Anyone can make one. The local grocery shop can have one to draw customers and to sell some blank discs. Schools can have them. Libraries. Ordinary people who wants to support free culture. The only thing needed would be a downloadable disc image and a computer with a CD/DVD burner and an internet connection, and you would be a free music/software/movie/book distributor. While we are at it, allow a USB stick to be used as media as well.

That's cool. But, why not use existing swarming protocols such as Bittorrent to automatically load the device with music, seeded from some central servers where the artists can upload their works. That would increase the amount of available music a lot. If there is not enough space to handle it all, it could download on demand, and the user can return later to burn their disc. As many such machines would exist, the content would be well seeded and download would be quick.

I recently read an article about a new device in Serbia called the Freedom Toaster. Basically, it's a machine that is going to be placed in a number of public places that allows people to chose from a selection of free music (as in beer and as in speech) and burn it to a CD, all free of charge.

That started a chain of thoughts for me, which I will try to recreate here.

What if, instead of having dedicated hardware, it was a software solution that could be run on any standard PC with a CD/DVD burner? Let's say a custom Linux distribution was made for the purpose, that gives a nice, simple user interface to select content and burn to disc. This could be built on top of an existing distribution. That would allow anyone with a spare computer to be a free culture distributor.

That's cool. But, why not use existing swarming protocols such as Bittorrent to automatically load the device with music, seeded from some central servers where the artists can upload their works. That would increase the amount of available music a lot. If there is not enough space to handle it all, it could download on demand, and the user can return later to burn their disc.

Then I thought: why limit yourself to music? There are free movies, free software, free ebooks, free newspapers and so on. All this could be added as categories.

While we are at it, add the possibility to check out the stuff before burning (with the exception of software, of course). Now you can try before you get it for free, that's even better than try before you buy.

Now, we have gone from the simple music dispenser to a free culture machine. Imagine going into the library with a stack of empty discs and leaving with the latest music, a movie, OpenOffice, a book and some other stuff. All free, all legal.

Anyone can make one. The local grocery shop can have one to draw customers and to sell some blank discs. Schools can have them. Libraries. Ordinary people who wants to support free culture. The only thing needed would be a downloadable disc image and a computer with a CD/DVD burner and an internet connection, and you would be a free music/software/movie/book distributor.

There could alse be a "Home edition", that would basically be the same product, but with an interface that is more suited to the desktop and with more focus on playing the files from hard disk and less focus on burning the files to CD/DVD.

Of course, some details will have to be worked out, such as the need for editors to weed out spamming and illegal files, but I think that will take care of itself, because as once the concept gains momentum, volonteers will appear. A ranking system would also help keeping any bad stuff at the bottom of the pile and make it easier for the editors to spot. That said, the basic concept is sound and have the potential to put a huge dent in the non-free market share.

As I don't have the knowledge, time or resources to make this happen, I'll put the idea here in the hope that someone will pick it up. I will happily contribute to such a project in whatever capacity I might be helpful.