer to peer networks and the bloated and restricted design of current media players. On Ezmo, you upload your music once, and then it is with you forever more - no hassle.

Today we open the Ezmo beta for you to try. These are early days, and our efforts to improve Ezmo will be relentless. We encourage you to try Ezmo now, upload some music, and invite your friends.

All the best,
The Ezmo Team

I've just registered for this myself. Certainly looks interesting I think.

[Harrison]

Sounds like an interesting idea.

But is it really that useful? And how many countries have similar law? I know that in many countries laws are being disputed to even allow one copy of an audio CD or video game to be made for personal use.

I think that old fashioned ftp is probably still the best sharing method among friends.

[Submeg]

True, but I see the point here. That way it wont ever be pulled down, and you can share whatever you want