RedSwoosh. free your links

I certainly never would, but someone most definitely could. . .

1) Search YouTube looking for semi-popular content. Look for mid-range content owned by the second tier of content owners and media co's. The ideal content would be uploaded by 100-200 different folks. Find the 100's of thousands of copyrighted works that fit this category

2) Catalog all copies of the various content fitting this category, date added, usernames adding, number of views, etc. Take screenshots of everything.

3) Contact copyright owners of this content. Either a) license content from the owner on the cheap (partial rights, time-limited rights, etc) or b) Inform them that their content has been misappropriated online, and you would like to help them get shut down its illicit distribution and get paid for damages (you can split with them)

4) Sue a few of the John Doe's responsible for uploading and illicitly distributing the content. Get subpoenas to YouTube for IP addresses and other information, and get subpoenas to ISPs to reveal identities of end users uploading infringing content.

5) Launch massive PR campaign around how you have bought the rights or represent the rights to all of this infringing content being uploaded, and let the world know that you are embarking on a massive campaign to root out these direct infringers, and intend to make them pay.

6) Set up legal infrastructure to handle and process 1000's of concurrent legal actions.

7) Don't let cases go to court. Settle with infringers for $5,000 a piece (RIAA/MPAA precedent). Spend no more than 2-3 hours of paralegal time on each infringement case and settlement.

8) Process 4000 cases and settlements in 30 days (200/day, 4 per paralegal per work day, 50 paralegals on staff). Collect $20MM, share revenues with owners or pay off licenses from #3 above.

9) Net take home pay is $10MM.

10) YouTube uploads decrease by 80-90%. All infringing content left if not deleted completely out of the system begins to get filtered by YouTube's new filtering mechanism.

11) Retire in Las Vegas and die knowing that you are hated by a significant portion of the worldwide broadband population.

For the last decade I've been toiling away in Australia on my own software; P2P, a music app, and insane operating system development, unbeknowing that I actually had any employable skill. I just developed this software because, well, "I thought it would be useful" was how I justified it, but really I develop software because I love doing so. That one better explains all those late-night-dev-sessions.

At the end of my Honours year and just before I enrolled in my PhD, I found out my Honours year project had been accepted into a software development conference held in the U.S.A. My university was kind enough to fly me pretty much literally halfway around the world to let me give my talk there. It was a great thrill to me, to finally visit the place where TV comes from and to discover that everyone really does talk with those cool 'TV accents'.

During the conference I met a fellow named David, who tells me that my software was in some ways similar to the software at this slighty-odd named company "Red Swoosh", and that they're looking for someone like me. After more discussion and a trial project that I work on back in Australia (me now also enrolled in my PhD at this point), and suddenly I find I have a dream job waiting for me in San Francisco. After a little while I make the decision to drop my PhD and fly on over. This of course is via a month stopover in Thailand, where instead of writing P2P software in my room and Uni as I had been doing, I'm was now writing it from the beaches of Thailand. And now, in Silicon Valley. I had gone from my home Separation Creek Valley ( set in a town of 7 people ), to Silicon Valley.

So looking back, I had come from my life of developing software for the fun of it from my room, to Red Swoosh. I think the ninja most aptly described my whole experience when he said those famous words:

	"I was just training in a pit of Siamese lions, and a severed arm flew in and hit me in the head. 'You have been called up for operation Red Swoosh'."

Tom, code dude.

UPDATE: This post has been translated into pirate.

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Today, Red Swoosh offers great features, cool Javascript API, sweet p2p performance and bandwidth efficiencies, but we're only as good as the number of your users that have our client. Now granted, we have a pretty light, friendly and easy installation, and each of your users only has to go through installation once and voila!, but wouldn't it be nice if Swoosh were everywhere and all of your users could instantly pull from peers the moment you swooshed your links?

One of the best things that Swoosh could do for the development community would be for us to find a way to get Red Swoosh on every desktop PC on the planet.

If the Red Swoosh client is everywhere, then websites and application developers never have to worry whether Swoosh is installed, . . . and never have to worry about how to get each of their users installed. It would be AWESOME, getting instant bandwidth savings across all of your users on day 1, and instant utilization of all of our other tools by all of your users from the start.

So the hundred-million-dollar question:

How do we get Swoosh *everywhere*?

- Product feature enhancements -- make Swoosh cool and desirable by users of media apps on the Net. Users could get interesting features like faster delivery to ALL content swooshed or not, or a cool plug-in to their favorite Podcatching application
- bundle with Firefox or iTunes (doesn't that take lots of money?)
- bundle with other apps (podcatchers, cool niche applications)
- new business models -- Example: website gets free distribution on RS premium product for life for all users that they distribute the client to

What are your guys' ideas?