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The Architect's Blog
January 3rd, 2009

Think: Projects

Collaboration on new music is the primary goal of VRS. So, the Music Tab (project listing screen) is really the focal point of VRS. And the new song projects that fill that listing usually begin with the New > New Project Tab. On the New Project screen you can name your new project, give it a description, give it a creation date, and add some remarks. You can set the project to public or private, set the BPM, and add your initial musicians and mixers. You will notice that there is a little people icon next to Mixers and Musicians. Go ahead and click on that. Remember our People directory? This is its humble beginnings. You can search for members, check the box next to their name(s), and then add them to your project. It's a pretty cool feature - I'm kinda proud of that little bit of JavaScript.

Another feature on the New Project Screen (and another feature I am kinda proud of) is the NDA (Non-Disclosure Agreement). This is where you can enter the terms of your project. If you don't want anyone to share your music without your permission, enter it here. The way this feature works is that no-one can download any tracks or mixes in your project without agreeing to your terms: When they initiate downloading of tracks or mixes in a project (for the first time), they are presented with your terms and must click the Agree button. These Agreements are then time-stamped and logged.

Code

VRS is written in C. Anyone that creates web sites understands that coding a web site in C is just plain nutty. Usually PHP, or Python, or .Net, or Cold Fusion... even Perl are used to create web sites. It's just so much easier to create web sites with scripting languages such as PHP. But I felt that in order to better control and safeguard VRS members' music, I needed to have more control over both the code and the data. Using C has allowed me to write my own track/mix upload and download engines, and that allowed me to code, right into the download engine, a check for the Project NDA. There are other reasons I chose C to develop VRS - but I'll talk about those in other blog posts.

Repeat

The NDA feature was really born out of a discussion I had with a well known Multi-Grammy winning Producer/Engineer. He wanted to know how VRS would protect his tracks from being released before an album was ready. The plain fact is that neither VRS nor any other music collaboration system can absolutely ensure that someone will not share tracks that they should not. But we figured that, by allowing members to attach an NDA Agreement to their projects, we hoped to provide them with a way to communicate their wishes to the other project members.

Enabling features to help protect the VRS members and their music has always been something we accounted for in our design. We are not lawyers, so we are not sure of what would actually happen if there was a legal challenge, but we figure that we should provide as many tools as we can think of to help our members keep control of their music. If this is a concern for you, we encourage you to talk to your Intellectual Property lawyer before relying on this feature for anything more than just communicating your wishes to your project members. P.S. You might also want to check into Digital Watermarking and Hashing (Fingerprinting). These are also options that we are considering adding to VRS in the future.