Fabrik is an interesting company aiming to ease storage and sharing. Dave Tang (Fabrik's VP of Marketing) spoke at the June SF Tech (hosted by Microsoft/Niall Kennedy) along with Jeff Barr (on S3) and Aaron Levie (founder of Box.net). The S3 and Box.net talks were of little value (Jeff Barr talked about all of amazons' web services instead of concentrating on storage/S3 and had to leave early, and Aaron Levie kept explaining that box.net was changing everything but they couldn't talk about it.) Fabrik talked about their just released Maxtor Fusion, although they explained they are also using the technology to build an web service.
Maxtor's Fusion is an external hard drive which utilizes Fabrik's stack built on open source technology (linux, php, samba, and others) to provide a rich experience for storage and sharing. They were particularly excited about how easily they enabled sharing the media (pictures, movies, and music) from the device up to social sites such as myspace. During the demo I noticed the "widget" the software created for embedding music was an open source flash app called XSPF Web Music Player. I was familiar with XSPF since I had just written a small web app for my wife to listen to her audio books.
Taking a quick look at the Recent Tracks XPSF from Ning powered Creative Commons Hits, you see a bunch of entries like:
<track>
<location>http://www.ryansmithonline.com/NeilAvenue/RyanSmith-LeadingTheBlind.mp3</location>
<identifier>1889482</identifier>
<title>Leading The Blind</title>
<creator>Ryan Smith</creator>
<annotation> Ryan Smith & The Agency are playing Friday,
September 1 at Oldfield's On High in Columbus, Ohio with
Frohman, The Trojan Rabbit (from Cincinnati), and Time And
Temperature. The show is 18 and over, starts at 9 pm and
is $5 at the door.</annotation>
<info>http://cchits.ning.com/artists/?/ryan_smith/leading_the_blind</info>
<image>http://www.ryansmithonline.com/neil.jpg</image>
<album>Neil Avenue</album>
<duration>254955</duration>
</track>
XSPFs have a links to mp3 file and a collection of meta data the MP3. During the talk I asked about the legality of posting these flash "widgets" containing copyrighted music on a public site. The representative of Fabrik responded that it is completely legal. Given the relative ease with which you can download music contained within XSPFs, that is surprising. Even sharing music would seem to be of questionable legality, given the precedent for internet radio.
Fabrik just launched an open beta of the online version. Signup was easy, and within minutes I had uploaded a song and creating a "micro-link" (a snippet html for their flash widgets):
Powered by www.myfabrik.com
The player defaults to automatically starting to play the music when it is viewed, so I had to modify the html to remove that annoyance.
Reading the small print, they appear to claim that they are not liable for copyright infringement. IANAL, but that didn't fly for earlier services... In the demo/pitch Fabrik used copyrighted music as an example and a use-case for their product. Perhaps their legal team needs to talk to their marketing team.
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