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Ok, don't start going into Napster withdrawal syndrome yet ;-) There's an excelent alternative to that: OpenNAP. Its a napster network, free from Napster Corp. And there's plenty of users and music on the OpenNAP network too. The site also lists alternative clients, even for those using Windows. Plus there's gnutella and other alternatives (I have'nt checked them all out yet).

AppleSoup is working to produce a next generation peer-to-peer network that lets content owners distribute "anything digital" via the Internet while giving them a way to control and monetize their intellectual property. For more information, send email to info@applesoup.com So bassically this will be a gnutella clone.

Originally, Gnutella *WAS* GPL. But, the authors (who worked for Nullsoft, which is owned by AOL,) were told (by AOL) to stop it. Since I'm guessing their contracts (as most programmers contracts do nowawadays) said that their employer (AOL) owns their code, they were forced to comply.

But, someone leaked the code to someone OUTSIDE AOL, and it's slowly being maintained. If you check their homepage, you will see that they plan on re-releasing the code, fully under the GPL, when they hit version 1.0. So, Even the "official" Gnutella isn't "official", since the only "official" source was closed by their "official" employer...

And, as was argued when it first happened... Since AOL owns the original code, they can change the (distrubution) license at will. Even on GPL-ed software. If I write a piece of software, and release it under the GPL, then for you to use it, you must agree to my chosen license. If, at a later date, I decide to charge for it, and change the license to a more restrictive one (such as Microsoft's,) I am fully within my rights to do so. And, if you were using my software, I can revoke your license, because I'm the copyright holder. Even if you made (and released under the GPL) modifications, since your original license was revoked, all your derivatives are illegal now. It's a REALLY slippery slope, which is why the FSF recommends that if you release under the GPL, you should also sign over your rights (copyrights, that is) to the FSF. Then, no one can force you to change your license, only the FSF could change the license. But, (again due to legal intricacies) if your software is really owned by your employer (like the original Gnutella) then THEY legally own the copyright, so you never had legal authority to choose the license, or sign your rights to the FSF... Ah, what a tangled web we weave...

The main reason I think RMS doesn't go after Gnutella is because he knows that they WANTED to GPL it (the authors even thought they did) but couldn't. Legally, AOL could stop the whole "official" Gnutella project anytime they choose to by sicking their lawyers on the current maintainers. But, since the important part of Gnutella is the protocol, it's too late to stop it. With the already-released (under the GPL) clones, there is nothing AOL (or anyone else) can do about it..

Reference URLs:

• The current Gnutella home page. These guys are not affiliated with Nullsoft or AOL in any way. They just acquired the source code, and are updating it.
• Nullsoft, Inc. The home of the original authors of Gnutella. There is no Gnutella info here.
• America Online. The beast.

The first piece I'd like to present against this is that Gnutella works. Hypotheticals aside, it flat out works. There are plenty of users using gnutella and it seems to work fine for all them. Just go get gnutella and see for yourself. Theres a client for every OS under the sun, so you have no excuse.

In terms of why it works: when you search a "virus" network, it doesnt go around in a linearized chain style. Nothing as sophmoric as A connects to B connects to C. Something like that would be just flat out inane! what would the network do if a couple of client/servers just shut off, all at once? You'd have to include major safeguards. In a chain network like you suggested, the network would tear itself to shreds within minutes.

An intelligent virus distributed network (See: Gnutella and what I'm doing) maintains a list of 10 or so connections. When requesting a file, it sends out its request to those 10 connections. Those 10 that recieve the query pass it on to every system they know of. They in turn pass it on to every 10 they know of.

I can see the questions already: Dear god! The bandwidth something like that might take! And how would it end?

Use your head. Put a byte for TTL (time to live) on a query which defines how many times it'll get passed before ending. That way, you'll never get more than (ActiveConnections)**(TTL) total messages sent out. Take this another step further and use intelligent routing. Keep a small table of recently recieved packets and ignore any repeats. That way, the message doesnt ever get caught in an infinite loop. There are tons of optimizations that can be done. Gnutella does some optimizations already.

But enough of this tangent. My point is that Gnutella's form of distributed networking not only can work, but is being used right now.

Matt.

The first piece I'd like to present against this is that Gnutella works. Hypotheticals aside, it flat out works. There are plenty of users using gnutella and it seems to work fine for all them. Just go get gnutella and see for yourself. Theres a client for every OS under the sun, so you have no excuse.

In terms of why it works: when you search a "virus" network, it doesnt go around in a linearized chain style. Nothing as sophmoric as A connects to B connects to C. Something like that would be just flat out inane! what would the network do if a couple of client/servers just shut off, all at once? You'd have to include major safeguards. In a chain network like you suggested, the network would tear itself to shreds within minutes.

An intelligent virus distributed network (See: Gnutella and what I'm doing) maintains a list of 10 or so connections. When requesting a file, it sends out its request to those 10 connections. Those 10 that recieve the query pass it on to every system they know of. They in turn pass it on to every 10 they know of.

I can see the questions already: Dear god! The bandwidth something like that might take! And how would it end?

Use your head. Put a byte for TTL (time to live) on a query which defines how many times it'll get passed before ending. That way, you'll never get more than (ActiveConnections)**(TTL) total messages sent out. Take this another step further and use intelligent routing. Keep a small table of recently recieved packets and ignore any repeats. That way, the message doesnt ever get caught in an infinite loop. There are tons of optimizations that can be done. Gnutella does some optimizations already.

But enough of this tangent. My point is that Gnutella's form of distributed networking not only can work, but is being used right now.

Matt.

The first piece I'd like to present against this is that Gnutella works. Hypotheticals aside, it flat out works. There are plenty of users using gnutella and it seems to work fine for all them. Just go get gnutella and see for yourself. Theres a client for every OS under the sun, so you have no excuse.

In terms of why it works: when you search a "virus" network, it doesnt go around in a linearized chain style. Nothing as sophmoric as A connects to B connects to C. Something like that would be just flat out inane! what would the network do if a couple of client/servers just shut off, all at once? You'd have to include major safeguards. In a chain network like you suggested, the network would tear itself to shreds within minutes.

An intelligent virus distributed network (See: Gnutella and what I'm doing) maintains a list of 10 or so connections. When requesting a file, it sends out its request to those 10 connections. Those 10 that recieve the query pass it on to every system they know of. They in turn pass it on to every 10 they know of.

I can see the questions already: Dear god! The bandwidth something like that might take! And how would it end?

Use your head. Put a byte for TTL (time to live) on a query which defines how many times it'll get passed before ending. That way, you'll never get more than (ActiveConnections)**(TTL) total messages sent out. Take this another step further and use intelligent routing. Keep a small table of recently recieved packets and ignore any repeats. That way, the message doesnt ever get caught in an infinite loop. There are tons of optimizations that can be done. Gnutella does some optimizations already.

But enough of this tangent. My point is that Gnutella's form of distributed networking not only can work, but is being used right now.

Matt.

The first piece I'd like to present against this is that Gnutella works. Hypotheticals aside, it flat out works. There are plenty of users using gnutella and it seems to work fine for all them. Just go get gnutella and see for yourself. Theres a client for every OS under the sun, so you have no excuse.

In terms of why it works: when you search a "virus" network, it doesnt go around in a linearized chain style. Nothing as sophmoric as A connects to B connects to C. Something like that would be just flat out inane! what would the network do if a couple of client/servers just shut off, all at once? You'd have to include major safeguards. In a chain network like you suggested, the network would tear itself to shreds within minutes.

An intelligent virus distributed network (See: Gnutella and what I'm doing) maintains a list of 10 or so connections. When requesting a file, it sends out its request to those 10 connections. Those 10 that recieve the query pass it on to every system they know of. They in turn pass it on to every 10 they know of.

I can see the questions already: Dear god! The bandwidth something like that might take! And how would it end?

Use your head. Put a byte for TTL (time to live) on a query which defines how many times it'll get passed before ending. That way, you'll never get more than (ActiveConnections)**(TTL) total messages sent out. Take this another step further and use intelligent routing. Keep a small table of recently recieved packets and ignore any repeats. That way, the message doesnt ever get caught in an infinite loop. There are tons of optimizations that can be done. Gnutella does some optimizations already.

But enough of this tangent. My point is that Gnutella's form of distributed networking not only can work, but is being used right now.

Matt.

Make a real file sharing network.

Seriously, napster is... of marginal usability? I'll be frank. Napster's protocol is total crap. Its based around single unconnected servers. Now, not only is this not totally decentralized (==bad) but since the napservers arent connected, you dont have access to every file (Yes, there are multiple napservers. (Choose your server with napigator)).

What we really need is a protocol that uses/abuses MD5 (RFC or a less technical overview), so you _know_ your getting the same file. Its not too much to ask to send a couple more bytes just once to know your getting the right song. Way more favorable option than having to backup your file before resuming a download, listening to make sure its the exact same file, et al. Way better

In terms of other options, I'd have to recommend a couple of different things: first off, check out Gnutella which is far superior to napster. Open protocol, truly distributed network. Everything. Second off, I'm gonna throw in a plug for Pie in the Sky, what I'm doing for BitWrench, the company I'm working for. Pie in the Sky (PitS) is the mother of all mp3 programs. When it does come out (end of summer time frame), it will support searching across napster, gnutella, freenet and scour. It will also boast possibly the most intelligent Gnutella router seen, extended protocols for enhanced communication with other PitS servnets and more. Check it.

Alright, enough ranting. Matt

I would love to see a distributed name to IP resolution service, that uses an architecture similar to Gnutella . Of course there is no reason to limit the service to domain name resolution. It can be quite handy to resolve an email address to an IP address, too.

This new piece of Internet infrastructure would be very handy for anyone wanting to do things cheaply. I'm thinking of:

• Web servers
• Remote access (VNC)
• chat
• voice over IP
• multi-player gaming

Gnutella is better than napster for a number of reasons. Chief among them is that it will share any kind of file, not just MP3's, and you can configure the port it uses, so it is hard to block with packet filters. Also there is no central server so there's no chokepoint of control like there is for Napster.

It is a public protocol and implementations of it are available on most platforms in common use (Java, *nix, MacOS, BeOS, Windows). Source code is provided for some versions.

The homepage for Gnutella is http://gnutella.wego.com. The download page that lists all the available versions is here.

I find that gtk_gnutella works well on Linux. It is a work in progress so it doesn't yet implement sharing but it does search for an download files well. It is under the GNU General Public License and its homepage is http://gtk-gnutella.sourceforge.net/

Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow

Gnutella is better than napster for a number of reasons. Chief among them is that it will share any kind of file, not just MP3's, and you can configure the port it uses, so it is hard to block with packet filters. Also there is no central server so there's no chokepoint of control like there is for Napster.

It is a public protocol and implementations of it are available on most platforms in common use (Java, *nix, MacOS, BeOS, Windows). Source code is provided for some versions.

The homepage for Gnutella is http://gnutella.wego.com. The download page that lists all the available versions is here.

I find that gtk_gnutella works well on Linux. It is a work in progress so it doesn't yet implement sharing but it does search for an download files well. It is under the GNU General Public License and its homepage is http://gtk-gnutella.sourceforge.net/

Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow

Actually, people on the development lists are actively talking about this and other similar issues. Please consult http://gnutella.wego.com/go/wego.discussion.disc? groupId=116705&discId=117653&view=threads&curMsgId =-1&index=-1&action=view for a web-based interface.

This, and the related problem of hacked clients giving back hits for any search that just link back to banner sites, has been a real impediment for me in using gnutella over something more centralized like napster. The problem with anything de-centralized like this is that while you have all the benefits of abandoning centralized control, you have all the headaches of abandoning centralized control too.

The best solution I've come across (in the oh so many hours I've thought about it... :) is to implement, either at the protocol level or the client level, a moderation-style system, or actually, more appropriate still: a web-of-trust setup.

Unfortunately, the protocol as it currently stands, does not have much room for carrying this kind of information, and implementing it in any kind of non-trivial-to-circumvent way would require a fair bit of work. I mean, you can have clients digitally sign their hits, and the hits of people for whom they vouch, but ugh - think about the kind of traffic that goes across one of these clients, and the overhead that would come from signing or otherwise authenticating each one.

Maybe something more akin to the spam blacklists would be more appropriate: have a hook in the client that allows it to grab the current blacklist and filter those people out of the hits. Unfortunately, since a gnutella request doesn't pick and choose it's recipients, you'd have all sorts of traffic moving around that was just being dropped by the recipient, but at least this contamination would be harder to pull off.

Any thoughts on these, or other ways to keep the S:N on something like this up? I think client-side implementation is important, since it allows the protocol to remain unscathed, and choice is of course, essential, just like browsing /. at -1. But if nothing gets implemented, we end up with a great distributed file sharing mechanism that is, much to the pleasure of Lars and his ilk, too contaminated to bother with.

Johnath.

The protocol has been fully reverse-engineered but only released with the windows client. Basically gnutelladev.wego.com deals with current generation clones and gnutellang.wego.com deals with extending the protocol to add new features. Capnbry did all of the reverse-engineering and he hangs out in #gnutella on EFnet so if you want to talk to the guy that did it he is the one to ask.

The protocol has been fully reverse-engineered but only released with the windows client. Basically gnutelladev.wego.com deals with current generation clones and gnutellang.wego.com deals with extending the protocol to add new features. Capnbry did all of the reverse-engineering and he hangs out in #gnutella on EFnet so if you want to talk to the guy that did it he is the one to ask.

The "third party" builds have both source and binaries (or links to them) available as the various authors deem fit.

Interested in helping make the next generation of Gnutella better? Join me over at the Gnutella NG site -- gnutellaNG.wego.com (Password required, but it's free. Skip all the marketing demographics... wego.com seems to behave if you tell them "don't email me.")

__________________________________________________ _____________
Ever notice that MCSEs advertise the fact, but Sun & Novell certified people don't?

The "third party" builds have both source and binaries (or links to them) available as the various authors deem fit.

Interested in helping make the next generation of Gnutella better? Join me over at the Gnutella NG site -- gnutellaNG.wego.com (Password required, but it's free. Skip all the marketing demographics... wego.com seems to behave if you tell them "don't email me.")

__________________________________________________ _____________
Ever notice that MCSEs advertise the fact, but Sun & Novell certified people don't?

As some above have said, (and I'm not trying to be redundant) there are many other places to get MP3s, most of which existed before Napster.
Oth.net used to be an amazing source for them by listing searchable FTP sites full with albums and singles. There's always other less dependable websites like AudioGalaxy.com and LycosMP3. There are all BIG, well-known WWW sites, which, although not quite 100% reliable are well established. This does not cover the thousands of pages you can find if you go to Hotbot and search for 'mp3'.
Then, of course, there's IRC. Here again, there are hundreds of communities across dozens of servers all working on one thing: getting/trading MP3s. (My recommendation is to try some of the IRC servers on the Eris Free Network).
Then of course, you've got other Napster-like clients like GNUtella, FreeNet, and Globalscape's CuteMX (most of these share more than MP3 files).
And college students will always have the trusty, reliable LANs where students share their large collections.

Ok, so you knew this already. Bottom line: MP3 is not going away, not now, and especially not at the hands of the RIAA. If they are only half as smart as their lawyers are blockheaded, they would work with some of these companies, as well as organizations like the Frauenhoffer Institute to develop a replacement for the MP3 file format. One that maybe sounds twice as good for half the file size, so you can get 320kbps encoded songs for 3MB or so. New technology is the way to fight MP3. If enough people think it's worth it to pay $0.50 for a song that sounds twice as good and can be downloaded in half the time, guess what? They'll be more likely to get that song as opposed to an .mp3 file. Relatively secure encoding already exists. The band Phish released MP3s that you could listen to for free three times, then a window popped up that reuqired you to enter a credit card number and pay some small amount of money to continue listening to the song (apparently, an executable was appended to the WAV file before it was encoded... You couldn't remove this prompt, or extract a WAV file with WinAmp).

If Lars is reading this, spend money on getting new media developed, not on paying your lawyers. You may win against Napster, but not against MP3.

Now, I feel it is important to support the artists and I like to have the very best audio fidelity. But if it were not for Gnutella I would have never known that I enjoyed the music of Ladysmith Black Mambazo - particularly not her rendition of the Lion Sleeps Tonight, one of my favorites from my childhood.

Does anyone know of an MP3 to WAV or AIFF decoder for Linux? I don't mean a player, rather one that saves to files. I'd like to make an all-Lion and all-Louie-Louie CD for the amazement and torment of my friends.

Now, I feel it is important to support the artists and I like to have the very best audio fidelity. But if it were not for Gnutella I would have never known that I enjoyed the music of Ladysmith Black Mambazo - particularly not her rendition of the Lion Sleeps Tonight, one of my favorites from my childhood.

Does anyone know of an MP3 to WAV or AIFF decoder for Linux? I don't mean a player, rather one that saves to files. I'd like to make an all-Lion and all-Louie-Louie CD for the amazement and torment of my friends.

Some come with source. My favorite so far is gtk_gnutella that I run on Linux.

The one problem I notice with Gnutella is that if I leave it running for a while - even idle - I will eventually need to reboot my cable modem.

You will need an initial host to begin connecting to GnutellaNet. One is always show on the Gnutella home page.

And by the way it's a damn easy protocol. Seems like being designed for hobby programmers, and I don't think that's bad.
The easier it is, the more likely it will get widely accepted.

Check the GNUtella protocol out for yourself

And I quote, from the Gnutella home page:

"Some reports have been circulating in some of the online press about a 'Gnutella Worm'. This 'worm' does not exploit any weaknesses in gnutella itself, but rather weaknesses in the Windows operating system and more importantly, the user. This 'worm' will not affect anyone who doesn't manually download it, and subsequently manually run it. Gnutella does not execute any files it downloads. Be smart, don't run anything from an untrusted source without checking it first. This is an exploit of human gullibility and a weak operating system, nothing more."

Gnutella powerful, humans weak. Grunt, grunt.

John S. Rhodes
WebWord.com (Usability Vortal)

M. R.

Question:
Can we realistically say that the internet is making a difference in the political process? Can a basically unknown candidate like Ralph Nader get a resonable number of votes thanks to just his web site? Or are people really just going to the web sites of the candidates they hear about on television? In the closed capitalist mind space we inhabit, big monetary interests determine the range of possibilities people think are viable.

According to a recent IBM/Altavista study, even on the net the big money sites like Yahoo "basically control the flow of information". So can we really think that the net is going to suddenly bring us democracy despite the nondemocratic nature of our entire economy/political system?

Vote for Ralph Nader. Period. thanks! his web site kicks ass too.

michael

___________________________
Michael Cardenas
http://www.fiu.edu/~mcarde02
http://www.deneba.com/linux

Disclaimer: there are well over 1000 comments in this thread. This one will necessarily be to some degree redundant. I apologize in advance, and will do my best to say things that are worth repeating anyway.

. . . I would say that I'm quite, I'd say, more than surprised, I'm quite stunned at the lack of communication and input from the record company. Obviously, you know, with record companies we never really usually depend much on what they have to offer in terms of creative things, but I am stunned at the low volume of support from the record company, both publically and privately.

I am too. One would think that the record company would jump to protect their investment. Unless, of course, they understand better than Lars that MP3/Napster is something they can't fight.

I mean, obviously, Peter and Cliff, our two managers -- they're our closest advisors -- we have been, they've been advising us for 18 years now. Our managers are basically the fifth and the sixth members of the band. They're a total partnership. We view both of them as equal. And they're equally involved in this.

. . . we don't take anything from anybody. We take advice from our two managers, but ultimately we override them a lot.

These two comments paint their managers in very different lights, I think. In the first, they're friends; in the second, merely advisors. After reading the first quote, I was surprised to hear the phrase "We take advice from our two managers," because I would have thought that those managers would be part of "we".

. . . when it comes to my relationship with the Internet and with my comptuer, the fact is that we don't spend a lot of time together.

I would never fault Lars for not using the web, or for not being a geek. These things aren't everyone's cup of tea. But I think it's important to note that Lars admits here to not being well-versed in computers or the internet. He is attacking something about which he is not adequately educated, and I think it shows. He and the band, and their lawyer too, would do well to familiarize themselves with the structure of Napster, the nature of the internet, and the concept of filesharing before they make themselves look foolish in court.

. . . when somebody fucks with what we do, we go after them.

What are they, a street gang? Never mind, that's not important. What's important is that it is Metallica themselves who are setting up the Us vs. Them dichotomy of this debate. People don't trade Metallica MP3s because they hate Metallica, they do it because they like Metallica. These people consider themselves fans, and if the band has not already alienated these fans by getting them banned from Napster, they will surely do so by insisting that they [the fans] are trying to "fuck with" them [the band].

You don't sit down and sort of try and sort of justify yourself, well, 'Maybe our time and energy would be better spent thinking about something a year or two from now.'

Why not? Everyone else in the music industry seems to be doing precisely that. (Or hiding their heads in the sand, I guess.) It is astounding to me that a band with as long a history as Metallica might not have extensive experience with either planning for the future, or adapting to the present. MP3 will force the industry to develop a radically new way of doing business, but there's no reason Metallica shouldn't be blazing that trail.

We really felt that it was time for somebody, an artist, with a potential of a public platform, to get involved with this.

I do applaud Metallica for using their fame to draw attention to an issue they believe in. At least they were at the head of some parade, even if it had to be a misguided one.

Now, are we aware of the Gnutellas and all these other things? Of course we are, but you can only take it one step at a time. And I believe, and the people that we talk to about this, we believe, that the minute some of these companies become active, when they basically come to a point that they become fully funcitonal, we believe that there will be technology and a way to go after them in the way they can invent this technology and make it untraceable. We believe that as quickly as they can make it untraceable we believe that you can find a way to fuck with it . . .

I believe it will be very difficult for Metallica to "fuck with" Gnutella. First of all, the last I heard -- and someone please correct me about this if I'm wrong -- Gnutella wasn't even supposed to be released. Its own developer doesn't support it (and barely acknowledges it). Who is Metallica going to sue to stop Gnutella? It's pirated music being transferred via pirated software. And even if I'm wrong about this, or if it changes, it's the concept that's important, not the implementation. Like CmdrTaco said, "Yeah, we should definitely ban peer-to-peer file sharing over the Internet, and NFS pisses me off, too." If we can't use Napster or Gnutella, we'll use DCC. Or FTP. Or HTTP. Or we'll invent a new protocol.

It's true, what Lars says, that as quick as hackers can find some way to facilitate the flow of MP3s, "The Man" can find some way to block it. But the cycle doesn't end there -- the hackers circumvent the block, the Man blocks the circumvention, etc. Where does it end? With the simple fact that, because of the way computers have been built from the early days, it is effectively impossible to prevent a string of bits from being copied.

So it's sort of like -- the thing about this sort of mob mentality, what we call the 'Internet Extremists,' it's all kind of cute -- 'Yeah, we want to fuck with the system,' 'Yeah, we have a right to get everything for free.' But I believe that if you have the energy and the resources to chase 'em -- and that's one thing we have is a lot of energy and a lot of resources . . .

Why doesn't he just walk around wearing a t-shirt that says "I Am The Man"? He dismisses the notion of rebellion as "cute" and brags about his vast supply of resources (read: money). I think this is a very damaging thing for Lars to have said, though I must admit I'm glad he's said it. It certainly does suggest that Metallica is firmly entrenched in the corporate world.

So of course there will be at some point -- we are not stupid, of course we realize the future of getting music from Metlalica to the people who are interested in Metallica's music is through the Internet.

This, on the other hand, is encouraging. It suggests that Metallica haven't doomed themselves to being legacy artists.

That ultimately is what the biggest beef about this whole thing [is], is that Napster could have so easily avoided this whole thing. It's like, OK, 'It's January, my name is Napster, or I'm Sean, or whoever the CEO was at the time, we have this service, we would like to know if you are interested in being part of it.' If we'd said Yes, then there's no issue, if we'd said No, then this whole thing would have never -- it's really what this is about, it's what this whole thing ultimately comes down to, you know.

This is plainly ridiculous. Either Lars simply does not understand how Napster works, or he is being deliberately silly in the middle of making what should be a critical argument to his side of the story. Napster never asked a single band if they wanted to be a part of their service. Likewise, Napster has never made available a single work belonging to a single band via their service. The service they are providing is not, as Lars seems to imply, to the bands. They are providing a service to their users, a service that allows them to transmit files of certain types across the internet. (Never mind Gnutella, which permits sharing of any file, period.) It is the users who share the files, and if anyone should have asked Metallica first, it's the users. I have said elsewhere that Metallica was right to finger individual users, if they feel they must persist in this attack, and I stand by that statement. (Actually, it was Dr. Dre to whom I was referring, but it's the same idea.)

Unfortunately, it seems that this comment is only a perpetuation of the consistent misunderstanding of the way Napster works that Metallica, Dr. Dre, and their attorney Howard King have shown since we first heard King say "Tha t [Napster's offer to ban usernames who were identified as sharing Metallica/Dre songs illegally] was not a satisfactory response. That was a comical response." Metallica, Dre, and King do not know how Napster works, and apparently, they do not care to find out. Worse, they do not seem to think they will need to.

It's sort of like, you know what, fair enough, I can certainly respect and I would certainly somewhat agree with the fact that paying 16 bucks for a CD is probably, you know, pushing too much. But, it's the marketplace that dictates that, not me.

Quite right. And this is what scares people who make money off of music. One of the rarer moments in the history of capitalism is upon us: for once, the consumers are going to tell the producers how the industry will be run. People are not willing to pay $16+ for a CD. In fact, people don't necessarily want the entire CD, and they may not be willing to pay a cent. The marketplace is speaking, and it's saying, music should be free. No one has told Metallica not to charge money for their music. But MP3 listeners worldwide are telling Metallica that they're not going to pay it. Is this frightening? Should this worry us? Only if we're the sort of people who think that music is created to earn the artist money. But if we believe that music is art created for art's sake . . . .

Understand one thing: this is not about a lot of money right now, because the money that's being lost right now is really pocket change, ok? It's about the priciple of the thing and it's about what could happen if this kind of thing is allowed to exist and run as rampant and out of control for the next 5 years as it has been for the last 6 months.

. . . look, our record sales have gone up in the last three weeks, OK?

You heard it directly from Lars, folks: the amount of money currently being lost due to MP3 trading "is really pocket change". And now he suddenly starts thinking about the future. Convenient.

Well, 1st of all, you have to remember that you're talking to somebody who advocates bootlegging, who has alwyas been pro-bootlegging. We have always let fans tape our shows, we've always had a thing for bootlegging live materials, for special appearances, for that type of stuff. Knock yourselves out, bootleg the fuck out of it, we don't give.

The bottom line is the size of it. The size of it and the quality of it. . . . So it's the quality, the quality and the scale.

So is it okay to make and trade MP3s of bootlegs?

I can't help feeling that this is a bit hypocritical. Metallica insists that their crusade is about principles, not money, but then say that it's okay if your illegal copying only costs them a little bit of money, but not if it costs them a lot.

So back to the question again, the 'commodity' really becomes about it being traded around illegally, and rather than the art that it is.

Is Lars trying to say that art isn't art if there's not a price tag attached? If someone doesn't receive compensation for it? Art is art because it has an effect on the audience. And I'm talking about an effect aside from the removal of $16 from the audience's wallets. Art's effect on the audience, 99% of the time, has little or nothing to do with how it got to the audience, or whether the audience had to pay for it.

Napster has the right to exist. I support Napster's right to exist, OK? But I want them to support my right to not be part of it.

This is a reasonable request, made to the wrong people. As Lars has already demonstrated he doesn't know, Napster is not responsible for the contents of their users' hard drives. This appeal ought to be made to the users.

. . . you have to remember that statistically, for every one band that you hear about, for every one band that a record company helps make successful, they lose their fucking shirt on the nine other ones you never hear about . . .

. . . which wouldn't happen if music were traded without restriction or cost. There would be no need for record labels, and thus the only money lost when a band failed to achieve its goals would be whatever money its members had contributed themselves.

But record companies will never be completely extinct, for one reason and one reason only, that there will always be a need to develop younger artists, and record companies will always be able to play a big part of that, because this whole thing about "I'm a young band, I'm an upstart band, I'm going to put my music on Napster, and then I'm going to become successful?" Fantasy. The only way you you will become successful is by having a publicity and promotion campaign behind you that elevates what you're doing above what your competition is doing.

This is not even true in the current music industry, where bands like Fugazi, a dedicated anti-commercial act, can do their own marketing and achieve a level of popularity that longevity that rivals many corporate-sponsored acts. But if the current music industry is rendered obsolete, and consumers go back to trusting their own personal tastes to decide what music they'll listen to, instead of advertisements, radio and TV, then not only will this scenrio Lars rejects be possible, it might be the only way to succeed as a musician.

It's very very simple. One of the -- when we monitored Napster for 48 hours three weekends ago, we came up with the 1.4 million downloads of Metallica music, there was one, one downloading -- one! of an unsigned artist the whole time.

Inconceivable. There is not a snowball's chance in hell that, in a 48-hour stretch, only a mere one out of the millions of songs transferred via Napster was written by an unsigned artist. I don't know what caused Lars (or NetPD) to make this massive error in calculation, but it is statistically as near to impossible as you could hope to get.

As for those 1.4 million downloads, here is a short list of things Metallica does not know about them:

• Metallica does not know whether or not the files were actually transferred, unless they downloaded them themselves, or shared them and watched them being uploaded. All they could know is how many were publicly available for downloading. To know how many actual downloads there were, they would have to monitor a host-to-host transmission as a third party, which is eavesdropping, and is illegal.
• Metallica does not know whether or not the files that purported to be MP3s of their music were actually MP3 files. They could just as easily have been empty files carrying the name of a Metallica song and a .mp3 extension.
• Even if they were MP3 files, Metallica does not know whether they were their MP3 files. Renaming another band's song would be child's play. The disk space required even to download and listen to a sufficiently large sample of 1.4 million MP3s is a lot more than Lars has on that computer he never uses. The task itself would be mind-numbing and eventually downright infuriating; I can't imagine anyone having the patience to do it.
• Metallica also does not know how many of those transfers were between two users who already owned the albums, and thus had legitimate rights to own copies of the songs. Doubtless these users account for a significant percentage of the 30,000 who challenged the ban Napster placed on them at Metallica's request.

You can sit there and talk about how this is great for up and coming artists or for unsigned bands, but a big counterargument that nobody gets is, me and you could form a band together, and we could like, make a demo and then we could put it up on Napster. Who is going to give a fuck? Nobody's going to care, because they don't know anything about what sets my and your band out from the gardener and the guy who cleans my pool's band. The record companies will never be extinct, because there will always be a need down at that level.

More bragging about how rich he is. In regards to this assertion, read The Brunching Shuttlecocks' An Open Letter From Metallica, which dispatches the notion better than I could, and more humorously too.

I believe ultimately -- and this is sort of what I was talking about before -- that the hardest thing about this is to try and come up with a system where it becomes an individual's right to choose how he will want to partake in this sort of stuff through the Internet. That's the hardest thing because it becomes very difficult, it's very difficult to generalize, like I said before. It's not fair to sit there and say, 'Napster can't exist,' because there are people who would like to use it. And it's not fair to sit there and say 'It has to exist and you have to be part of it,' for the people who don't want to use it.

This is a very good point, and an insightful one as well. Lars is right, this will be a very difficult problem, and in fact, I'm not sure I want to see how it gets solved. It also addresses a more important issue: the question of how to ensure that authors retain copyrights to their work, and how to ensure they're properly credited for it.

We believe based on the people we hired that we're probably not more than a year away from where you can basically download Mission Impossible 2 the same day that it opens in the theatre . . .

Another example of how much Lars hasn't bothered to find out. This is, of course, more or less possible today, though with the problem that a two-hour movie will generally be a much larger file than a five-minute song.

I guess that's all I have. I'm sure it's plenty. There was other stuff I wanted to respond to, but I can't remember what it was, and damned if I didn't waste enough time writing this already. I guess it's obvious where my sympathies lie.

Because Gnutella and Freenet have no profit potential and no incentive to create user-friendly software, this new technology will probably be limited to a relatively small community of highly-skilled computer operators. If these decentralized software protocols do ever gain widespread popularity, Congress will have to revisit this issue.

If Napster dies cos of harassment by RIAA etc, Gnutella and Freenet will definitely take up the slack. Its ridiculous to say that Gnutella is hard to use - its no harder than any mainstream commercial app like MS Word. And there are even web interfaces for it, like Daily Phat and Surfy, that make using Gnutella as easy as using a web site.

Frankly, I can't understand the fuss over Napster, which is simply the messenger, delivering the message that peer-to-peer file sharing will totally transform the music industry and the movie industry, as well as parts of the software industry, and probably a bunch of other industries as well.

Check out how often people are searching for things like Win2000 or Win98 on Gnutella! I can't see Microsoft making too many sales to non-businesses in the very near future.

In its time, Netscape Navigator too, being the successor of Mosaic, was a commercial application...

But since the HTTP protocol is an open standard, free browsers came, and after a while Navigotr itself became free (as in beer).

Now for Napster : the problem with it, as well as its inherent weakness, is the use of a centralized server.

Gnutella doesn't make use of a central server. It's only a protocol, an open protocol. So methinks the next step will be (is becoming) the shift towards GNutella.

No one can be banned for Gnutella. No lawyer can sue Gnutella, because Gnutella is nobody.

I heard it. I coulnd't believe the guy. He's obviously a complete moron and a sarcastic one at that. His parting shot killed me. Something like "and we realise that even if napster goes out of business, in six months time there will be other technologies that can do the same thing, but there will always be a way to track down the pirates and nail them". DUDE! I hope the gnutellaNG group has taken note. ( http://gnutellang.wego.com/ ). How about total anonymity for client and server and 1024 bit encrypted socket connections between servents tough guy!

Rather than a single application, gnutella is a public protocol with numerous independent implementations, and it is architected to survived both nuclear blasts and lawyers - there is no centralized server.

There is some anonymonity, although it is far from perfect (I'd like to see both the downloads and searched done through encrypted channels) but because there is no central server, search engine or user registry there is no central point of control (or chokehold).

There probably aren't as many titles available as through Napster, but that's mainly because it's not as well known. But if I run Gnutella now, let's see how many files there are available this afternoon... well I'm tired of waiting, it's over 3700 hosts, 413,000 files, and 7,700,000 MB. So even though there may be fewer files available than Napster, there's a lot out there.

Mike

Rather than a single application, gnutella is a public protocol with numerous independent implementations, and it is architected to survived both nuclear blasts and lawyers - there is no centralized server.

There is some anonymonity, although it is far from perfect (I'd like to see both the downloads and searched done through encrypted channels) but because there is no central server, search engine or user registry there is no central point of control (or chokehold).

There probably aren't as many titles available as through Napster, but that's mainly because it's not as well known. But if I run Gnutella now, let's see how many files there are available this afternoon... well I'm tired of waiting, it's over 3700 hosts, 413,000 files, and 7,700,000 MB. So even though there may be fewer files available than Napster, there's a lot out there.

Mike

This makes perfect sense to me. %95 of Napsters files are illegal and all of the searches go through their servers and are run by their servers. Their business is supported by illegal MP3 trading. What can they expect? Unlike you average ISP their business is supported by illegal MP3 trading, not as they may claim supporting artists who want to bypass the record companies. (Something the RIAA wants to stop too, both sides are not blameless.)

In short I really don't see what all the fuss is about. Napster's getting what it deserved. And as expected velnerable technology, Napster's centralized servers, is in big trouble. Just like security through obscurity...

You shouldn't worry about this sort of action. You can get by it with Gnutella and FreeNet

Hence, I would strongly suggest pointing them to the Gnutella home page and the Freenet home page. The what is Gnutella? stuff is a little hard to find on their page, and should perhaps be pointed out directly.

It might be well to provide short synopses as well... just in case they, like so many /.ers, aren't inclined to read before posting. ;-)

Hence, I would strongly suggest pointing them to the Gnutella home page and the Freenet home page. The what is Gnutella? stuff is a little hard to find on their page, and should perhaps be pointed out directly.

It might be well to provide short synopses as well... just in case they, like so many /.ers, aren't inclined to read before posting. ;-)

Gnutella and Hotline are almost guaranteed to crumble if a lawsuit is ever brought against them...

How exactly is Gnutella going to crumble? Source is already widely available, there's no centralized server and the system itself makes it next to impossible to determine who's looking for what.

Gnutella and Hotline are almost guaranteed to crumble if a lawsuit is ever brought against them...

How exactly is Gnutella going to crumble? Source is already widely available, there's no centralized server and the system itself makes it next to impossible to determine who's looking for what.

Which leads me to a second opinion: what is RMS's opinion on the current lawsuit by Mettalica against Napster?

Thank you!!

Check out gnutella.wego.com for details.

(I've haven't tried the old version yet, so I don't know if it will help or not.)

Mike

And if you want a Unix-clone and can't find it on gnutella.wego.com, then you download gnotella as a tar.gz from here, or search on this php-form.

http://gnutella.wego.com/
- Warning NOT to use v0.56 (due to "major problem which is causing the network to slow down massively"
- Promises to new Win32 and Unix versions soon.
- Source-Code is coming up RSN!
It's all there!

Just wanted to point out that Gnotella 0.1 ( Gnutella Unix clone) is out. (I mirrored the tar.gz, since I couldn't find it on the webpage anymore)
Or you can, of course, use web-based gnutella-searches like this to search for your strawberry-rhubarb pie recipes.