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Universities Begin to Ban Napster
Anonymous Coward writes "CNET's News.Com has a story about universities beginning to ban access for Napster users. The schools cited excessive use of bandwidth (with 5% of total bandwidth going to Napster) and the RIAA's lawsuit as reason for it. Take a look at the story here."
But modern recordings of classical music are copyrighted by the orchestra playing the music. You should support the director and orchestra and not justify it by saying that Mozart is dead.
I don't understand this whole mp3 thing.. Making a mp3 from a wav file is NOT copying the digital music.. mp3 is a lossy compression. Yeah it may sound "good" but its not a COPY of the original.. Now if/when people start to seriously trade\pirate ACTUAL wav files i.e. by using shorten.. then maybe people have a right to start suing for copyright infingment... If you listen to a mp3 on a good stereo equipment you WILL hear the difference between the original and the COPY.. Whats all the fuss about??
True, it seems that most MP3s on Napster are illegal. The problem comes in when someone actually tries to *prove* it. I mean, Napster has a little disclaimer that says that users are only supposed to trade *legal* mp3s on it. So, if your enitire mp3 collection came off of Napster, you can legally claim that you were mislead as to its legality. This would be total bullshit. But legally plausable. That is why universities and such have to turn to the tired argument that it "hogs bandwidth." In addition, 5% does not seem like much to anything with serious high bandwidth connections. Besides, if it is a lot higher than that, then its probably a major group of the student body who wants to use Napster. This should be an indication that the system is becomeing outdated and is in need of an update. I mean, what happens when VRML or whatever the next BIG thing will be comes into its own? Ban it too? Well, I've got religion class. I'm done ranting.
I'll do what's necessary to keep them from suing the college's pants off, because it's damn cold in Massachusetts right now and we can use all the pants we can get.
Might I recommend pouring some hot grits down your pants then? Can we donate some grits to this guy?
AN0nYM00s3 CHiKin
"Y'know. I used to feel the same way. But because of napster our College is most likely going to have to raise tuition to pay for more bandwith (currently Napster is using a large portion of it.) Try explaining to the majority of students who don't use [it]".....hey, blow me. i pay a fee for all kinds of crap that i don't use...shut up until you can think.
that's a good idea if 5% of the bandwith is used by napster for mostly illegal purpose (mp3 pirating, i've never seen legal mp3 there)
obscure CDs cost much more than mainstream :)
ones. I guess that means all you listen to
is mainstream music by big name bands &
labels who can afford such low prices?
Online commic strips and other art forms are doing fine and some techno bands have massivly boosted their lissenership via the internet, so I don't see that these are 'theoretical' ideas about going directly to the consumer. The music industry is the whole problem.. if we screw the industry the artists will just jump ship and go make more money doing it themselves. The problem is that the music industry has beaten the idea of "getting signed" into the artists.. as this changes life will get better. The only real problem with mp3 piracy is that it gives the good internet musicians lots of competition. You could only lissen to mp3 musicians, but I feal pirating music is the moral thing to do in this situation because your piracy helps other people who are not big time pirates not buy as many CDs. There is one other thing would could help the artists a lot: change the mp3 players to play an mp3 contined in a tar.gz file and view web content in the file. This would allow them to include visual art, lyrics, links to buy stuff, and advertising in the song. People would not strip this stuff (shirts, stickers, other music, etc.) if it was more then just advertising (like visual art), so it would stay with the song and give people an easy way to connect to the artist. Once this happens the artists will truly be free of the industry.
Nominal fee? I wish! At my school getting a (10 Mbit) Ethernet account costs $160/year. Compared to a normal ISP, that's not too bad. But it's sure a lot more than nominal.
(of course, one can get around it by using IP masquerading to get more than one computer on one account)
What???
You're kidding, right???
I have(luckily) had very few problems with bandwidth at my college, but the one or two times I have, it has made me pull my hair out.
For instance, I had to submit my c++ project over the internet to my teacher. I started the transfer at around 8:00 and the project was due at 12:00. I barely made the deadline because the main oc3 had gone down.
Now, I know that wasn't mp3's, but what if it was??? There damned bandwidth usage for illegal purposes may have cost me my grade.
Also, there are several clauses in the network usage contract saying "you cannot use abnormal amounts of bandwidth".
http://enmasse.penguinpowered.com/
Look man, the people that are doing this activity are a bunch of cheap skates anyway. They probably wouldn't get the music legaly anyway, they are broke or just don't give a sh*t about paying artists for their product. Regardless you can't shut off the flow of technology because some people abuse it. Next why don't we get rid of scanners or maybe cd burners. Jesus this world is so filled with people making sure that they get their take. *Many* people use this technology *legally*!!! Just relax and smoke a bong hit, but make sure nobody is stealin your stash man!!
I have d/led MP3s off of the net and if I like what I hear I'll buy the CD. If not, It's deleted. I don't have an ethical problem with that.
I've no doubt that you're an extremely ethical person. But how many people, after getting the songs they want on mp3, then go out and buy the CDs just to be ethical? I know I don't, and I think you're deceiving yourself if you think that most people do.
There's no question that mp3 has legitimate uses, but there's no question either that mp3s allow music piracy at a much larger scale than ever before.
Each year my school fees like go up exponentially! Over my 5 years here the tuition curve looks like some experts only ski slope. I better get some bandwidth for that! We all know that there are plenty of valid academic uses for high band width access. Ahem.. Now whether we use the internet for those purposes is another issue. ;) Anyway, as far as I am concerned your university is an ISP that you pay for they should get more friggin bandwidth. And to all those furious artists out there. MP3s do give bands good exposure. *When* I have money I goto shows and buy cds from mp3s that I have heard. Don't punish everybody because some people abuse the system. The RIAA is full of sh#t they are just afraid that they won't get there take in ripping everybody off... boo hoo Toast
>that people would just find a way around it in time
:-)
In time? It's already been here for a LONG time - check out the firewall piercing howto. Using his techniques, there is NO WAY AT ALL to stop napster packets, save making the client machine totally non-configurable, or denying all internet access (or hand viewing EVERY network packet).
Denying things like this is not only a waste of time, but makes napster "e1ee7 w4r3z". And all the "c00l" people at your university will force pierce your firewall. This leaves you with less security in the end!
Of course, this depends on you finding someone nice enough to let you "borrow" their cable/DSL/ISDN/etc... bandwidth, and and a IP address (masqed or not).
Why don't you quit forcing your OPINIONS on others. Asshole.
I could get around that kind of "security" in 10 minutes using the firewall piercing howto.
The ONLY way to block the traffic is to HAND CHECK every packet. Yeah, right...
Of course, the outgoing traffic will stop (no point there). I bet the downloads are the biggest problem, though. And it is still convenient to download stuff this way...
Might as well live with it (or better yet, DISCUSS it with the others that are causing the problems - tell them if they don't quit, they won't get access to the network. And if they don't, fire them or expell them).
You closed your eyes while typing the word 'near' there, didn't you?
When you trade mp3's, you make them illegal. Because the trading activity is illegal.
Case closed.
when did you last pay money to buy a CD from an artist on mp3.com that you'd never heard of?
people only pay for money for music if they've heard of it, which means AIRPLAY, which means ADVERTS, which means all that shit you dont get when you go it alone, bypass the record companies and most MP3s.
Sure, you can get people to download your free mp3s, I download heaps of music from artists who put their mp3s up for free. But you cant really get bucks from it. All those artists on mp3.com might have avoided the evil record companies, but they're sure as hell not making much money.
The only major success stories relating to mp3 are the ones always hyped like how Public Enemy and Prince are taking their music straight to the fans via the net, cutting out the record cos. Trouble is, I think you'll find these people were very, very famous already. And they got famous by the traditional route.
And conversely to what the tone of this post might suggest, I myself am an amateur musician who distributes tunes in mp3. So I want to believe what you posted... but for the moment its mostly fantasy.
If you don't, the next thing that happens is that you have RIAA or whatever they call themselves on your back.
It's just as simple as that, in my opinion. I do wish that record companies would start to see MP3, or even just digital distribution in general as an opportunity rather than a threat - as so many people on /. have said, why download an album if you only like 1 or 2 tracks?
If record companies allowed people to buy a just one track and download it, and charged reasonable prices, there wouldn't be problem.
Comes with all (new) standard linux kernels. Lets you limit bandwith to what you want.
Check under the network section when you compile.
:-)
Enjoy the Openess, have a GPL on me...
How about this: allow unlimited (or very high) bandwidth for a certain amount of traffic (100 MB ?) every day. Once a user reaches their limit, their bandwidth will be capped (256K down/64K up ?) for the rest of the day.
Pretty soon Andover will realize what a swamp their policies are turning this site into. When the banner advertising is all for teen wear and flavors of bubblegum we'll know what hit it.
What are some ways to TRY to get around the bans?
Any links, or reading, or tutorials.. on tunneling, rerouting, or whatever else...
Give me my napster... have my university pay the lawsuits. Better than having all of the foreign students sucking up my tax money.
1.) There is no need to bring down the entire network in order to test one project. Most testing is done on local networks and (in some cases) isolated networks, depending on the nature of the networking project. 2.) There is no liability in this case because the University is not banning content. The University is not banning the exchange of legitimate MP-3's, rather, it is metering a limited resource by blocking a site that is essentially having the same effect as a Denial of Service attack.
I think the point is the university took out the "big guns" (total enforced bans) before they attempted to stop crap usenet feeds.
:-)
If you are running out of bandwidth, and are downloading ANY newsgroup in the alt series, you are an IDIOT.
Yeah... Setup up an anonymous Napster server run by students. A couple of Snap servers could do it. Download everybody's requests and warehouse those MP3s in off hours. For 14 hours of the day our universities have very little network traffic. Stop napster during the hours classes are in session then let it fly...
Most of the stuff I like is on vinyl anyway. Used Napster to listen to an Iggy Pop song that was ripped like crap. BWOT Big waste of time.
Don't be silly; you can't buy real grits north of the Mason Dixon line. Also, when the wind chill is 20 below, even the hottest grits quickly become uncomfortable, solid blocks of ice.
Simply block access to the *.napster.com domain. The dataport within the napster program, is for the file sharing, not the client-server connection. If the router to the napster servers are blocked by ip, you're going nowhere.
You sir, are truly a fucking moron. Who the fuck uses http for legal software? YEA REALLY THAT HAPPENS. God damn fucking moron.
You sir, are truly a fucking moron. Who the fuck uses ftp for legal software? YEA REALLY THAT HAPPENS. God damn fucking moron.
You sir, are truly a fucking moron. Who the fuck uses nntp for legal software? YEA REALLY THAT HAPPENS. God damn fucking moron.
You sir, are truly a fucking moron. Who the fuck uses sz for legal software? YEA REALLY THAT HAPPENS. God damn fucking moron.
You sir, are truly a fucking moron. Who the fuck uses rz for legal software? YEA REALLY THAT HAPPENS. God damn fucking moron.
You sir, are truly a fucking moron. Who the fuck uses telnet for legal software? YEA REALLY THAT HAPPENS. God damn fucking moron.
You sir, are truly a fucking moron. Who the fuck uses pop3 for legal software? YEA REALLY THAT HAPPENS. God damn fucking moron.
Getting the picture, MORON? I'll sell you a clue if you need one. I obviously have too many.
So does that mean colleges should spend more money on sports too and raise tuition for that since the fat or weak computer geeks are slowing down evolution too?
I think that if one has oc-3's and t-1's running around they shouldnt be bitching in the first place because I was still running off of my 56k before i got to college. If even as much as "5%" of the bandwidth is being used up its still a damn faster connection than you can get through a dialup like some off-campus students have to do anyway. I am on 2 t3's for 25k students and if youre gonna bitch about how slow your connection is because ppl are using 5% then try living with a 56k for a week and then tell me how disappointed you are with the speeds.
Hate to burst yer bubble, there, Chuckles, but most entertainers (let's not be so ridiculous as to call them artists) don't make that much off of CD/tape/vinyl sales; the recording company does, not the musician. The musicians make their money off of touring, merchandising, and -- yes -- even endorsements. This is how bands like Tool and Metallica can go for 3+ years w/o putting out a new album.
I post anon now to preserve my Karma points!
Let them ban 1 thing, and it will be easier to
ban lots of other things.
You college types must fight this, I'm to lazy to help you.
You don't understand budgets, do you?
By the old Usenet rule of thumb, the thread is over and he lost (by being the first to mention Hitler). I do realize that he made intentional use of this rule in a sarcastic post, though, instead of just (a) conceding the point, or (b) giving a counter-argument.
surprisingly, you *can* buy real grits up north.
try:
http://www.boiledpeanuts.com/index2.html
i recommend calling since the e-commerce here ain't too sophisticated.
>How, exactly, can Napster be used legally?
>I tell you, 99% (if not more) of all files available on Napster are illegal copies.
Then the other 1% are legal. If you admit they exist, do you only want to know how as in how they are uploaded to others, or why?
Napster can be used legally simply by recording any MP3 you like that isn't copyrighted, say your own voice. Then place it in the "upload" directory, as defined in the napster software configuration. You are now serving up a legal MP3.
>but when you use a university's or a company's telecom infrastructure, you use it on their terms, not yours.
I don't know about you, but where I live (Canada) *MY* taxes and *MY* money pay for *MY* universities (and colleges). *I* should use *MY* resources EXACTLY as *I* please, considering *I* paid for them. I would *NEVER* buy a car on the stipulation I am only allowed to drive it as the dealership deems fit. Same as I would *NEVER* go to a College that decides how I should use *MY* paid for services.
>They paid for it. They probably paid a LOT for it.
Yes, a *LOT* of *MY* money (therefore *I* paid for it). They raised College tuition here (Ontario) by like 10% the other year. I *DESERVE* some compensation for that - I have already *OVERPAID* for that bandwidth, IMHO. If they have to raise tuition, *DO IT*. They have done so where I am, and the signup rates for the local college haven't changed.
>If they find that excessive use of a service for illegal file transfers is bogging down the network for everyone, the only good thing to do is ban the service.
No, the only good thing to do it FIX THE PROBLEM. The worst you can do is ignore it, and hope it will go away. What the Universities are doing here is right in the middle - a bandaid solution that doesn't fix the real problem.
The problem is that Universities don't give you the computer use license BEFORE you ante up your cash. I haven't even had to sign one to use my college's computers, and I WORK THERE! You cannot just change license terms in the middle of the school year unless you are willing to deal with refunds.
If you go to University, and your computer license stipulated "No illegal software trading. No more than 100 Mb transfer per day. The University may limit access to services that are abused.", and you received that license BEFORE you paid up any cash... Then the University can change *YOUR* network (you paid for it, you see) on you. You agreed to it, when you paid for it.
Changing license terms in the middle of the school year is like a car dealership saying "Well, you can't get out of your car lease, but we have decided you can only drive your car 5 miles a day. No refunds." in the middle of a lease. IT ISN'T EVEN LEGAL unless you were told BEFORE you paid.
And if I sound selfish, I am. I am tired of people trying to tell me what I should do. I do what I want, when I want, how I want, the way I want (as long as it is Legal...). That's why this country is like it is - because everyone is selfish. That is what freedom allows. If you want to be selfish and hoard a year's worth of food before the millenium, go ahead. Nothing illegal with it, and nothing even against most religions in it either.
>The whole point of any communications protocol is that the data can be copied, period. NOT that it can be copied for free. If that were the case we should be allowed to use our cell phones for free, right??
If you paid $2000 for your cell phone, and cellular access, and paid another $8000 towards cell net access, you DAMN WELL BETTER BE ABLE TO USE IT AS YOU PLEASE.
Maybe where you live universities are charities... not here. And NOT in the United States either.
And no, free doesn't cut it. Free usually implies the government is paying for it. So that means I am paying for it. So it isn't free at all. Only charities are free, since I can take what I want, and never give anything to them (that's not nice, but true). I'd LOVE to see a charity University.
Let me take this one step further - if people use King St. to get hookers at night, and the only reason (99% of the time, the rest is ambulance traffic) that street gets used at that time of night is to get the hookers, then should the government be allowed to stop citizens from using that street at night? NO! They PAID for that street. They can use it how they like. How _dare_ the government even consider such a _ludricrous_ act!
Well, that is what shutting down Napster access in universities is like. It is like closing a street because there are hookers and drug dealers on it. It isn't right. Especially since I paid for it.
Of course, the government/University has every right to POLICE the law. And if they want to have an officer (not a rent-a-cop!) going around rooms checking for illegal computer use, and the cops bust those that are using their computers illegaly, they can do so without any qualms from me. But banning napster outright is like banning access to a street.
I've never been under a 24/7 curfew before, and I think if I was, I'd get out of this police state.
Instead of swearing, take the free slashdot code ( a little old, but workable), and create some competition without warez intrerest.
Don't want to do it? It's minimal effort, and requires little to no programming skills. There isn't any excuse, save being a MORON (which would explain your post).
Perhaps they should try blocking Ads?
I know my firewall can block it and it would save alot of bandwidth!
You said:
>The RIAA is Nazi Germany and Eric Clapton is Hitler. Death. Mayhem. Destruction of Biblical Proportions.
Now you can prove it.
Thread isn't over by a mile.
That you feel compelled to justify it proves that deep down you know it's wrong to pirate music.
That was AWESOME! I must use that next time I talk to an IP loving nutcase/freak... :-)
I never even considered it that way before!
Then they can download them from mp3.com or from the band's web site. What's your next justification?
Who said he doesn't listen to Louis Armstrong? (For example).
I doubt if profanity-laced tirades on Slashdot are going to help much. Why don't you try asking the admins to fix it?
What the heck does your opinion on a single music band have to do with the discussion?
Answer: NOTHING.
I like The Crystal Method, but I don't care about your opinion - it DOESN'T MATTER!
But dont the students PAY the colleges? Or are they offering free rides now-a-days?
Your post and that site just popped into my bookmarks. Good points! Why aren't you at 5 moderator points yet?
:-)
Because you buck the system, that's why.
>>I'll unplug your data port from the hub.
Then I'd complain to your boss. If that did nothing, I'd complain to his/her boss. If that did nothing I'd put your office phone number in a personal ad in one of the Gay or TV newsgroups.
And who pays for NERO? The STUDENTS, in their TAXES.
Woah, a concept - the government doesn't print money to spend it, they actually have to collect it from their citizens first.
I'll give ya something to deal with...
Scum == Drug Dealer.
If you think you can make that kind of comparison to someone who tapes a show to watch later on TV (also a violation of copyright law), then you, sir, are an idiot.
Ok. So the musicians are already getting ripped off. We arn't hurting them at all. The music industry is hurting, and they've shown it with the vigor with which they fight the MP3 craze. There problem is, they are playing both sides of the coin. If the music industry were playing fair with us, I would feel bad about ripping them off. Fact is though, while i'm paying 15+ dollars for a CD "to get the copyright" when the media itself costs them only a few dollars to print and distribute.. fine. But Why then can't i turn it a scratched or destroid CD for a new copy (same copyright I already baught)for cheaper.. maybe only a dollor or two for distribution cost. And another rant: Since when is my downloading an MP3 ripping anyone off? Who'se to say i would have purchased the CD if mp3's wernt available? I buy LOTS of cd's.. but i've never said "Hmm cant find so and so on mp3, so i'll have to buy them". CD's and MP3's have different uses.
the internet routes around censorship as though it were damage to the physical connection of the network at least as long as the source and protocols are open and if they are closed the internet ceases to be the internet and will not be as successfull
Read it (avaliable at www.linuxdoc.com). Get cable/DSL at home. Create a linux router box, attach it to the cable/DSL. Create an IP Masq'ed "fake" network. Enjoy the benefits that getting around the rules (twice in this case) gets you.\
As long as they allow you to get mail or access the web, or use FTP, you'll be able to break the firewall.
So by that logic, I could take down the internet in 30 min (TM)(C)(R). And that would be ok becuse it wouldn't use alot of bandwith? So, in that case RST RST RST RST RST RST RST RST RST RST RST RST.
Unfortunately that's not entirely the case... in fact the student handbook does indeed say otherwise. Basically the excerpts here indicate that you may not warez, steal copyrighted works or create a tax on the network. While I have nothing against napster and may also feel that the recording industry is gouging us, the fact remains that there are rules and it looks like someone wasn't following them. Although I don't speak for the University here's what I was able to find that in this specific case, seem to indicate that they can NOT do as they see fit. Rule 6C7-4.037 Use of Information Technology and Resources (under section 2) 2.Use of Information Resources. a.Members of the university community shall use information resources responsibly in accordance with this rule. 2.The computing and telecommunication resources of the university shall not be used to make unauthorized or illegal use of the intellectual property of others. Users shall not transmit to others or display images, sounds, or messages that reasonably could be perceived as harassing, invasive, or otherwise unwanted. (under section 3...) 3.User Responsibility a.Computer users shall comply with all applicable laws and regulations governing the use of computer and telecommunication technology, specifically Chapter 815, Florida Statutes, Computer Crimes Act, and Title 18, United States Code, Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986. ... 2.The computing and telecommunication resources of the university shall be used only for purposes directly related to, or in support of, the academic, research or administrative activities of the university. These resources shall not be used for commercial or other for profit purposes without express written approval from the provost and vice president of Academic Affairs or his designee. ... 8.Users of university computing facilities and telecommunications networks shall use these resources prudently, and avoid making excessive demands on these facilities in a manner that would knowingly impair the use of these resources by others.
The next thing will be at work places!
This is overly reactionary...what you're talking about with regard to the act of pirating MP3s anyway, is mainly an issue of revenue preservation on the part of big record and production companies which make an absolute killing off the typical consumer, by selling you a CD costing less than a buck to make, charging sky high for it, and keeping anywhere between 80-95% of the profits from it. The artists themselves rarely get much of the real profits from music sales or royalties. I think people are just trying to equalize the distribution a bit, and that is not wrong, at least in regards to big name artists. I would certainly not approve of selling these copies to anyone, but I'm pretty tired of this 'we own this, you can't have it except through legal (overpriced) distribution channels' on the part of record companies in order to protect a profit margin that is absolutely ludicrously high already. Same goes for copying any other media as well. In regards to the private information angle, your private information is not copyrighted AFAIK, but it does fall under some Federal laws which protect its being distributed without permission. This is to protect you, a consumer, from other companies who would seek to use your information to, you guessed it, make more money off you. There is a big difference between personal private information being protected, and a corporation seeking to preserve its enormous profit margin. I would, however, support indy artists who get to keep more of the profits and respect their copyrights because I can see the money from my purchase supporting that artist more directly, not some behemoth record company.
Sure, you can do what you want with YOUR network.
If it is a college/university network, and your students pay to be there (and pay YOUR salary, I might add), then you do what they want. You have no right to say anything else in the matter, other than closing down the college/university or quitting (or hammering out an agreement).
Yes, I know I just said what you suggested I not say, but it is the truth. If I bought a car, and the guy doing the lease said I couldn't drive it more than 5 miles half way through the lease, I'd be telling him I paid for it and I'll do what the hell I please as well...
By your argument, I should say that the next person using the car would appreciate my using it less, so I will lessen the wear on the car by not using it. Hahahahaha!
>I look at it as I am on their network and I am blessed to have such a speedy connection.
I look at it as I am paying for that connection, so I will use it how I please. Are you paying for college/university? If so, you own a piece of the pie as well. Welcome to the world of total anarchy, college/university. Quit worrying about your freinds and get on with your own life. They aren't likely to give a crap about you 10 years from now anyways.
And yeah, when I don't get the service I pay for, I will ALWAYS get VERY ANGRY. In that case, *I* am being STOLEN from. And don't even think of comparing this to napster being used illegally, because I would only ever use it legally (try to prove me wrong).
>I have asked politely for them to open up Port 22 and such, and they were kind enough to write me a couple of paragraphs on why they have it blocked ("Might be able to compromise security on a machine outside the network, etc" *shrug*)
I've heard this before too (that opening up ports will cause security holes, etc...). The answer is to secure your server! I plan to use the firewall piercing software to bust all them pointless rules one day, and if I do, there is no stopping it. Unless you want to cut the internet cable.
I upset people all the time. I do it because I have a right to. I don't do it for kicks, I only do it when necessary. In today's PC world, though, it seems to be more and more often I have to upset people.
If I have to get the network admin REAL pissed off, I will, not gladly, but because I CAN and I NEED to. And if they try to delete my account without just cause, I will complain to the Dean. And if that doesn't fix the situation, I'll SUE. And win. Big.
The law supports me on ALL these points. And the law is all you should be concerned about here.
My school has implemented a firewall for as long as I can remember. That means that if I setup a linux server, no one can ftp in or telnet in more or less any incoming connections. Only authorized ips can login, lets say my school uses 123.255.*.*, everyone within that ip range can ftp/telnet in but if a 123.254*.* tries to ftp/telnet in, they are denied. Can I still use Napster to download music?
In the end, all this will acomplish is collage kids abusing open proxys even more.
>Absolutely correct, just because you goto school some where doesn't give you the right to use as much bandwidth as you want.
No, paying for it does. I pay for my schooling out of MY pocket. I will use the school as I please.
>You are privledged to be able to use as much as you do, and when something doesn't work, or when your admin shuts you down then what? You don't bitch to them and say "Damn you! Give it back!"
Yeah, I do. I have the right to, and if they STEAL the access from me (remember, I PAID for it), then I will do what is necessary (read on). I would bitch at a store that sells me a computer missing components that I paid for. I would bitch in a big way. Then I would do to them what I would do any college that decided to defy me (read on).
>You need to respect them and they will reward you be explaining why and what they are doing... yelling at the net gods will not result in your net access being returned. In fact it may just have the opposite effect, you may never get it back... and heaven help that your computer may break down and you need to call on the admins for help...
If the "net gods" want to feel the effect of the legal system on their puny ideals, they can. I'll sue. I'll win (I paid for my service in full). I'll win PUNITIVE damages too, if they try to punish me for complaining. That means $$$$ (like millions). I probably won't even have to give my lawyer a penny out of my own pocket - they'll take the case for 50% of the winnings - they know that I would have an airtight case that would pay them BIG!
That is why the legal system of America is great. You can sue the sh*t out of people whose egos are too big (net gods). And if they even try to get another job again, god help them.
The fact that many people considered the music that the Grateful Dead produced to be total crap does come into the issue, though. If we want all our music to degenerate into doped out crap, then your example of the Dead would make sense.
what a retarded way to share/move a file. this is what happens when the web tries to make everything idiot enabled. usenet binaries solved this years ago but even today some acumen is still required (of the user).
You're missing the entire point. The whole concept behind Napster is distributed storage. It's actually more efficient than Usenet, since a file shared with Napster doesn't have to be stored on thousands of servers, and the file is transferred immediately, not whenever it makes it's way from the other guy's news server to mine.
When I log in to Napster, it notes my IP address, what songs I have, and what port I'm using to make them available. That's it. The actual MP3s never touch Napster's servers. Not only does that save them money by easing their bandwidth and storage requirements, it also saves their ass. Napster doesn't provide illegal content, it provides a method to share files on two computers. Semantics? You bet. But that's the way things work.
Finally, a reasonable reason to limit access to napster. You see, as long as I know my access to the computer system will be limited before I pay to use them, then I have no excuse.
But a LOT of universities and colleges don't even bother with any form of Acceptable Use Policies. _They_ cannot have any argument that is reasonable to deny access to Napster.
If you pay for something that is without limitations, and someone limits it, well, they are breaking the contract. You deserve either a full refund, or legal compensation. Pretty simple, actually...
It isn't, and in case you didn't notice, slashdot is becoming news for juarez kiddies, pirating that matters. Oh boo hoo, the college is trying to stop me from illegal activities, BOO FUCKIN HOO. Honestly, slashdot is disgusting me more and more every day, I need to find another place to go...
hahahaha
i want to download the realaudio files of the supreme court arguments... however the admins have installed realplayer incorrectly and there is a security lockout on the lab machine so i cannot install a new copy that works correctly. im sure they have lots of reasons that is 'necessary' however they are a bunch of fucking idiots and cannot even install fucking realplayer correctly and they are a bunch of fucking asshole moron fuckwads
---snip---
Someone is paying for this bandwidth (the colleges) and I don't think they're paying all that money so that people can collect MP3s.
---snup---
I pay $85 per semester. I have the right. I have the power.
"In space everything is possible"
-friend
So? You pay for what you get. You pay for a shared resource, you get a shared resource. YOU take the RISK of having heavy users. Don't like this at your college/university? Change the fee structure.
I live in Canada, and go to college. I pay for 100% of my college. 30% DIRECTLY, the other 70% INDIRECTLY in my taxes.
:-) If there is surplus taxes against me, then that is banked against further services I might need. If there is a deficit of taxes against me, I consider that a loan which will be repaid eventually.
I consider that my taxes ONLY go to what I NEED. If I didn't I'd go insane like the Sun newspaper editor.
I would never consider paying for breast examination (I am a man) because it is a service I don't need. I beleive the women that use that service pay for it using their OWN tax money.
The University/College system in Canada is NOT a charity as you describe.
If the record company execs have any insight at all, in 20 years when they're all managing fast food franchises, they'll realize: "You know, if we hadn't fucked musicians so thoroughly, maybe they would have been more willing to back us up when we tried to kill online music, and we would have succeeded."
But that's probably hoping for a little too much.
It would only take a day or two of work for a few cs majors to put together a fast and reliable system that could have you search everyone's mp3 files and download the ones you are looking for.
I didn't elect my payroll department. Did you?
Mp3s should replace audio cds, and the record companies should start spamming ads
use your noggin.
It varies from college to college, but I know at most of the "good", more established schools, tuition pays for about half of the cost of a student's education.
I can verify that here at F.I.T. Napster has been shut down at the Firewall. Changing ports in the client does not allow you to connect to Napster.
Rumor has it that its not the Bandwodth usage but the Recording Industry that preashured FIT into shutting off the Napster service. This is pure speculation on my part however.
I am appaled that I paid for Net access in my dorm and I cant access which ever legal services I wish. Its as if FIT is playing Judge and Jury.
Easy... you cant copyright beats
You are one clueless arse :)
Downloading music does not entail in Educating students or conducting research ??
And i suppose the Music Major students are all pirates and should be shot dead on sight....
That is the most obsurd argument i have heard in a VERY long time my friend....
If i *OWN* the damn cd i won't give a rat's ass what RIAA wants you to THINK is right. I will give it to my friend to my grandma to my dad and anyone else who likes the damn album. If the RIAA has a problem with that then they should stop selling the shit. That's the ONLY way they will stop the so-called "piracy".
Everything is piracy these days... Jesus. Ya all need to get a grip. One 12 year old kiddie farts and all the big boys are up in arms screaming "PIRACY PIRACY"..... I am all for protecting the artists but this is getting rather silly lately.... It makes me wonder why on earth did i ever buy those cd's and DVD's i own....
I suppose if my gf likes an album i just bought i won't let her have it right?
"But honey RIAAA says is bad for me to give you the cd. You might copy it!"
Guns actually have a less percentage of illegal/legal use. There are quite a few people who own guns and use them legally. I would say its around 70 legal / 30 % illegal (if not more legal). As for cd burners, they weren't created with sole intent of illegal activity and again, I would say there legal/illegal ratio (user ratio) is 30/70. Napster on the other hand has an legal/illegal ratio of more like 99.99/0.01 and was clearly designed to facilitate illegal activity. Ignoring this fact isn't pragmatic. Anway, you really cant reason with juarez kiddies, so the point of this post is probably useless.
The problem isn't their bastion host, it's the circuit to their upstream provider. They just demonstrated they don't care to enable this use, so they're hardly going to lease a new absurdly expensive high-speed circuit and set it aside!
Not sure how well the quality of service stuff works out there on non-ATM links but I would think the routers could be made to throttle back the number of packets/sec that are allowed to be sent to certain IP's without "censoring" anyone.
---
I'm not a real anonymous coward, I just play one on TV.
Some people would probably even shun a university just because it didn't offer potential lovers or indoor plumbing, the wimps!
US gun use deters ten times as many crimes as it abets, unless you only count pulling the trigger as "use". Just showing an assailant you have one is generally enough to send them running, to look for someone more helpless.
Hey, I've got it! They could just do what my University (New Mexico State: There's got to be SOME reason the tuition is so low) does...only offer dialup access. Yes that's right folks, here we have super cool 14.4 dialup net access, totally free via the 1 single phone line per two man room. 56k is a "premium" service that has to be paid for here. While this is annoying to the students, it pretty much guarantees the University doesn't have to worry about MP3s or warez. Note that all the offices, computer labs, and classrooms here are wired up via ethernet, I'm not sure what kind of a pipe the University has though. What this does is offer fast ACADEMIC net access from a classroom or the library while making sure students don't siphon off bandwidth from their rooms. If you don't believe this is effective, try leeching MP3s with that old Pentium 100 in the math computer lab and watch what happens ;)
"That will be effective if the university blocks off *.napster.com."
This statement makes no sense. Did you mean: That will be effective until the university blocks off *.napster.com?
"You can just change the domain name to get around the firewall"
This statement also makes no sense. If the firewall filters are set up to block a particular destination, you can not change the fact that it is blocked by trying to access a particular virtual alias. You look up the IP from the DNS server before sending packets to the destination - so the argument is moot.
I wish I could pay $18 for CDs that I liked. Recently I've been paying $14 for a single (one song) and $35-$40 for a regular CD (and this is stuff I already have in MP3 format). You just can't find this stuff in Best Buy, and it's a pain to find it anywhere in the US.
WE ARE FUCKING CAPITALISTS YOU IDIOT. NOT COMMUNITSTS. CAPITALISTS. DO YOU KNOW WHAT THAT MEANS, BECAUSE IT DOESN'T SEEM YOU DO? In case you don't realize this, if the artist doesn't have financial support for his creations, s/he will not be able to create them. If they can't create compositions, you can't copy them. What part of that chain confuses you? Very few artists make millions, most don't. So don't even go to that line. God damn moron.
you are a dumb bastard. that's why i moderated you down, fuck face.
If you are paying more than $13 for a cd, you are getting hardcore ripped off. Also you can buy used cds. Just admit it, you just don't want to pay...
you are a dumb bitch, you know that, don't you?
Retard: no they don't. The article linked to mentions Oregon State University which is a part of NERO which is funded by State and Federal money ... the students don't pay dick. The students pay for access to the _campus_ network. Access to the internet is a bonus. Do the math.
What university was that?
Just because the students pay for it doesn't mean they can legally do whatever they want with it. I'm sure a quick check in the terms of service for use of your University's net connection covers their asses in a case like this, where they feel it is necessary to cut off a certain net service.
I see you've been practicing in private, and your ability to morph into a weasel is smooth and subtle. Very good!
Now come back to reality, please, if you don't mind.
Well, back in the olden days when I was abusing a college network, we had FSP. FSP servers could be installed on any port and were very-low bandwidth if need-be (I seem to recall a throttle option). Better yet, FSP clients could patiently wait to resume a connection if the network become congested --they wouldn't compete for bandwidth, so they were a bitch to detect-- and would resume broken downloads.
IIRC, the only big-time legitimate FSP server in those days (circa 93) was wuarchive.wustl.edu.
I dunno what the status of FSP is these days... I dropped outa that scene a long time ago...
Good idea. I will. http://www.mp3sharing.com/download.htm Almost done! :)
NATALIE PORTMAN DREW BARRYMORENATALIE PORTMAN DREW BARRYMORENATALIE PORTMAN DREW BARRYMORENATALIE PORTMAN DREW BARRYMORENATALIE PORTMAN DREW BARRYMORENATALIE PORTMAN DREW BARRYMORENATALIE PORTMAN DREW BARRYMORENATALIE PORTMAN DREW BARRYMORE
Doesnt anyone listen to the radio anymore? I always enjoy not picking what music to play. They play the songs iwth a little advertising.. Thats just a little easier than causing all of this fuss isnt it? *shrugs*
You think 5% of total bandwidth is bad? Try up around 40%! Northwestern University in Chicago banned access to Napster because it was sucking up nearly half of their bandwidth. My college, the Illinois Institute of Technology, never had a problem w/ the bandwidth usage, but the RIAA did come in and threaten to sue if the school didn't shut the student-run MP3 servers down. There's now a special rule that expels any student who runs an MP3 server on the campus network. Hmm, I wonder if the RIAA considers Napster an MP3 server.
"I threw up my hands in disgust and wondered if it had been such a good idea to have eaten my hands in the first place."
Damn sad, banning Napster.
Of course, I remember in 1992/3 when the University of Michigan tried to ban Bolo-playing on all the Macs in the fishbowl (the big-ass, glassed-in computer center).
What a drag.
"Try explaining to the majority of students who don't use napster or don't have a computer, why their tuition is going up because of the few who do" Umm... So we should dumb down evolution because of a few slow adapters (They give computers away these days.) ...Okay so certain students don't use their 'puters and access as often as others, should there not be an averaging out effect. This is about IT departments/providers choosing the easy way out and siding with 'The Man!'... Fight the power...
Firsties! Besides, I'm at a university and don't see how they can stop me using Napster, unless they kill my net connection.
I am at the University of Victoria and they have not banned it but they do try and catch people using it, they monitored the sever for 5 minutes and caught 17 unlucky kids who got a visit from Campus Security the next day. Kinda a pain in the ass, but it's also true that its use is rampant. Everyone in our building that had a computer used napster alot.
All the students in the schools that banned connections to the napster servers. All they have to do is goto zeroknowledge.com and download the program all of your communications are proxied through zeroknowledges servers. I know many people who do this and it works fine. So your school can't block it because even if they ban connections to napsters server, you are no longer trying to connect to napster you are connecting to zeroknowlege, and they connect for you. This way works great.
Hi folks,
;-)) just as napster is useful to grow musically. Can you forbid cars? Not really, a better solution would be to limit, equally sharing resources... As far as the music industry is concerned: I'm willing to pay the Ozric Tentacles for their CDs as long as my money goes to them and is not used to pay for the intolerable publicity campaigns that should convince me to buy some shitty (excuse me!) mainstream artist who pretends stellar cache's. BTW anybody ever heard of the Ozric Tentacles on MTV? Photek? What about FZ?
sorry for the anon coward but I just can't remember the userid I chose... (any way to get it together with my passwd on email?)
Well I have to confess that I seldom buy CDs. Here in Italy they cost a huge bunch of money and I usually can't afford it. When I do come across a good artist or band (and I mean really good) I quite happily fork out the cash, and sometimes I bought stuff blindfolded. This caused me a few bad surprises so I prefer listening to a CD from the first to the last song before making up my mind. I can't do this in a CD store (well as far as I know there's ONLY ONE in all of Rome that allows this but then it's just too unconfortable to stand in front of the cashier trying to look seriously concentrated on the stuff thats blasting thru the amp!)
So all I can do is to hope some friend has already bought one or else it's the internet!
Napster it's really cool as it allows me to get a look inside someone else's collection and say "hey, this I never heard of this side of the ocean... lemme give it a try..." This reasoning works well if you just can't get to terms with the stuff the industry wants to shove down your throat! In the old days there was the small indie music shop where the owner first of all had some taste (... the expert... "...un maestro..."), today it's just Megastores... they could be selling rivets as far as they are concerned. Collecting mp3s just for the sake of doing it is useless (I remember people having >700 floppies in the days the Amiga ruled the pond...) just as speeding down the road at 160 Km/h. A car is useful if you use it to go somwhere (or to do something in it
See what I mean...
Edo (would like to login al Awreetus)
It was funny to see this on /. this morning. I work here in the Cisco TAC and I've been fielding calls all day from universities asking me to block access to Napster on their routers. The calls just started today though. Did something radical change about Napster that suddenly set these people on fire? I have to admit I feel bad doing this because it would make me evil mad if I lost access at my school.
Forbidding stuff is an amazingly ineffective way of stopping students from doing it.
Of course, that would be totally ineffective against anyone with a little bit of time on their hands.
If you download something you are "copying" it under copyright law.
(That's not legal advice, I am not a lawyer).
Thank you.
allow me to repeat that for emphasis.
Thank you.
That is all
Alex Bischoff
---
Alex Bischoff
HTML/CSS coder for hire
The config file has an option called "port"...
Well, the linux version (console client) has it anyways
Check freshmeat, look for napster, and take the console client :)
--
People using html in email should be shot.
Are you insane? $6000 on cd's? You probably are that weird data point floating above all the normal people who just do it to pirate.
Exactly.
In theory, this kinda makes sense -- the academic version costs less than half of what the standard version does (like $200 instead of $500 or thereabouts). But it's still kinda silly, since the workaround is so obvious...
Adam
I am Jack's complete lack of surprise.
Why not just block the server port for the napster server?
-- I'm the root of all that's evil, but you can call me cookie..
No one ever noticed that the execute bit was set on a couple of core files. :)
Okay colour me stupid, but that is one of the neatest ideas I'd heard of. Mind you, talk would have to be running at the time of the dump, no?
(/me knows his network security quite well, but not his system security)
I ripped all my CDs into mp3 format, and those are the only mp3s I have. In addition, I make a point of not distributing my mp3s for precisely this reason. I burn CD-R's with about 13 albums a piece, which means that I have a way to listen to many albums at work without having to lug upwards of 50 CDs around and switch CDs every hour.
That said, I still think napster is pretty vile.
--
Kevin Doherty
kdoherty+slashdot@jurai.net
Kevin Doherty
kdoherty+slashdot@jurai.net
Sure... I downloaded several MP3's from MP3.com of a celtic band. I loved em. I memorized em. I sang em. Then, I caught up with someone who actually knows the band and can get their CD'S (They're not available in stores). I had this person get the CD's and from all the people who downloaded these MP3s from MP3.com, they probably sold an extra 12 albums. Sure, not many overall, but we now know about them and want to bring them East for some show dates... now that will be worthwhile for them... and if they get picked up by some major label due to this, then they're doing even better. That's how it helps.
-- There is no sig line, only Zuul.
Please enlighten me...just HOW is this MP3 craze really helping artists? Musicians are already getting screwed by the industry at large, they DON'T need to be doubly screwed by people pirating their music this way.
MP3s actually empower the artists, allowing the musicians to circumvent the record labels and go straight to the consumer. The corporations who sell CDs are only interested in artist that are going to sell *MILLIONS* of copies. They are interested in $dollars$ and thus have to mass-market. It's the lowest common denominator rule. Some of the more creative or original artists are never going to get in the front door at most record companies. MP3s and the Internet give these artists a chance. Once they have a following, they can sell CDs on their own or have a demand for being in concert.
I'd like to see some REAL EXAMPLES of it and see if the artists are REALLY PROFITING from MP3's
For examples, just go to MP3.com and see how many small artists post their own music.
You don't have to be rude.
Maybe you should ask yourself why you're paying for things you don't use... I HAVE thought about this and I think it about it all the time. I discuss it with students who don't agree with me, and with other College IT people who do agree with me. This issue is shaping up to be a "students oppressed by 'The Man' type of conflict". I was a student as little as two 1/2 years ago, and no wI work for the college I graduated. Beleieve me you see College politics and decisions a LOT differently from the other side. I've seen both sides, so I think that gives me a little more perspective on this than a lot of people (especially those who ask me to "shut up until I can think" without explaining why they are so much smarter. Don't troll, it's dumb.
-jay
Here in Canada we have undergone an interesting transformation.
Last year the federal govt. passed the Home Recording Act.
It says ( in simplified words): Copy the CD or whatever as much as you like for personal, non-commercial use.
And to provide a return to the musicians they implemented a surcharge on blank media. So, a blank CDR now has a 5.2 cent (Canadian) tax on it. This money is then sent to the musicians organizations to be distributed to the artists.
I am told that the next step is to implement a CDDB that tracks the play usage by song.
Yes, it is NOT perfect. But I think it makes a lot more sense than the old method..
Maurice W. Hilarius Voice: (778) 347-9907
Just my $0.02.
Sanity.html - Error 404 not found
I'm all for napster, but this AC is right. That ain't flamebait, just truth.
Here's a great idea for you. Why don't you stop pirating music like some lameassed warez kiddie and get a life?
Only on slashdot can a posting be rated "Score -1, Insightful".
Well, I usually find mp3's of groups I might be interested in.. and in the end I almost always buy the cd. It helps me stay away from one-hit wonders.
You want a real example, here's a couple:
I found the Franklin-Neumann project on MP3.com and liked the music so much I bought the CDs.
I wasn't planning on buying Bob Kanefsky's new CD (Roundworm) until I heard four tracks on it that MP3.com is distributing for free.
So how is this new 'cassette' format helping artists? Anyone with a couple of home stereo components can copy any albumn they own from vinyl to tape, and then give the tape to a friend, or take it to a party, or even trade it for other music. This kind of outrage will ruin the music industry.
-- Spring: Forces, coiled again!
How is it hurting though?
All the music companies are still reporting very high profits and none are anywhere near going out of business.
Just a thought...
All editorial writers ever do is come down from the hill after the battle is over and shoot the wounded.
Bruce Hornsby (Influenced by the Greatful Dead, I'm sure) also allows free distribution of his concerts. (Not of his actual albums though)
Here's my take.
Pir8ed MP3s have little or no impact on musicians. Every musician that I listen to (and I know there are some out there who aren't) are artists. They produce the music as expressions of themselves, for the enjoyment of the people; for the betterment of society.
Musicians make very little money on music sales; their money comes from merchandizing, endorsements and concert appearances. They can continue to make money that way, uninterupted, even with MP3s of every song available freely everywhere.
The RIAA, on the other hand, is not nearly so altruistic on the whole as the artists are. They are big businesses with "reps" who are nearly as rich (or even more rich) than the musicians. They make $5-$7 off of each CD, and probably have the interests of retailers in their pocket, who also make $4-6$ per CD.
Think about this: what would happen if all that music in Best Buy were suddenly free on the Net? Granted, most people don't have portable/car/home MP3 players yet, but over time, the market would evolve, concentrating on sales of the players, not the media.
That's where I would like to see things o, but I'm a technocrat that way...
SlashSigTheorem: Humorous, Political, Critical, Constructive- If you have a
>>Your logic is terribly flawed. They paid for it, they can use it as the terms of service set forth by the University sees fit.
I'll say it again. Do you rent or own? If you rent, how would you feel about your landlord writing into the lease a prohibition against having sex in any manner of than the missionary position? In many states in the US sodomy is illegal, and according to the most strict interpretation anything other than heterosexual missionary sex is sodomy.
>>If you actually BELEIVE that that is the norm, you are stupid and/or haven't ever logged into napster.
Non issue, if they can prove that any specific individual pirated any specific file, then by all means they're correct to punish THAT INDIVIDUAL, not everyone else.
>>I'm sure any court would (IMO rightly) see that the University is well within its rights to curtail what it views as illegal use of its network, particularly an illegal use which is sapping away bandwidth from legitimate network uses.
See my sodomy example above.
>>Also, anyone upset about this should be aware that fighting this, or spearheading massive campaigns to try to "fuck the University" could backfire with Unis drafting REALLY STRICT terms of service that disallow game playing, casual web surfing, etc (anything that isn't specifically related to school/educational activities).
The university would lose out to the competing schools who are less draconian in their internet restrictions. It's a big game of chicken, the RIAA just beat the universities, so the universities want to take it out on the students.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
>>Napster eats bandwidth to the point that it does effect other users ability to use the system. That is legitamite reason to ban it, which of course leaves people still able to use ftp and http and get all sorts of MP3s.
Any type of download "eats" bandwidth away from other users. If 20% of the university is downloading *BSD or linux ISO images, that will prevent others from having full access to the total bandwidth.
The administrator angle is a red herring to cover up the fact that the universities are pussying out in the face of the RIAA.
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
>>I mind very much if those doing so clog the bandwidth so much that students trying to use the thing for real work, or others trying to use it for real research, can't get done what they need to get done.
What does it matter WHY the bog down takes place? If everyone is downloading *BSD, Linux, or whatever and they have a "legitimate" reason for doing it, and your connection suffers because of it are you going to bitch to the admins to ban *.*linux*.* and *.*bsd*.* connections from being made?
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
>>Great... you just flunked your homework because some kids are downloading MP3's all night.
.3K/Sec because every compsci class was d/ling the kernel and an ISO of FreeBSD.
Why does it matter WHY? What if you were d/ling at
Throttling connections would be just as effective in prohibiting excessive downloading. Right?
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
>>You may rent the facilities and network, but they still *own* it.
Do you rent an apartment or own a house? Can your landlord tell you that you may only make love in the missionary position?
Ownership is not an issue.
>>They are scared the RIAA would start suing, can you blame them?
Yes, the RIAA has no case against the university.
Legal MP3 distribution does occur with napster. It's not the University's obligation to determine what is legal and what is illegal. If that's the case the university may as well prohibit all *.jpgs because SOME of them contain illegal images like kiddy porn or bestiality.
Where do YOU draw the line?
>>If you were the person in charge, what would you do?
Stand my ground, because if you give an inch they'll take a mile.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
>> The colleges are nice enough to give you the internet connection, so they have to ability to regulate it as they see fit.
That's like saying that McDonalds is "nice enough" to give you the hamburger at window 2 after they take your money at window 1.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
>>It does matter because of the simple fact hundreds of students downloading pirated mp3s is illegal, and downloading linux isn't, espically if its for a legitimate educational reason.
How many specific students can you name for downloading specific pirated files? What you believe or what you "know" is not that same as what you can "prove".
For the sake of arguement, if someone is doing an economics paper about new bands distributing music for free over the internet, downloading legal MP3s in that context would have an academic purpose.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
>>It matters because the bandwidth is not there to make the students happy.
Actually it is, in college brochures they love to mention that they have ethernet connections in the dorms when attempting to lure prospective students.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
>>You are missing the point.
No, you're missing my point. It's not a question of "can they do this?" They can.
The question is "Where will they stop with this?"
Can you answer that? No.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
>>Do you actually believe any of that garbage that you are posting, or are you just bored today and are getting in a good laugh. Students do not pay for their internet connectivity.
Not directly, they DO however pay for their room & board. If a network connection is a part of that room, you've paid for it.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
>>My point is that he tried to get his school project in with four hours to spare, therefore, he was not blaming bandwidth hoggers for slowing him down for four minutes but four hours.
My point is that if he/you knew of the project for days/a week and you waited until four hours before the deadline that it's YOUR fault for procrastinating
>>Actually, a good way to handle Napster would be to put low bandwidth limits on it.
That is exactly my point. If there is a problem with people hogging bandwidth they should throttle all connections so that everyone has a fast connection, but noone has "too fast" of a connection. If it's possible for a group of people to take up so much bandwidth that others can't use the system, then there is a design flaw.
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Actually that's what the federal interstate highway system is for.
The only way they were able to build it constitutionally was to build it for the purpose of providing for the common defense. If you modify a Sherman tank to comply with your state's and the federal motor vehicle laws(mirrors, turn signals, brake lights, etc...). Yes, you can drive it on the interstate.
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
>>If you are paying more than $13 for a cd, you are getting hardcore ripped off. Also you can buy used cds. Just admit it, you just don't want to pay...
I do pay for the music that I get. I've spent more money on music that many people spend on computers.
I just want to pay a FAIR price for it. $14-15 for a single CD is fair, $18 is not.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
>>There damned bandwidth usage for illegal purposes may have cost me my grade.
Waiting until right before the deadline may have cost your your grade.
>>Also, there are several clauses in the network usage contract saying "you cannot use abnormal amounts of bandwidth".
Define abnormal. If large numbers of people are using the same amount of bandwidth as you, your use IS normal.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
First off, you cannot turnoff downloads from your machice when you are connected, you MUST by design allow people to download. The best you can do is allow 1 download connection at a time.
You can, atleast in the latest version, limit the # of uploads per user to 0.
However, I'm not particularly happy with the program myself, for similar reasons, and another one being that when you hit close, it doesn't actually. You have to hit exit. :)
Oh, and to those who say, if you don't like it, write your own. Its a closed protocol atm. And looking at the packet analysis, its a strange one.
Filtering this program out shouldn't be hard. However, if the author wants to, allowing the clients to bypass the filters should be easy too.
The fight between the filterers, and the author, would be interesting.
I use to have a funny sig, but slash cut it off, and I forgot what the punchline was.
There is no law regarding MP3, except for the "fair use" part of copyright law which allows you to convert/store the stuff however you want to.
The place where you get into legal trouble is when the recordings are transferred from one person to another, where the source person does not delete their copies. The issues are no different than burning CDRs, dubbing tapes (not counting the analog/digital issue), etc.
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Here come the proxies and tunnels now....... Not like blocking ports can ever stop people from using bandwidth or applications
Additionally, they probably DID sign an acceptable use policy, which I seriously doubt includes saturating their network with illegal mp3 files.
If the student did sign such a policy (you DID read it, didn't you?) then the institution can accept/deny whatever services they see fit.
I mean seriously, if you were in charge of such a network, and a chunk of it was being eaten up by a protocol that you knew was used for (more often than not) illegal activity, and condoning such activity would put you in a bad light to the students (and the parents of) who really wanted to use the net for research, what would you do? Jeez, put yourself in the shoes of those running the network for once rather than sticking to your own narrow opinions.
Quake 3: Arena/Unreal Tournament servers! etc. :)
Actually, if you check out the latest in tank tech, you'd notice rubberized treads are available and capable of leaving roads in one piece.. now as for the weight limit on the concrete, thats a different story.
This is my sig. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
But the universities' are for educating the people and take tax grants. They are establishments for the people. Therefor, it IS my dime. And yours. And every other taxpayers. "We the people" dictate policies of this country and universities are a part of our country's policies.
This is my sig. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Dressed in sheets and tie string with his best John Belushi impression.
"Tunnel, Tunnel, Tunnel, Tunnel, Tunnel"
It was too easy
=)
Hangtime
I understand the bandwidth problem, but what if it happened to be a legitamite use?
Say part of a 4th year networking class the project happened to "build a napster client" or even something legit which started to drag down the network. *That* wouldn't be banned, yet the real problem would still exist.
I think it is a much better policy to impose limits on the volume of up/down bandwidth allowable, not to pass judgement on the value X or Y packets as some other customers have. No administrator would want to be in that business if they can possibly avoid it--waaaay too much grey area.
If a university administration does block out napster, then it implies that they are taking responsibility for the useage by their customers. There may be a liability issue if some student was running a porn ring, for instance. The U might be asked in court: Well, you blocked out napster, why didn't you block this out too?
(IANAL--luckily)
My napster linux client (not that I use napster) is not working on @home anymore. Is there a reason for this? ; )
-B
I've just received word that Rice can be added to the list of universities blocking napster...
*sigh*
I'm thinking that everyone is looking at this wrong. The students that are doing this are violating laws. It is in the University's right to turn of the service for those which are violating the rules. If the users where hosting a ftp site that housed ISOs for all the newest software I'm thinking they'd do the same thing.
Justen Stepka
No, they haven't paid for it. At least at the university I work for, the network infrastructure is NOT covered by student fees. If we actually could charge them in a manner similar to an ISP, we could offer MUCH better service.
As it stands now, the network in the dorms is rather heavily subsidized by money from other places -- like research grants.
Well, one example is that there is a load balancing system that funnels processes to the least loaded node. Seti user cranks up his job on all the nodes, and now they all look equally loaded..... blows the load balancing nicely.
There's also daemons that come in overnight and run researchers code on idle CPUs.... with seti running, there is no idle CPU.....
"near idle" does not equal "not wasting CPU"
I think making it a free speech issue is reading far too much into it. I'm a sysadmin at a university and we're always facing things like folks wasting CPU by running Seti@home on public machines, or wasting bandwidth putting up their porn web page, etc.
We don't stop these due to some objection to the content, we stop them because they are impeding the use of the machines/network for what they were purchased for -- the academic mission of the university. If they want to run Seti on their own PC, that's fine, but we're going to kill it if we see it on a multi-user *nix box.
If some one has a high bandwidth use that is a real part of a class or research, we do everything we can to support that.
It's the bandwidth. Usenet doesn't suck down much bandwidth and the admin has control over it. If alt.binaries.* starts taking up too much space, the admin can throttle it.
I don't care what my users do as long as they don't prevent other users from doing what they do. If one use is directly related to what the university actually does (ie, it's for a class or research), it's going to get win over something that is unrelated.
Claiming that this is some kind of censorship is like claiming filesystem quotas are some form of censorship (which I've had users claim).
Here at BGSU they are threatining to shutdown personal web servers being run from dorm rooms. They claim that they waste too much bandwidth, and are only used for illegal purposes. I personally use my to locally develop PHP.
In the same day, they manage to have the network down for 3 hours, never fix one residence hall's lab where every computer is down, and lose half of the passwords to the Unix mainframe all us CS students have to use. If there is a problem, they blame it on the MP3's.
You keep beating the ownership drum. You are missing the point. If a landlord stipulated in the lease that you could only have sex in the missionary position, he could hold you to it. Enforcement might be a problem, but if you were found out, he could terminate the lease. Where I am, it is stipulated in the agreement that students will not run servers that chew up bandwidth unneccasarily. This gives the University the rightto do whatever the fuck they want when someone violates the agreement. This is just like people that happily sign a contract that stipulates mandatory random drug testing and then bitch when it actually happens. If you enter into a contract, you have to obey that contract, ownership be damned.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
They will stop when people stop paying tuition, and not being able to use napster in not going to make me walk out the door.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
I read many of these posts, and many of them are along the lines of "Well, I pay for it, so I should be able to use it however I want". And that is true.
BUT
The guy next door also paid for it, and how fair is it that he can't access his e-mail (for school related purposes), because YOU are serving up mp3's? (not school related)
It would be all fine and dandy if bandwidth were unlimited, but it's not, and it's the university's job to serve the educational needs of it's students and staff. Allowing hundreds of mp3 servers doesn't really faciltate that.
The main thing about Napster is that it allows the average Windows person to get mp3s. Before Napster came out, people would ask me how to get mp3s, and I'd try to explain FTP and IRC to them , to no avail. This kept the level of people who got mp3s to a minimum. But now that Napster is out, every Joe Schmoe can get whatever he wants with no problem, which is why the bandwith is being used up. On another note-I don't think mp3s help artists, but they don't hurt them either. My friends and I download mp3s to bands we like, and if we like the bands, we'll buy the CD. If mp3s weren't there, we wouldn't be buying the CDs of bands with only one or two good songs-we'd just go without them.
I help out serving the local LAN where I live. And one of the other admins here did some testing on Napster.
;-)
;-)
When admins say that it hogs bandwith and thus they are forced to shut it down they are not kidding. It is apparently eating bandwith like those first walkman-cd players eat batteries. (By the pound?
I mean it. Nap. doesn't seem to try to limit it's bandwith. If you could do that and *force* users to limit the bandwith then I recon it wouldn't be so much of a problem anymore.
There have been some complaints about the network being slow here lately. Perhaps Nap. is the cause, I haven't checked yet. (Due to our network setup (hubbed mainly, a few switches) if someone starts to hog bandwith a lot of people go down.
And that's bad, for everyone. Particularly for the one doing the hogging when the mob comes knocking on his door.
Say that something that hogs bandwith (Video conferancing perhaps, or lots of people were streaming movies.) was run to the point that the network was satuated.
What would you as a network admin do? Go say that "We have to invest another big pile of $$$ to get another T3." to your boss/whoever gives you money. Do you seriously expect that you would get it because "Streaming movies is hot right now."? I don't think so at least. (Unless the video/streaming were done for educational/relevant purposes naturally.)
Well, they could always do it the hard way and use a proxy/firewall combo that scans the packets for content that use the Napster protocol.
So then you could send it encrypted.
Then network admins would scan for connections looking like Nap.
In the end noone would win, and a lot of "innocent" user will get pissed off. (The admins have access to new Nap. clients as well you know. To examine for signatures/ports etc.) Instead try to work with them. Limit Nap. so it won't hog bandwith. Use better protocols. Make it *better*, not more cumbersome to stop.
And the "evil admins" have one last trumph-card to play if they want to. They can search the data and if/when they find copyrightproteted matherial they shut you down. Keep that in mind as well.
Pissing people off is generally not a good way to make progress.
>If you modify a Sherman tank to comply with your state's and the federal motor vehicle
> laws(mirrors, turn signals, brake lights, etc...). Yes, you can drive it on the interstate.
I used to know a guy in middletown,OH that would do tank conversion. The main problem isn't the lights and stuff, it's making sure the treads don't crack the road:}
This had to be done. I work, live and goto school at the Ohio State University. I live in the dorms, and damn that program had sprouted up like a freaking weed. I know, I was a person that had been using it (even during summer quarter at home on a 56k modem). During Fall quarter of 99, Resnet was sucking up 1050% of what it was supposed to. I'm going to make the crezzy assumption that a healthy part of that was some type of mp3/warez transfer. It was killing us. So napster was banned from getting through the firewall. I miss it, yes, but I understand why. :\
http://www.somethingpositive.net Funny + bitter = comedy gold
This is true that most people just are using mp3 for pure warezing purpose. But by considering mp3 and warez egal you put a doubt on ANY use of MP3 for music distribution.
There are many musicians distributing music and using mp3 to do so. 95% of all the music files I have on my hdd are coming from those sources. And mp3 benefited then as it permits to give a wide audience to their productions.
Now, that people are using mp3 to store files they hear every minute on the radio or can find at any record store, th
. . . . . . .
may u!sh 2 sm!le at dz!z bad nn.!m!tat!ion
I've used it a little bit, and although it's a nice interface and all, most of the tracks that I found I can pretty much get anywhere. I'd rather use that type of resource to get music that you won't hear every day on the radio.
$35-$40 for a regular cd? Is this us dollars, or are you just mentally impaired and can't type the right numbers?
I'm assuming you live in the US, since you mention it's a pain to "find it anywhere in the US"
-PovRayMan
----------
Check out my blackbox styles
Ever hear of singles? Pretty much all of the popular songs are available on singles that cost a lot less than the full album and you often will get two or three songs and several variations and remixes.
The Digital Millenium Copyright Act has provisions to prevent the possesion, use, creation, etc. of software and tools that have primary usage of copyright violation. So it is legal. And regardless of what the stated intent of Napster Co., an simple observation is enough to indicate that the primary use of the napster software and servers is the illegal distribution of mp3s.
Now a lot of people think this particular aspect of the DMCA is bogus, not fair, not constitutional, etc. But it is legal and until someone with deep pockets is willing to step up and fight it to a win in the Supreme Court it's going to remain so (in the US at least.)
They can easily prove they wrote it, since they claim to have done so. To collect damages they need to prove it was to promote piracy. To shut them down all they need to do is prove it is used for piracy as a primary purpose.
Every process takes resources. It may not necessarily be a huge amount of CPU or memory, but it does take something. On a machine that has an intended purpose, such things are inappropriate.
Isn't there some well known quote about the simple answer being the wrong answer? The port that the napster client allows you to change is the data port used to transfer files between you and other napster users. There is still a port that your machine connects to at the napster site that is well known and relatively fixed. This is the port that is blocked and it prevents you from getting access to the napster search engine, database and file transfer initiation processes.
This is what the universities are going to tell you and it is a perfectly valid point, imho.
Of course some people will get around it, but that is not the point. A few people using Napster would not be a problem, it is the fact that so many people are using it. Napster is so dangerous because as long as you know what a mouse is, you can use it. If only technically adept people are using up too much bandwith because they can get around it, then it wont be that much of a problem.
And by the way, almost all colleges pay for their internet acces with grants, not the student's fees.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
He who pays the bills makes the rules. It's slightly interesting because at final analysis, it's the same students who want the bandwidth who pay the bill payer.
Actaully, the tuition that universities charge does not pay for very much of what the school purchases. Most of any college's money comes from grants and the products of research.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
Yes, and "We the people" elect people who appoint people who hire people to make these restriction. So technically if such restrictions are put in place, it is still the people's wishes.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
Do you actually believe any of that garbage that you are posting, or are you just bored today and are getting in a good laugh. Students do not pay for their internet connectivity. That money largely comes from grants or research. If I was renting an apartment and my landlord gave me a free internet connection via T3, I would comply with any resrictions he imposed.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
>>Define abnormal. If large numbers of people are using the same amount of bandwidth as you, your use IS normal.
True, so if a majority of the college students are using napster, then your argument makes sense. But if that ever happened then napster would definetly banned. The network is there for the same reason the dorms are there, to allow the students to live and do their school work near the college.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
>>Not directly, they DO however pay for their room & board. If a network connection is a part of that room, you've paid for it.
So by your logic electric bills, phone bills, water bills, and heating bills should be payed for by your landlord. The electric lines, phone lines, water pipes, and heaters are already in the apartment, so you shouldnt have to pay any more than just your rent.
And anyway, dorm rooms do not work like apartments, or else they would be alot cheaper. Colleges pay for many of the expenses that dorm rooms entail with grants and such. The fees that students have to pay do not cover the full fees of the dorm room, let alone the internet connections. The colleges are nice enough to give you the internet connection, so they have to ability to regulate it as they see fit.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
You're probably heard of They Might Be Giants. Just a short while ago (in real terms, not Internet time) they released an MP3-only album. This stuff was mostly redone songs from their Dial-A-Song service, with a few rarities thrown in. In so doing, they made some money, and got some songs out that fans wanted but wouldn't be viable for a traditional album. (I bought the MP3 album, by the by.)
Second example: a roommate of mine specializes in rare and interesting songs; he's a big Dr. Demento listener. Thanks to his collection, I've bought (and have resolved to buy more) of some musicians I would NEVER have heard of before.
Yes, in this second case those MP3s *were* pirated, illegal rips... but it certainly worked out for the artists. I fully admit this is due to enlightened self-interest: I buy albums so the musicians can produce more music I like, and there are plenty of warez kiddies who can't see that far... but screw 'em, we're talking about ME.
--
These are *MY* opinions.
These are *MY* opinions.
They will not be *YOUR* opinions until the Orbital Mind Control Lasers are operati
There is nothing to get up in arms about here. I'm at U of T, and the engineering department alone has a huge chunk of bandwidth devoted to it's staff and students. The costs of maintaining such a wide pipe are not trivial. If a non academic application was consuming an appreciable percentage of that bandwidth, I would restrict it too. Apps like ICQ and IRC may waste time, but their network usage is negligable. Napster however, can actually interfere with academic applications.
Michael Gentili
- He's just some guy, you know?
Uh, this makes no sense.
:)
So basically, Microsoft is restricting them to pirating just the standard and premium versions, right?
Does it matter? Not really. If it matters, you'll recognize enough in those details to figure it out (and would've known anyway).
How, exactly, can Napster be used legally? This is not a free-speech issue. It is very plain that if you record just about any CD onto mp3 files and make them available for public copying, you have broken the law. I own quite a CD collection and every last one of them has the illegal reproduction warning on it. I tell you, 99% (if not more) of all files available on Napster are illegal copies.
If a large number of musical artists were releasing their music under some kind of GPL-type license, the situation might be different; people would probably be using napster for legal uses as well. Realistically, the percentage of legal files being transferred just might reach 40%.
However, that would not change the fact that most of the transfers on napster are illegal. It is not feasible to prosecute every offender, but here you have a service that knowingly allows all this illegal activity and doesn't even care, and shutting them down is the only thing that makes sense.
"The whole point of any communications protocol is that date can be copied for free (unlike a concrete thing like food) and very easily.
So they be trying to ban all communication (including normal speech!) because you can copy music/films etc. with them."
Umm..that's not true, besides being a bit selfish. In fact, it's a bunch of baloney. I'll assume here that you meant data and not date. The whole point of any communications protocol is that the data can be copied, period. NOT that it can be copied for free. If that were the case we should be allowed to use our cell phones for free, right?? The protocol covers only how the information is copied, not whether or not it is free. I can make a VHS tape and give it away or sell it at my own discretion; the method of communication has nothing to do with whether I should be allowed to charge for the data itself.
A lot of people have religiously bought into the (false) philosophy that "information wants to be free therefore give me your stuff." All is sacrificed at the altar of free flow of information. Maybe you don't realize it, but when you use a university's or a company's telecom infrastructure, you use it on their terms, not yours. They paid for it. They probably paid a LOT for it. If they find that excessive use of a service for illegal file transfers is bogging down the network for everyone, the only good thing to do is ban the service.
JD
In the sense that the university usually has property stickers on all the equipment, the equipment belongs to the university. I'll concede that point. BUT, especially for private or non-research-funded universities, the university is there by and for the students. Students pay for most if not all of equipment that is bought, directly through fees or indirectly through tuition increases and hidden costs. You know how the students own the Student Union? It's the same way with the equipment. That's not to say that the students could just bust in and take routers and whatnot, but it does mean that the students can and should have a lot of clout with policies that relate to equipment that they (and previous years' classes) have paid for.
It might be legal for a university to make an arbitrary decision to ban a bandwidth-sucking site, but it would not necessarily be ethical, and I doubt students would stand for it. There would be outrage, protest, or large numbers of students simply transferring to get away from the administrative fascism. I had to put up with a lot of blank-faced, "it's-for-your-own-good" administrative bull in high school. It's the big leagues now; I pay for the equipment with my tuition and fees (as do my fellow students), and there is no reason for us to stand for such treatment. It will happen, but the students have several ways of fighting back.
The university is obligated to provide service that serves the academic interests of the campus community. The academic infrastructure and students alike are customers of the information systems department. Customers pay for stated service when they sign a contract, and it is breach of contract to rescind that service without renegotiation, except in cases where laws have been broken, etc. It's the university's responsibility to make the best effort to negotiate and work with the customer BEFORE going to extremes.
I see nothing wrong with a university choosing to ban the use of a program because it is using too much bandwidth--which effectively means it is blocking legitimate access for other users--provided the university is doing it for that purpose and not because the fscking RIAA or some other gestapo organization is breathing down their neck. IF the RIAA is pressuring the university, I expect the university to be truthful and inform the students. If there is a clause in the infosystems contract about no copyright violations, then the university has no reason not to inform the students that there have been numerous copyright violations and as a result access is being shut down. It just seems that universities are not giving the students--the whole reason the university is there--the whole story, and that sucks, frankly.
Further, I will concede that it is unreasonable for the priveleged few who have enough time/are taking few enough credit hours to be downloading copyrighted MP3's via napster or some other method, to be blocking access to other students or faculty who need the bandwidth to do real work. I'm a major proponent of music as a means of getting work done, but not when it's to the exclusion of anything else. I've ripped my entire CD collection; that's all I need. I have no problem paying for music if I like it; however, I, like many people, wish more of the monies would go to the artist and not to the corporations.
But the times, they are a-changin'.
If the students _host_ an ftp site with pirated software (warez), they'd be shut down pretty quickly. They might, or might not, get away with downloading warez ISOs.
But nothing legally stops them from downloading ISOs from open-source software, or even hosting an open-source mirror of those ISOs.
-- Robert
2) mp3 probably benifits the little guy more than the big, established bands. There are a lot of bands I've heard on mp3.com or the like, whose albums I've gone on to purchase online (from the band's own web site). Again, without that exposure on the Net, I wouldn't have bought the album, nor would the artist have gotten that exposure.
3) Nearly all the mp3s on my drive are ripped from my own CD collection. I realize this is almost certainly -not- what you are taling about, but regardless, I find this a very convenient way to store my music (no disc switching, convenient playlisting, etc.), and as time goes on, it will probably become more common. This benefits the artist in that I (as a lazy person who spends too much time on the net) don't have to get the hell off my butt to go down to the record store -- I can just buy the album online when it comes out.
(Yes, this is a "theoretical," but the truth is, mp3 and distribution of music on the Net has not yet "arrived," so you're still stuck with a few theoreticals, I'm afraid).
Will you go to lunch!
Ah....forgive my ignorance. As a personal user on a NT system and a personal Linux box, I'd found it to be completely unobtrusive.
Obviously I'm not a network admin.
The cake is a pie
Nothing that complex.
More like:
cp talk ~/core
chmod +x core
This worked until the ops started noticing running processes called 'core'.
(Prior to this, people had tried making local copies, but the ops had taken to searching the home directories for "talk" and "rn".)
After they caught on to the core thing, it was:
cp talk ~/a.out
chmod +x a.out
The cake is a pie
Uh....since Seti runs at a near idle priority, how can it be "wasting" cpu time?
The cake is a pie
the entity who owns and maintains the (usually no cost to access) network can make decisions about what it is used for?
the horror! i demand we step up and protest this
<sarchasm>
Need a Catering Connection
Pardon my lack of technical knowledge on the subject (both Napster and all things TCP/IP), but how do you (you being IT, not you personally) know that those 25 students were participating in illegal activity?
I suppose it boils down to how your AUP is structured. Here, students may not do anything illegal (surprise), and may not impact other users on the network. I run a server (legal stuff), so if I get an email from OIT saying I'm using too much bandwidth - and it's affecting other users negatively - I'll back it off. Actually, I have gotten such a letter (an informal one), but they seemed more concerned with whether or not what I was doing was illegal. After assuring them that everything is perfectly legal, I haven't heard back.
-- "Complacency is a far more dangerous attitude than outrage." -Naomi Littlebear
On the other hand, if you are at a completely private school like Harvard or something, go wild.
If it's tax money you're concerned about, I don't think there are really any completely private schools anymore (except a few fringe ultra-conservative schools that refuse federal aid).
Many private schools depend on government aid for about the same percentage of their total budget as do public schools. The difference between public and private has to do with the organizational structure, not with the sources of funding.
Anything worth doing is worth doing badly -- G.K. Chesterton
But not compared to listening to music. It's easy to listen to 5-6 albums in an evening. Even the most enthusiastic software downloader can't keep up with that, right?
Waiting until right before the deadline may have cost your your grade.
I would not consider four hours before a deadline to be cutting it too close.
Some people don't consider 4 minutes before a deadline cutting it too close. What is your point?
My point is that he tried to get his school project in with four hours to spare, therefore, he was not blaming bandwidth hoggers for slowing him down for four minutes but four hours. If he paid several thousand dollars to go to school, he should be not punished by those hogging the bandwidth when they could have spent a few dollars --in comparison--to get a cable modem or xDSL modem.
Actually, a good way to handle Napster would be to put low bandwidth limits on it. People could get their MP3's, but the school projects would come first.
My point is that if he/you knew of the project for days/a week and you waited until four hours before the deadline that it's YOUR fault for procrastinating
I guess you have never had a hard professor in your life. I have many projects that I would start on within a few hours of receiving them and still be cutting it close. I have spent up to 120 hours in one week getting two projects done. Got A's on both.
Then you will probably enjoy this little quote from the fortunes file as much as me:
You can however, make a new directory somewhere on your system, maybe under the Napster install directory, and then use that as your mp3 directory. Put nothing in it, and when you get a file, move it out of that directory...
---------------
Yes! That guy!
I have a bunch of mp3's, about 12gigs worth. Now a good portion is stuff I own on cd, but its just more efficient for me to play them off the computer. Most of the remaining mp3's are things I would NEVER buy on cd. If I hear a song I like, I look for it on mp3. I am not going to pay any amount of money for one song I like and 12 I don't. When I discover a band who has a lot of songs I like (such as orbital) I start buying cd's. Mp3's were the media I first heard them on, so it did pay off for them. I buy cd's cause the quality is better, and I like to support good artists.
The assumption that your tuition check is the sole source of income for your university is wrong at best, and foolish at worst.
/not/ your dime.
Most universities run on many revenue sources: tuition, small items sales, charity, state and federal budgetary supplemnts, private/public investments for projects, etc.
Bandwidth is expensive and, to be blunt, doesn't belong to you. It belongs to the university. They can dictate what it is used for.
So, in short, its
--Ruhk
404 Error:
What's really funny about this, is that it meshes really well with the recent story about campus life and the internet.
/QUOTE
Let's take a reality check here:
QUOTE:
Napster was "hogging" 5 percent of the university's bandwidth, White said, so more than 3,500 students connecting to the Net through RCN were permanently shut off from using Napster's software.
"We made the decision to block access in October before the RIAA lawsuit was filed," added Curt Pederson, vice provost for information services at Oregon State.
The university has an annual budget of $75,000 for bandwidth. Based on peak Net usage statistics, the campus could have gone over budget because of Napster traffic and other non-education-related activity, Pederson said.
IMHO, more than the RIAA, this is the real reason Napster is getting banned. This isn't about free expression or whether or not the RIAA manages to win their suit (I hope not!), it comes down to cost.
As a systems and network administrator for a college, you have to balance "wants" against "needs". I WANT to be able to play network games, trade MP3s, download pr0n and the like. I NEED to make sure that there is maximum bandwidth available for the business I work for, the college. That bandwidth is primarily for the furthering of the college's purposes. Everything else comes in as a secondary consideration.
--Ruhk
404 Error:
Hrm. Even assuming that your routers are smart enough to do this... what if there are too many hosts?
That is, so many hosts compared to bandwidth that either
a) You limit each user to an incredibly low amount of bandwidth, thus guaranteeing that you will not overcommit... { exacerbated because a uni most likely has many hosts at any given time that are not accessing the pipe to the Outside }
or
b) You allow overcommitting, which means in theory you may again be forced to deny people more bw even though they're now well within the announced limits.
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
Er, at most universities, what the students pay doesn't even come close to paying for their classes, let alone the whole kit-and-kaboodle.
Guess again.
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
Well for starters at least in Canada students only pay for about 30% of the universities budget. So only 30% of the BW is your dime. And even then if you use that logic only your small percentage, out of all the students, is your dime. If I'm having problems connecting to sites I need for assignments, because someone is downloading mp3s, I wouldn't be too happy either.
It's really amusing how often I find out about Slashdot stories from places other than Slashdot itself (the classic case being Bruce Sterling's Viridian Design Manifesto story, where I either was sent the manifesto itself or a link to the Slashdot story by, among others, Bruce himself, Warren Ellis (a raving mad comic book writer and fellow member of the Viridian Movement), and about 30 random people) and it just happened again with this story.
I'm on the Resnet mailing list as a result of work I've done here at Oberlin College (as a student) on DHCP registration crap, so I've been hearing carping about Napster for a while now. This story first popped up earlier today or yesterday, and then, lo and behold, someone mentioned that Slashdot picked up on it. heh. If you're potentially interested in seeing why this is being done, and how they think they'll get it to stick, take a look at thi s, a canned search for the words "napster" or "slashdot" in the Resnet mailing list archive.
Also, after first reading this most recent furor, I wandered over from my cubicle to chat with my boss, the college's chief sysadmin, and asked her how we were acting in regards to Napster. Her reaction? "It's not that much bandwidth. Big deal. If someone gets caught doing something the RIAA doesn't like, we'll yell at them. It's not that big a deal." Kind of refreshing, I thought...
Well, I'm not sure if I entirely agree with this. I pay a certain amount per month for access to the net from my dorm. In exchange for that subsidy, I feel as though I have a right to at least a basic amount of connectivity in accordance with the acceptable use policy of my university.
But, as you say, it's their network. That it is. They own the cabling and the routers and the bandwidth; therefore, some say they can do whatever they want with it, up to and including shutting me down. Why? If the entire dorm network were subsidized by the school, I suppose I would be happy with whatever I got, but I'm sure as hell paying for something right now. I don't want that taken away because I'm engaging in a perfectly reasonable pursuit such as, say, playing Half-Life.
So what if Half-Life isn't academic in nature? Nowhere in my school's AUP does it specify that that academics is to be the sole or even primary use of the residential network. Actually, reading over it, it's not even mentioned. It only asks that I use the same level of courtesy as when interacting in the halls of my dorm, as well as laying out a few prohibitions (spam, harassing e-mail, servers that over-utilize bandwidth.) And if I want to walk down that hall (analogous to browsing the web, or playing Half-Life), then that seems to be my perogative. If I'm moving in, and I have to bring a couch down that hall (downloading a linux iso) then that seems to fall under fair use. Of course, if I'm lying in the middle of the hall (server) or constantly ferrying crack baggies in and out of my room (mp3's), then, hey, that could be cause for concern.
Of course, that's just my opinion. I could be wrong.
Point well taken. To clarify a bit what I was saying earlier, I guess I should say that my "basic amount of conenctivity" is more or less proportional to how much I'm paying for it. If (and in all fairness, I don't pay this much) I'm going to be paying open-market dsl values for my internet, I'm going to expect a comparable level of service as well as connectivity. But yeah. I pretty much agree with you and hey, who hasn't gone mp3 crazy once or twice?
:)
Quick disclaimer, I'm not charged a whole lot for my dorm ethernet hookup, and I'm permitted to run a small server off it, so I personally have nothing to complain about
I don't think napster would be better off using UDP... Why would you write it in UDP protocol when you want realtime updating? And use UDP to transfer files? They also have "chat" and crap like that, which wouldn't benifit from being written in UDP. What the hell are you talking about? What crap software man? Napster doesn't make me download crap software...
At least read a little into the article. The reason is that napster users were banned was because they were hogging more bandwith than the university could afford, 5% or something. Now, web sites, that's different, you make your connection, get the page, and disconnect. Most people don't know how to close napster totally, and it stays open in the little taskbar in the right hand lower corner of the screen. And also, if the use of bandwith continued to rise, the university would of been over their $75,000 a year "bandwith budget".
You're talking like you have to pay for Napster or something. First off, you can disconnect people downloading from your machine, second, if you don't like it, write your own version.
I wish there was a way to edit ones own comments on /.
Me too, then I'd have a karma more than 1.
It's pretty clear that the students are paying for these technologies. Furthermore, bandwidth these days is cheap compared to what it was ten years ago. As this is the case, the facilities simply needs to invest to provide what they said they would. If they are not providing enough bandwidth to satisfy their students, then it sounds like they need to adjust within reason.
I haven't checked the price of a T1 in a while, but I do know that they price has continued to fall. Furthermore, other technologies that provide for very cheap bandwidth that were not previously available, are now. There isn't a single reason why the college can not, within reason, adjust their available bandwidth to keep everyone happy. I do want to stress, within reason. Obviously, providing each student with a t3 is silly, but it sounds like they need to be addressing their technology commitment prior to terminating network services.
To emphasize, that is not $100,000 per Year, but $100,000 TOTAL!
So 17,000,000 CD's times $11 per CD = $187,000,000 in revenue, and the artists share was $300,000 total! (And people wondered why "the artist formerly know as Prince" walked around with SLAVE tattooed on his face)
The record companies have a virtual oligarchy on the distribution of music. The lack of viable alternative distribution channels not only hurts the artist, it also hurts the consumer (as in why do CD's retail MORE than cassettes, but cost LESS to produce and distribute?)
There is real opportunity for the Internet to become a viable independent distribution channel. MP3's help the artists by opening up additional sources for distributing their music.
The fact that no two snowflakes are identical should tell you something important about God's will.
you can't find any definitive wayt o say people are using napster? ever hear of tcpdump? the protocol isn't that complicated, guys...
I don't think that downloading top 40 dance music hits really counts as "free thinking."
"On the other hand, the early worm gets eaten."
Gah, I am not going to try and argue this any more, as this infurates me.
Sosumi. just kidding. DONT!
The next thing will be at work places!
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Yes, I believe that property is a right you are born with. It is an inalienable right. I don't care what country you live in and what form of government you have.
I would like to know why you believe there is a difference between physcal and intellectual property? Why should there be a difference between something I create with my hands, and something I create with my mind? If I create a statue, which is a product of both my creative mind, and my hands, do I retain ownership of the statue or will you claim that, being an intellectual product, it also belongs to 'the community'?
"Anyone who can't laugh at himself is not taking life seriously enough." - Larry Wall
I do not know much about the constitutions of the 50 states, but if you look at Amendment V of the US Constitution, it takes the right to own property as a pre-ordained right without even questioning it.
The Constitution says:
nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.
If no person was allowed to own property, then this statement would be unnessessary.
Of course, as I said previously, I am not making a law based statement. My statement is one of beliefs, not of US law.
Again, if you feel there is a difference between physical and intellectual property, I would like to see your reasoning.
"Anyone who can't laugh at himself is not taking life seriously enough." - Larry Wall
Just because intellectual property is infinitely replicable, does not make the replication morally correct. Yes, it is possible to take a copy of Steven King's next novel, make 1,000,000 copies, sell them and never give Mr King a single dime. (his novel is intellectual property and infinitely replicable) That does not, however, make the action I take morally correct. Mr King spent long hours working on a product. If I take that product, make millions of copies, and sell it at a lower price than his publisher will (since I'm not going to pay Mr. King any royalties). I am effectively taking away his means of living.
Also, just because reproducing an mp3 is cheaper (approximately $0.00) than reproducing a novel, or a Porche 911, (the design schemas and ideas for both the novel and the Porche are intellectual property), the reproduction of an mp3 is no more correct than the reproduction of the other two.
I look forward to your response.
"Anyone who can't laugh at himself is not taking life seriously enough." - Larry Wall
If you create something, then the product you create is your property. This includes both mental and physical creations. If you sign a contract stating that, in return for monetary compensation, you will release ownership to a second party, then that second party takes ownership of the product.
The big problem with mental products is that they are usually easily reproducable (eg, a program is easier to reproduce than a pair of Gap blue jeans). Because the intellectual property is cheaply or freely reproducable does not mean that it isn't still the property of the creator, unless you entered into a contract with them to reproduce their work. Copying an illegal MP3 is no less illegal than taking a pair of jeans from a rack in the Gap and walking out of the store without paying.
This does not mean that MP3's should be banned. The MP3 format in and of itself is not the problem. The problem exists in the fact that many people are abusing the format and using it for illegal purposes. Obviously you are one of them.
Also, please note that people who actively participate in the Open Source movement have entered into a contract to release their intellectual property for free by agreeing to the GPL or another such licensing agreement.
"Anyone who can't laugh at himself is not taking life seriously enough." - Larry Wall
That's around 8Mbit/sec..
I use 8Mbit/sec for napster at home when I download the most damnit. : )
10Mbit switched ethernet... mmm.
Deal with it. Unlimited recording is gonna be free, and so is bandwidth, so what will the revenue model be for musicians?
It's not ownership of past canned recordings or present distribution thereof. Rather, it's what's alive and kicking right this second, and who thinks what is. So you're right on. It's LIVE performance. (meatspace or elive). Flawed. Surrendipitous. Abuzz. Frisky. Also, live interviews. Interactive stuff, ya know, "community". *Shared ownership in client/server transactions.* Whatever, good music will attract fans, and fans will pay (probably more willingly) when the jackals are disintermediated.
Until then, the big biz "value adders" are in total tsunami denial. They're addicted to the model of owning and selling the past. Evergreen. Selling it to consumers, (who hardly "consume"). The Biz is in a fight for its very life, it knows it, so it'll push harder. More suits. Things will get much uglier.
Ironically, this will only make things worse (for biz powers that.. were.) Data havens will route around. In fact, IMO, data havens could be an ideal way to renegotiate the contract between makers and users of music, (including canned recordings), so long as they permit *accountable* anonimity and secure escrow accounts.. and maybe superdistribution..
embee23: Although I may personally use it at home, it has no place on an academic network.
Lord Kano: When you live on campus, for 9 months out of the year, that IS your home. They pay tuition, technology, and housing fees. They've paid for it, they can use it as they see fit.
Ok, 1) I don't live on campus.
2) I do work in network services, and I can tell you for certain that this is a very common policy. When you pay your technology fee, you have to sign a piece of paper saying that you won't use your ethernet connection for any illegal purposes, and that you won't serve files of any kind. (I don't the specifics of other schools, but this is the case at UCF.)
Paying for something doesn't mean you can do anything you want with it.
embee
I agree, I am a student at OSU, and know the guy who is maintaining the block, and I certainly don't want tuition or net access fees to go up. Gee, I wonder why everyone seems to think that we are paying for the majority of it now... I personally think that $50 for the year is one hell of a deal. Also, Napster is no big deal, we can get mp3 the same way we have for the past few years, ftp, irc, sneakernet.
I don't think that I'm hurting any musicians with my MP3 collection. Almost all of my music is by people who are dead. They can't really suffer from me not buying their album anymore. In the cases where the musicians aren't dead, I only have albums that I couldn't find in stores, but still wanted to listen too or albums that I would never spend the money to buy. In either of those two cases NOBODY would be getting any money anyway, so NOBODY got hurt.
"To save the planet, I had to go to the worst spot on Earth, and that was Philadelphia." -- Sun Ra
Here's my tale of 15 CDs or so... For most of my life, I didn't listen to music at all; my friends didn't, and my parents only had classical stuff, which was just boring. Then, a few years ago, I found an MP3 site (by accidentally typing ftp:// instead of http://) and figured that I'd download a couple of songs from a few artists that I'd heard about. Of course, there were a few songs that I didn't like, but I did like many of them (They Might Be Giants, R.E.M., The Simpsons :-), et al.) This pretty much started my interest in music. I signed up with a CD club and ended up buying the CDs (~15) with most of the songs. Buying 15 CDs cannot possibly be construed as hurting these artists.
As for the songs I downloaded for which I didn't buy the albums, even without MP3s, I would not have bought their albums. Also, I don't listen to those MP3s (after all, if I liked them, I would have bought the albums). This certainly doesn't hurt the artists.
I'm sure that in the future I will definitely buy more CDs, further helping out the artists, all due to MP3s. Have I hurt these artists through MP3s?
I do know some who never ever buy any CDs but rather just download the MP3s, but I think that they are in the vast minority. CDs are cheap if you join one of those clubs (12 free CDs if you buy just one at BMG), and if you quit after fulfilling the obligation, they typically send you an offer to win you back after a period of time. It's simply easier to buy the CDs that than search for and download the MP3s.
Daniel J. Peng
Daniel J. Peng
Lets try one more time formatted...
Unfortunately that's not entirely the case... in fact the student handbook does indeed say otherwise. Basically the excerpts here indicate that you may not warez, steal copyrighted works or create a tax on the network.
While I have nothing against napster and may also feel that the recording industry is gouging us, the fact remains that there are rules and it looks like someone wasn't following them.
Although I don't speak for the University here's what I was able to find that in this specific case, seem to indicate that they can NOT do as they see fit.
Rule 6C7-4.037 Use of Information Technology and Resources
(under section 2)
2.Use of Information Resources.
a.Members of the university community shall use information resources responsibly in accordance with this rule.
2.The computing and telecommunication resources of the university shall not be used to make unauthorized or illegal use of the intellectual property of others. Users shall not transmit to others or display images, sounds, or messages that reasonably could be perceived as harassing, invasive, or otherwise unwanted.
(under section 3...)
3.User Responsibility
a.Computer users shall comply with all applicable laws and regulations governing the use of computer and telecommunication technology, specifically Chapter 815, Florida Statutes, Computer Crimes Act, and Title 18, United States Code, Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986.
...
2.The computing and telecommunication resources of the university shall be used only for purposes directly related to, or in support of, the academic, research or administrative activities of the university. These resources shall not be used for commercial or other for profit purposes without express written approval from the provost and vice president of Academic Affairs or his designee.
...
8.Users of university computing facilities and telecommunications networks shall use these resources prudently, and avoid making excessive demands on these facilities in a manner that would knowingly impair the use of these resources by others.
mcrandello@my-deja.com
rschaar{at}pegasus.cc.ucf.edu if it's important.
Actually, the dorm rooms also come equipped with phone lines. A simple '7W' in front of the phone number will allow them to access any outside ISP, the same way I do when I retire for the evening, off campus.
mcrandello@my-deja.com
rschaar{at}pegasus.cc.ucf.edu if it's important.
Basic connectivity: You can surf the internet, you can read email, etc etc etc. But, your school draws the line at playing Half-Life (mine do to!damn them!). They apparently think that playing half-life is not a basic amount of connectivity. It sucks, yes, but everyone administrates their network differently. Getting back to my original post, I mainly complained about people who are constantly hogging up bandwith, from the sounds of it, this really doesn't apply to you. Your analogy was really good too. But, unfortunately the problems are being caused by people sucking down (keeping with the analogy) Entire Dorm rooms of furniture at a time. So, the NetAdmins see this, see Napster is a major part of it, and save themselves headaches in the future by killing the napster ports. Technically, this is just a few bad apples causing problems for the rest of us. Although, I have had a few times taht I went a little mp3 crazy, as most of us probably have. :)
Objects in the blog are closer then they ap
Everything you said and more. Although I haven't gone so far as 6k in cd's.
--Have a Johsonville brat.
-- SIGFPE
-- SIGFPE
Maybe you'd like to explain why record companies and musicians should earn money for something that I can copy at no expense. This isn't meant to be facetious - until one understands what your philosophy of ownership it it's hard to "justify ripping off musicians this way". As I see it intellectual property isn't really a fundamental right of the creator of it but a privilege granted by governments because granting such rights is in the public interest (because it encourages such creation). Is outlawing mp3's in the public interest? Will we get better music as a result?
-- SIGFPE
"Yes, I believe that property is a right you are born with. It is an inalienable right" That's a really interesting point of view. Do any states codify this right in their constitution?
-- SIGFPE
"nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation." "Again, if you feel there is a difference between physical and intellectual property, I would like to see your reasoning." You've made your case very clear. So here's my case: intellectual property is infinitely replicable. Physical property is not. If I get your food you necessarily lose yours. On the other hand I can use your idea without taking it from you because you still have it. Without 'taking' the constitution does not apply. I look forward to your reply!
-- SIGFPE
It always annoys me when people forget this. College ain't free, and students are the customers.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
Ok, so in the spirit of "Open" community, why isn't there some sort of setup whereby people can simply donate funds for MP3s to various artists? Some sort of listing of Artists' contact information. This way, if, say you download an entire album of some band, and you think they deserve a little credit for it, you can make a donation, or whatever you feel like calling it, to the band. This would bypass the recording industry all together for people who don't want the physical media, or who burn their own CD's.
The downside to this, is that making music is a cycle. I'm sure bands get studio time, as well as compensation help when touring and such, from the record labels. If such a "Donation" idea caught on, and it did in fact manage to kill the recording industry, what would take it's place??
....or did I just miss someplace that's already doing such a thing. Yes, it's similar to MP3.com, but A) I don't see anywhere on their site that lists how to send money to an artist, and B) MP3.com doesn't have "Mainstream", or "Labeled" artists, which tend to be the bulk of bootlegged MP3s.
If they ban it something will aways pop up to replace it. The only way to stop it would be to ban file shareing(web, ftp, etc...) all together.
God, root, what is the difference?
It is very difficult to decide where the universities should draw the line. I don't think the RIAA should have anything to do with it, but University bandwith is very valuble accedemically.
I know there are many financial and even political obsticles for a public university to increase its bandwith, and these political obstacles are not just copywrites, but agencies competing for the same money, but that is a topic in itself.
When I want to use MatLAB over a remote connection (I live off campus and have a cable modem) I don't want the students in the dorm (who don't pay that much more for network bandwith) to bog down the Universities net connection so much that it is impossible. Last semester I had to go to campus many times because the net connection was saturatred at the university.
I don't know where to draw the line on bandwith usage, but it has to be done somewhere.
I remember when they installed ethernet in the residences here at Waterloo -- for the first couple of months the top five computers in terms of bandwidth usage were all machines in the dorms. Then the admins clamped bandwidth usage to ~200MB/day. You can do whatever you want with the bandwidth, but once you're over the limit, that's it for the day. You could still communicate with other university machines (i.e., anything in uwaterloo.ca), but not to the outside world.
Not a bad solution, since you're welcome to do whatever you want with the bandwidth, but since you have a cap, you're not going to interfere with other users of the network.
The Federal Interstate system is mine in the end right? So I guess I can drive a Sherman tank down the middle of one. (So long as I own it).
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
This signature contains text from the worlds funniest signature.
the university is banning access to the service. as a philosophy major, i'm not really sure how, but as i understand it, that's what they're doing.
i had heard something about universities beginning to ban napster, though i never thought it would actually happen at ohio state, where i go to school. but this past monday, the school announced that they were blocking campus access to napster- and they have. disturbing, considering we're one of the biggest colleges in the country. we've responded by sharing all the mp3s we have on the school network... but it just isn't as efficient or easy as napster to find the songs you want. c'est la vie.
"The new wave is not value-added; it's garbage-subtracted" - Esther Dyson, Dec 1994
A friend of mine got a very polite email from his college sysadmin asking what he was doing with 5Gb of bandwidth to unusual ports, and a request to stop it.
I think this is perfectly reasonable as the network is not there for collecting MP3s.
"The new wave is not value-added; it's garbage-subtracted" - Esther Dyson, Dec 1994
Who uses Napster anyway? I tried it out and couldn't find anything but the most common tracks for the bands I was interested in.
I'd rather use MP3 to trade rare tracks and bootlegged concerts than Top 40 crap that's available at every single music store in the world. Unfortunatly it's nearly as hard to find a lot of these things online as it is in real life, thanks to all the kiddies and their "I can turn on any fsucking radio station and hear this but that's not good enough" MP3 collections.
All i do know is that if you own the CD/DVD/whatever yourself you can convert it to any format you want (mp3,mpg etc.) and watch away to your hearts content (even if a EULA forbids it i think, but IANAL)
This is at the heart of that DeCSS thing. They're just watching their DVD on a Linux box and they can take any step (incl. reverse engineering) in order to avail of their right to watch the DVD which they bought with hard-earned cash - but that's another story!
You sir, are truly a fucking moron. Who the fuck uses napster for legal mp3s? YEA REALLY THAT HAPPENS. God damn fucking moron.
I bet CD-burners are used for illegal copying about 90% of the time. What about the legal/illegal use ratio of guns?
Anyway, I'm sure there are more legal mp3's than you think been transferred by napsters. A fair few in my own collection are legal (got from mp3.com's trance section) and if i were using Napster (which i can't due to a damned firewall) i wouldn't be surprised if much of the mp3's up/down-loaded were legal.
I suppose you're right. I was going into rant mode. The one line at the end of my original post saying the universities can do what the want with their own network wasn't emphasised by me enough.
/. :-)
I was ranting about my belief that the use/distribution/development of things like this is ok IMHO. It wasn't censorship because the Uni can rightly insist their network is only used for academic purposes but that not the same as Network Solutions or the Government or something banning it entirely.
I wish there was a way to edit ones own comments on
BTW, I did read the full article first
Other people have said the same thing that you said. And at first, I agree with them. But the fees that colleges have for bandwidth and tuition are put there under the same logic as insurance. If we all pay a little, we can each get a big piece when we need it, assuming that we won't all need it (money, bandwidth, whatever) all the time. And people get mad when someone makes a fake fall at the store to get the insurance money because it's their money. The scammers don't get mad. In the same way, those who need info for school get mad because it's slow or unable to connect and those who are sucking up the bandwidth don't get mad as they are the ones using the bandwidth.
I hope that was comprehendible. It's very cold here and I can hardly feel my fingers.
Withdrawal before climax is very ineffective and those who try this are usually called "parents."
The whole piracy policing issue is complex and the kinks are still being figured out, hence this is probably not the best base for creating rules.
If the problem is bandwidth put in limits on bandwidth. It can't be that hard technically because my school manages to do it. People on ResNet have a quota for the term. If bandwidth overload is the problem then this is the proper solution. Messing with Address/Port blocking is just asking for people to develop workarounds. A simple bandwidth quota system is far simpler.
It's also interesting to note that UW has a comprehensive statement to govern the use of computing and network resources.
The quotas are 2500MB for a term with a max of 150Mb per day. All I know is that I'm glad I'm off campus with ADSL because my usage for two days is 1.1GB. Gotta love iCraveTV when you don't have cable.
I'm pretty sure napster uses TCP which IMO is a bit of a waste due to all the acks and setups that are required. Much better would be to use UDP. Multicasting song lists would also be a good idea to remove the obvious target of a centralised server (plus avoid having the possibility of pulling a Microsoft and changing the server so you have to download a bunch of their other crap software that you didn't want just so you can continue to use it [re: netmeeting/instant messanger])
Rich
Yes. TCP has a bigger overhead than UDP. By going to UDP, you get rid of that overhead. File transfers do not benefit from streaming. You could greatly increase the file transfer speed and not have to worry about connections timing out (as has happened to me a couple of times about 90% through a transfer
What crap software man? Napster doesn't make me download crap software...
No, not now it doesn't but you're reliant on a central server. They could change the software tomorrow so that to connect to the server, you have to download a new version of napster that flashes adverts all over your screen, or maybe you have to download "Napster instant messaging" or something. They don't do it But they could. A centralised server means that you are at their mercy. Plus if they get shut down tomorrow, well you're SOL.
File lists could be multicast, updated every couple of minutes, files could be UDP transfered with back filling for dropped blocks. No server dependency, slicker, more reliable file transfer.
I'm not saying don't use napster, I'm just saying there are probably better ways of doing things. And I'm not complaining about it, I would only do that if I was willing to write something myself.
Rich
Ah yes, "chat" full of lively and interesting discussion. Or more realistically, the part/join messages of people who connect to the channel and then go to the other window to get down to the real business of transferring mp3s which after all, is what everyone's there for anyway.
Rich
Given napster's makeup, couldn't you just write another one, or use this one, and switch the port? I mean if napster is on port X, then switch to pory 90, 73, 371298.... I support musicians, and i buy CD's, but jeez!
one, you can't ban it, cause it will mutate two, it is perfectly legal (so far) upgrade your network - i go to virginia tech, most wired small town in the US, we have an OC-3, dual t3's, 3 sets of dual t1's for backup. why is it i only get 15-20 K/s?
~zero
sig?
If it's my dime, I can spend all day searching for and indexing AC "Naked and petrified/grits down the pants" posts if I want to.
No, you can't.
Your money is paying for your slice of the bandwidth pie. Just as all of the other student's money is paying for their slice. If you are downloading your "naked grits" and it doesn't interfere with them doing their work on the network, fine. No problem.
However, if your constant downloading is having an adverse effect on other students attempts to use the network, then you are abusing the network. When that happens, I'll ask you to stop. If you don't, then I'll unplug your data port from the hub.
Your right to use the network is no more important than all of the other student's right to use the network. As long as you respect their right to use the network, I'll make sure they respect your equal right to use the network.
mr.nobody
--Don't you wanna go where nobody knows your name?
Despite the obvious troll nature of your post, I shall lower myself to issuing a response because I feel that their might be someone who actually wants to know what you are asking
Please enlighten me...just HOW is this MP3 craze really helping artists? I don't want to hear any 'theoretical' answers either, about how musician A 'could' distribute their music with MP3's and avoid the record companies...I'd like to see some REAL EXAMPLES of it and see if the atists are REALLY PROFITING from MP3's. All I've heard so far is lame excuses and pontifications about'freedom' of speech.
I don't even know where to start. First of all, I've never heard any sort of freedom of speech argument for mp3s, but I suppose someone might have made such an argument at some point. Secondly, I can give you numerous examples of mp3's helping artists from my life alone. For starters, mp3.com sells cd's that contain the songs of their artists in both mp3 and normal cd audio format. The artists choose the songs, choose the price and choose the coverart and mp3.com does the rest. For every cd sold, mp3.com gets half and the artist gets half (the average cd sells for about 7 bucks). I personally have bought six of these cd's in the last month or so. I highly recomend you give some of the songs at mp3.com a listen.
Secondly, I have bought countless cd's from artists I never would have heard of had I not sampled their music via mp3 first. In fact, every cd I've bought in recent history is from music that has come to me that way. I buy, on average, about 5 cd's per month (not including those mp3.com ones).
Lastly, I have purchased music at emusic.com (they might be giants cds) and I plan on doing so again in the future.
I hope that helps set the reocord straight.
But if you are trapped in the residence halls, their service is all you can get. Think about it this way, five years ago, the "new" dial-up gateway at UK was installed, with a huge pool of 28.8 modems. The students could use this for full net access. Two years later, it was restricted to within university domains .uky.edu, but still no other solution other than another ISP, but that ties your phone, and the university does not sell extra phone lines to dorm residents. We were told fall 98 that a high speed networking option was coming, by december I was told by the VP of Info. Sys. that 640kbs connections were the minimum bid spec. What we ended up with was @home with 128k down/64k up connections, first level install/ setup/troubleshoot techs that were sent out on 4 hours of training(I'm still one of them, the pay is decent), and complete and total idiots at the cable company who are our second level and network ops people. I have to lie bold faced to people not running Win 9x/NT or MAC OS8.X or better and say that our network does not support them, even though I know damn well it does. So I say fuck them, I'm moving off campus where DSL is dirt cheap
Read my plan to save the Bengals
Split four ways you come out 15 bucks ahead a semester. Thank God Insight/@Home scared GTE into droping the price on their far better service.
Famous Scott Adams quote "The people that work for the cable company are the ones that weren't smart enough to work at the phone company!"
Read my plan to save the Bengals
If you want to really get technical, let's look at the AUP we have here at Drexel...
1. All computer and network access is denied unless expressly granted. Access is generally granted by the Office of Information Resources and Technology in the form of computer and network accounts to registered students, faculty, staff, and others as appropriate for such purposes as research, education (including self-study), or University administration. [My italics]
Technically, we can bust you for playing the latest game over the network, unless you can somehow clain it's for research. But frankly, I'm not going to spend my time trying to look for every user who is doing something not covered under research, education, blah, blah, blah. I've got other things to worry about, and generally they don't use that much bandwidth to really be noticable. Feel free to ruin your GPA in your own way *grin*
But getting to where we really get on your case...
6. You may not engage in actions that interfere with the use by others of any computers and networks, that interfere with the supervisory or accounting functions of the systems, or that are likely to have such effects. Such conduct includes, but is not limited to, the placing of unlawful information on the system; the transmitting of data or programs likely to result in the loss of the recipient's work or system downtime; the sending of "chain letters" or "broadcast" messages to lists or individuals; any other use that causes congestion of the networks or interferes with the work of others.
That last part says it all. If we look at where our bandwidth is going, and for some reason you have a big lump of it, and you can't give us a good reason as to why you're using that huge lump of bandwidth, we're going to cut you off, plain and simple. Have a nice day.
We have the usual mentions of not using our network to transmit copyrighted material without permission, academic honesty and all that, but it really boils down to a matter of if you're making us notice you.
The question I raise is, how hard is RIAA going to push us? I can understand if it's sitting on one of our university owned machines, we'd have no problems erasing those no matter who put that up there, as that's our property. But what about servers which the students are running, regardless of what kind of bandwidth they take up? Are we going to be expected to watch each and every frigging packet on the network to make sure it's not copyrighted, or part of a copyrighted item? If that's what RIAA wants, they can blow it out their ass.
I can understand about them being worried, as they don't want to let it appear that they are not actively defending their copyrights. However, I also respect the fact that the students are free to use their own personal computers as they see fit, as long as they are not taking up too many resources. Now if they ask me where this IP is located that they have found objectionable, likely copyrighted material, I'll happily provide a physical location so that THEY can talk to the person, and find out if it's a true copyright violation. I don't have the authority to break into a personal computer on campus owned by a student. You get the police to do that yourself.
Well, I guess I might be a bit different case than most, but...
I have a huge collection of Cassette tapes, CD's, and records (yeah, I'm old enough for that). Heck, I've even got a couple of 8 track tapes, and no way to play them anymore.
And I should say DID have a huge collection of CD's. They were stolen - someone broke into my pickup truck, and stole them, an amp, and the CD player. Pretty depressing. However, I had about 100 of the CD's on MP3 format. The artists made thier money off of me.
Quite a bit of the stuff from back in the days of cassette tape I now also have on MP3 format - I own the music, so, I'm legit. I'm not legit with the stuff that was on the CD's but, eventually I will be again.
Almost everyone I know in the face to face world uses MP3 now - however, most of them have started using it as a convenient form of storage. Most MP3's do have a little bit of loss, but, not enought to worry about, so, they set up WinAMP or the equivalent, and set up their play lists so they can program, work, play, whatever and have pretty much thier own radiostation of thier favorite music, without commercials, etc.
Most people I know are VERY legit about it. Plus, lets face it - some things you just can't get on MP3 format from Napster in the first place. I just repurchased Boston's Walk On CD (don't bother commenting on my taste in music) again because no one is willing to rip the entire Walk On suite (5 tracks long) in such a way that you can listen to it in it's original format! Most of the stuff on MP3 format is the most popular stuff at the moment - not all the other tracks on a CD (unless it's a particularly popular band). So if you want to hear what else a group has done, well, you have to go get the CD anyway.
Again - this is for the people I know in the face to face world. That doesn't account for all the people who don't bother to buy the CD's, don't care about anything but the most popular music, etc. Of course - these were the same people who dubbed cassettes from thier friends instead of buying it!
Davis Ray Sickmon, Jr - looking for something to read? Check out my three free novels at MidnightRyder.org
I agree with Millinium about the bandwidth constraints. We are coming up with ideas to consume bandwidth faster than bandwidth is increasing. Maybe we will see a quantum leap in the near future, but for now, we're stuck. This issue is closely related, but not entirely the same issue as whether or not an employer has the right to limit net usage. He who pays the bills makes the rules. It's slightly interesting because at final analysis, it's the same students who want the bandwidth who pay the bill payer. On the other hand do we really want tuition to increase just to provide unlimited bandwidth?
On the RIAA front, they are trying to figure out a way to prevent piracy without taking every person with an illegal copy to court. Now, what RIAA should do, is get a court order that allows them to audit the music that is contained on Napster. If all the pirated music were marked "private" and accessable to the owner only, the piracy problem might be reduced. It is piracy. No if ands and buts about it. If you posess a song that you have not bought rights to, the recording studios have legal remedies, unfortunately these copyrights are somewhat unenforceable because the cost to enforce is greater than the asset they are protecting or the penalties attached to them. Don't give me guff about trial ware and all that. It's the exception for a software author to get his fair return out of shareware, so trial ware music would be just as unfair.
Termigan
Today is all we really have. We should all live it well: it is our stepping stone to all of our tomorrows.
Wow, good points. The Music business is really messed up, and there has got to be a better way.
But, unfortunately, there's a dark side of MP3. People who have no care in the world but free stuff are using MP3 to distribute WAREZ. People ripping copyrighted CDs and distributing them as if they were in the public domain. Even if they're extorting money from bands, it's legal. Labels have a right to be upset about their property being given away for free, and unfortunately the independent stuff gets cought in the cross fire. If you did away with pirated MP3's, the Labels wouldn't have a legal leg to stand on, and all would be good!
If it were independents on MP3 versus major label signed bands on traditional media, I think that bands might even be able to make some money! Then add a secure format where you could get good music for 50 cents a song, and you'd be really cooking with Gas. At 50 cents, there would be very few people who would begrudge them their money. Maybe you couldn't be a millionare, but maybe there'd be more people who made money at it.
Just some ramblings from some guy would love to see a perfect world.
Termi
Today is all we really have. We should all live it well: it is our stepping stone to all of our tomorrows.
Technology is changing! That's why it can happen now. Jukeboxes ran off of the desire to hear 'MY' song, but they have died. Maybe it's the advent of good quality tape so you can record it from a friend or the radio. Maybe it's that we live in a prosperous society that buys what it wants. Whatever the case, there is currently no popular pay to play buisness model, but Jukeboxes suggest that such a desire exists. While I'm not going to pay significant money for an MP3 because its quality is not as good as a CD, I would pay 5 or 10 cents for something very high quality that I can download quickly, listen to once and then decide if I want to buy. I think that with the right technology, we could get that lost revenue to the artists and reward the good ones, not just the ones who stick with it past all the trash.
I'm with the pundits who say that Electronic distribuiton is the wave of the future, but you've got to have security for that to work. You can't count on the lack of quality to make someone buy something if they can just get a pirated copy that is the exact thing that they'd buy. How much shareware actually gets paid for?
There's nothing special, or soon there will be nothing special about a physical CD you hold in your hand. It's just something to hold bits after all. Once you have made the quantum leap to electronic distribution of music, (It'll take more bandwith of course...) you have the capability to agressively compete with any buisness that insists on Brick and Mortar delivery of any product that doesn't have to be physical. Right now, if the story posted here about the music industry is right, the record companies are little better than Pimps. Tell the artists what they want to hear, then work them to death for just a drip of money. When we have the tools, we should support anyone who gets rid of that insidious buisness model. It that benefits everyone BUT the artist, and good bands aren't rewarded!
Just my opinion, but I think we should be smart revolutionaries, not attacking a dinosuar without any hope of success. The fact that MP3 is being used for piracy makes it an easy target for the existing industry who doesn't want to lose it's cash cow. Maybe they are stretching the case by leaning on MP3.com and anyone who enables MP3.com to do business, but I think there's a case there. If I have CDRs that I pass around as "keys" to get access to MP3s of those CDs, piracy via MP3 has just gotten effortless. RIAA has a right to be upset at that. Don't support the pirates, support the artists that make the cool music. Be careful about what you advocate. Agreeing with napster, even though it has a large potential for piracy, though not advocating crime, opens the concept of MP3s up to unneccessary attacks.
Termi
Today is all we really have. We should all live it well: it is our stepping stone to all of our tomorrows.
Their is no censorship in this part im 99% sure of it. The School reserves the right to do this and explains this to you in some pamphlet or something. Or at least every school ive seen. If you dont like it. If your using their network you have either agreed to these terms or are stealing network access (im assuming the first). So its your own damn fault they can block what they decide is questionable. Another point is because you are on the schools network your actions reflect on the school. In that case they have an obligation to make sure they use the network correctly.
OK, who's going to port this to Linux!?
I'll admit, I had no idea (still don't) know how my cable company (roadrunner) limits thier user bandwidth (anyone know?). But this dummynet thing is just too cool.
Thanks for the info Brian!
-- Gunther T Dull is not responsible for his opinions.
And yes, I did download that clip off of the Internet.
And no, I'm not touching my privates right now. :-)
Chris "Bob" Odorjan
Sadly, there is some slight potential for this grim possibility to become reality in AZ. It wouldn't just be Universty policy, either. Take a look: http://wildcat.arizona.edu/papers/93 /81/01_4_m.html. (The bottom half is the most relevant part of the story.)
--It burns! --It's loaded with wasabi.
The idea that universities install dorm-wide networks to improve education is laughable. They do it because they're competing for students who want such a connection - and who mostly want it for reasons that aren't particularly educational in nature.
College Students DO pay for their bandwidth, that is what fees help pay for (along with everything else). If students pay, why not let them use it.
Students pay for education, not for unlimited mp3-downloading bandwidth.
Are there really people out there who would choose a University based on their internet usage policy? That's sad to even think about.
I'm sure any court would (IMO rightly) see that the University is well within its rights to curtail what it views as illegal use of its network, particularly an illegal use which is sapping away bandwidth from legitimate network uses.
Also, anyone upset about this should be aware that fighting this, or spearheading massive campaigns to try to "fuck the University" could backfire with Unis drafting REALLY STRICT terms of service that disallow game playing, casual web surfing, etc (anything that isn't specifically related to school/educational activities).
I believe the universities are more intrested in preserving the bandwith for academic puporses, and that is the reason for the ban on Napster, not to ban MP3 trading. System Admins are not policemen, they just want to assure that every student has the ability to enjoy the bandwith many of us take for granted.
Jeff P.
they are banning napster because it uses 5% of their bandwidth! why don't they just ban HTTP? it probably takes up 80% of their bandwidth!
Unless there is a massive bidding war between music labels for a particular artist, most new artists make a painfully small percentage of the sales of their songs. The artists make more money on the concert tours by far. So, lets say that 10% of the musicians target age group really likes the music that they make. If they get their music into more people's hands, then there are naturally going to be more people who are going to go to the concerts and potentially buy the T-shirts, buttons, bumper stickers, etc. And if their fan base grows, then the next contract that they sign will most likely be more favorable towards the musician. This is how the Madonna's and Garth Brooks' of the world sign these amazingly large contracts. A lot of folks heard their music and (for some reason) liked it. In my mind mp3's are just another way to get small artists heard by the masses.
You may rent the facilities and network, but they still *own* it. They are scared the RIAA would start suing, can you blame them? If you were the person in charge, what would you do?
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Universities are becoming more and more communist all the time. I know certain universities that have banned public speakers because of their conservative views, while the university was far far to the left. Thats free thinking? It also comes down to money. The last thing they want is a million dollar lawsuit to fight.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Duhh... I was responding to and conversing within the context of the previous post (Read up!) If your prone to ridiculous extrapolations then take it to wasteoftime.com I'm not biting the bait, Troll!
Yeah, I have several gigs of MP3s-- they're 100% legal and I don't own any CDs. I just download music from places like mp3.com. I'd much rather listen to the creative stuff I find on the net then bland corporate shwag like "bush."
Even though the industry doesn't realize yet, you are still giving them power by even pirating the music they produce. Eventually, all record companies will realize that they need to change their business model, and all the (big lablel) music you're listen to right now is essencially advertising for their new online venture. With their horrible treatment of artists and fascist lobbying efforts (such as killing the DAT), these people don't deserve your attention.
For those of you out there that believe in the Internet and MP3s, go to places like mp3.com, find some music you like, and then catch their live show when they come to your town. Buy a T-shirt, a CD or maybe a video while you're there. Nobody can pirate a live show!
Whats the current law on MP3s? From what i understand (perhaps completely wrong), the artist can say whether or not (s)he wants MP3s made of the song ... but if an MP3 is illegally made, i was under the impression that the file itself was legal for transfer. That is, that it is the act not the storing of MP3s that can be illegal. Anybody know for sure?
Those Bastards! ;)
//3000 people are going to be required to download Linux this semester.... 1/4 of them will need to get it during this week, and we need to know that we'll have the bandwidth to handle that.) Well if you know that that many people are going to download the same thing, cache it locally, stay off the internet entirely, DUH.
What, me worry?
Its not just a matter of whose dime it is.
My school has had napster blocked for several months now. initially, there was quite an uproar, with people spouting off about freedom of speech, and how their daddy pays taxes so they can have whatever they want. (Its a public school).
The problem isnt even necessarily that the legality of the whole thing is questionable at times.
the problem is that while we have a very fast internet connection, it is intended for educational use. This doesnt mean that you cant use it for other purposes. No one is going to stop you from looking at porn or whatever else, SO LONG AS IT IS NOT INTERFERING WITH THE MISSION OF THE UNIVERSITY. When napster is pulling hundreds of gigs a day thru our campus, that is to the point where the bandwidth used is infringing on what other people need to use for legitimate university business. I shouldnt be having to wait forever to download patches for solaris because a bunch of kiddies are in their dorm rooms serving up a veritable library of mp3's.
And adding a faster connection isnt an easy solution. It costs money. A lot of money. We have OC-3's, T-1s and all sorts of other stuff running all over the place, and normally i can download stuff at a very reasonable rate (> 200K/s)....you cant justify adding higher bandwidth for mp3s......
my $0.02
Oregon State University had blocked Napster access for it's users on the RCN (Resident Network in the dorms). I figure it's only a matter of time before some bright CompSci major finds a way around it, or an unscrupulous SysAdmin starts selling access on the site. People will always find a way to get what they want.
Vodka - It's not just for breakfast anymore!
The University may cut the final check, but it's the students' dime in the end.
Well, no. Especially in state universities, like the referenced oregon state student tuition and fees pay a miniscule *fraction* of the costs of the university.
The statement would be "It's the students' 0.16 cents in the end."
Oh come down off your high horse! "trying to ban all communication, including normal speech"??? What a load! They are simply enforcing the campus network's AUP (acceptable use policy) which states that transfering illegal (as in copyrighted) material over campus networks is strictly forbidden. This has absolutely nothing to do with blocking free speech.
Absolutely correct, just because you goto school some where doesn't give you the right to use as much bandwidth as you want.
You are privledged to be able to use as much as you do, and when something doesn't work, or when your admin shuts you down then what? You don't bitch to them and say "Damn you! Give it back!"
You need to respect them and they will reward you be explaining why and what they are doing... yelling at the net gods will not result in your net access being returned.
In fact it may just have the opposite effect, you may never get it back... and heaven help that your computer may break down and you need to call on the admins for help...
The problem with your statement is that it only applies to bands involved with major labels. The digital audio revolution allows artists to make their own CD's etc. with a relatively small investment, and keep the lion's share of the profits. Real numbers: you can set up a digital 8-track studio capable of pro-quality results for a 1-time investment of 10-20k. (I know, I've priced dozens of variations.) Many mastering houses press CDs for about $3 or less per unit (buying about 1000 units.) Say you put out 5 CDs total, with 1000 copies each. Cost per unit for the gear is now $4, add $3 for printing/packaging - unit cost is $7. Band sells for $15; $8 per disk profit. (Perspective: Most big names get around $2 per disk in a straight deal; hence the greater profit in touring & merch.) OK: 5 CDs, 1000 units each = 5000 units. Big label pays 10k to artist. Homebrew makes 40k. Who's better off? (Incidently, if Madonna's next album sells 5000 units, she'll be dropped like a hot potato!) As far as getting new bands out there, the sword cuts both ways. You tend to become a very tiny fish in an immense, ocean-sized pond.
UCF's network problems seem to be caused by inept administration and poor maintenance. UCF has had terribly low bandwidth to the outside world for a long time. UCF's problems aren't caused by Napster; they will not go away if Napster is blocked. Peter Doege
This is a issue about censorship. Oregon state university gets there funding from the goverment so they should respect the students first admendments rights. Napster is not illegal and I think the courts will validate that point. It's what the users do on there that is illegal. Should the residential computer network ban the use of IRC channels because of all the warez and mp3's that you can get from them? Should they ban Usenet because of the warez and mp3's that you can find on there. NO. If this was a ISP or a corporation then this would be a different issue and then I would say yea they have the right to ban then. But this is a goverment instution in a country where people have the right to the freedom of speach this shouldn't be happening. And the other students that go to osu and work for Audioglobe.com believe that this is the case. I also believe that the $75,000 cost of bandwidth based on peak usage is a bougus number that the university is throwing around.....if you check out nero.net then you can see that OSU doesn't even come close to a peak amount of bandwidth that would cost that much.......shit I've been ranting sorry guys....if you want you can e-mail me at hummertc@ucs.orst.edu to get more information about what is happening here at Oregon State University with napster Thanks for listening to me go off Christoher Hummert
You fucking capitalist idiot, the artist will get MORE money if we eliminate the publisher from the loop (not to mention the state). I am also a fucking capitalist, btw. Not to mention that if you only treat the economic argument, their loss is ZERO (I couldn't afford to pay those prices anyway) and my gain is greater than zero, so there's a clear economic advantage in breaking the copyright. Uf, those damn self-proclaimed capitalists who know nothing about economics... Note: I love counter-arguments. Please also cc them to marcel@aiurea.com. Thanks.
All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past, are placed irrevocably in the public domain
Urp. I suppose this doesn't use the bandwidth provided by the University? Upstream requires bandwidth, too.
IMNSHO, digital music CAN indeed be a judicious use of university services. I know a music history major would be using the U's services for academic purposes.
However, if you're just using Napster to download the latest Backdoor Boys album, then you're probably in violation of one University this-or-that. Of course, if you really want said music, you'll ferret the web for it, copy or rip a friend's CD, or (gasp) purchase it in the store.
--
"No Salt." http://www.arich.net/
You know, there's always the possibility of using Luigi Rizzo's excellent dummynet. Yes, it's for FreeBSD, which would mean changing the Linux firewall box to a FreeBSD firewall box.
Here's some information from the dummynet home page. I hope this helps!
dummynet is a flexible tool for bandwidth management and for testing networking protocols. It is implemented in FreeBSD but is easily portable to other protocol stacks. There is also a one-floppy version of FreeBSD which includes dummynet and a lot of other goodies, see below. dummynet works by intercepting packets in their way through the protocol stack, and passing them through one or more pipes which simulate the effects of bandwidth limitations, propagation delays, bounded-size queues, packet losses, etc.
Each pipe can be configured separately, and packets are forwarded to the appropriate pipe using the ipfw packet filter. Thus you can apply different limitations/delays to different traffic according to the ipfw rules (e.g. selecting on protocols, addresses and ports ranges, interfaces, etc.).
--
Brian Fundakowski Feldman
This is even more apropos given mp3s, as they are as 'free as radio' for all practical purposes, but they are not a desirable audio quality compared to the source material. They can be quite listenable but nobody would argue they are a fidelity improvement over the original full-bandwidth data.
So, it's like a realworld of that AT+T feel-good ad, "One day you can watch the movie you want.... _when_ you want", only it's happening with audio first. It's like massively parallel radio- a lower fidelity version of the music is broadcast from somewhere- as a CD- and then countless people 'tune in' to the signal, and keep 'rebroadcasting' it, causing the effective bandwidth to become nearly infinite. A song released today need never die or drop off the charts- mp3 can keep it before the attention of the interested listeners for months, years. Any of those people can seek out the source CD and buy it if they like, just as if they were hearing the tune on the radio and wanted to own their own copy.
In an age when you have stuff like the Klipsch Permedia computer speaker system sneaking formidable audio performance into people's lives by disguising itself as a home theater system- it will become more significant, this distinction between the lower quality 'broadcast' of mp3s, and the performance of CDs or audio DVDs. What the industry _should_ be doing if it wasn't corrupt, insane, and bereft of common sense, is this: encourage mp3s as much as possible, especially 128K encoded ones that really compress a lot, and discourage _other_ types of downloadable digital media which might in future deliver performance closer to the store-bought physical media. I can tell you that you can get _very_ good sound out of mp3, but there are limits- the risk is that if the industry can step on mp3s and push some encrypted higher-quality format, said format would only get cracked eventually leaving the industry with the same problem and even less incentive for people to buy the physical media.
'Secure format' is an absurd term. Whose security is at stake? Not the consumer's, the record industry's. How secure is it? Completely unsecure- the better the format, the more of a risk it poses when it's eventually cracked and turned to 'warez', as you call it. They need to rent a clue and figure out that digital formats are like radio- and set things up so that everybody's happily swapping the equivalent of AM radio, rather than invent stereo FM radio and then attempt to build a coin-slot into all receivers which is only going to be massively defeated by the listening public.
If you're so ready to give 50 cents to a musician you like, bless you my friend ;) and I'd rather give the music to you, and then offer you EXTRA FINE versions of the same music for if you want it to sound extra nice. That way, you can have it when you're hurting for money, but if you can afford it, then I can sell you something _real_ that you can have and do what you like with, even sample bits of it and make your own music.
Well, it really depends on the person. You are correct that mp3 is just audio warez for some people. If somebody downloads full albums of bands they like and then burns them to a CD-R, this is obviously simple piracy. It's not particularly an mp3 problem though - it's the exact same thing as borrowing a friend's CD and burning it to a CD-R.
Other people actually find out about music from mp3s. I was not a Nine Inch Nails fan until a friend sent me several of their mp3s a few years back...now i have 8 of their CDs. They obviously didn't lose money from my piracy of their songs. 99.99% of the bands on mp3.com would have absolutely no album sales if it weren't for mp3. Would I have bought a Painted Blue album if it weren't for finding their mp3s there? Of course not - I wouldn't even have known they existed.
There's also a fairly large contingent of "semi-legal" mp3s, nearly the exact same thing as CD- and tape-based bootlegs. Live shows, rare recordings, unreleased demo tapes, etc., all circulate in mp3 just as they did on bootlegs before. This is probably technically piracy, but in almost all the cases the material is unavailable from a "legitimate" source, so there is no revenue loss by the artist (or the record label).
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
What's he got to do with this?
>The University may cut the final check, but it's
>the students' dime in the end.
Uh, no. But you already knew that, didn't you?
Of that dime, a penny or two are the students'. What students pay is dwarfed by what contributors and endowments pay at private schools, and by what governments pay at public schools.
So, by that token, you can use the College gym to have a coed naked basketball game?
;-P
I'm betting you also get pulled over, and procceed to tell the police officer how you pay his/her salary..
-- I'm the root of all that's evil, but you can call me cookie..
The Digital Millenium Copyright Act has provisions to prevent the possesion, use, creation, etc. of software and tools that have primary usage of copyright violation. So it is legal. And regardless of what the stated intent of Napster Co., an simple observation is enough to indicate that the primary use of the napster software and servers is the illegal distribution of mp3s.
Agreed, on all counts.
Now, prove it in court. Thanks to our lovely "innocent until proven guilty" clause in the Constitution (a Very Good Thing, by the way), you have to prove that when Napster wrote the software, he did it to promote piracy. Proof of intent is a very difficult, if not impossible, thing to do.
If RIAA can't prove this, and I very much doubt that they can, then they have no legal grounds for pressing charges against Napster.
Y'know. I used to feel the same way. But because of napster our College is most likely going to have to raise tuition to pay for more bandwith (currently Napster is using a large portion of it.) Try explaining to the majority of students who don't use napster or don't have a computer, why their tuition is going up because of the few who do. Try seeing this from the other point of view!
-jay
I checked out their songs on mp3.com and was impressed. My only real connection with metal is through Motorhead, but this bands LotR's songs seems to fit the bill very well.
The 2nd song 'Nightfall' is fun too, kind of a Scorpions meet Sweet and jam out at Stonehenge with Spinal Tap and a few dwarves and lots of beer sorta thang.
The mp3 I got for LotR's sounds very distorted, which might be an intentional form of protection, or might just be the crappy 5-y-o soundcard I'm using in this machine.
In this case, as pertains to the discussion at hand, I won't be rushing to buy their cd, but the band is solidly on my radar now, no thanks to Radio Land, Hollywood or Wall Mart!
Gotta fscking love that.
**>>BELCH
Remember when people bought 45's? Some bands, the 'one hit wonders' based a successful career on a few singles. Nowadays there's no way for a band to really put out a single. You can put 2 or 3 songs on a cd, but most folks aren't that interested, and there's really no entry-level distribution for that sort of thing.
The idea of paying a coupla bux for a single (after previewing a free, lower-quality version) is an awesome breakthrough. Sure, the song will passed around once someone buys and downloads it, but a lot of people will appreciate the opportunity to support and encourage good bands without having to go broke, and bands can worry more about writing one, two or a few good songs instead of filling up a cd with crap.
Whoo hoo I say.
**>>BELCH
The environment has changed. Organisms, including musicans and the RIAA will have to adapt or die. In the short term, people will suffer to one degree or another, while in the long term they will find a way to. Kind of like when a Steel Mill closes down. Sad for some, a joyous breakthrough for others. Inevitable either way. Nothing lasts forever.
No one owes the RIAA or any musician a living. They have to figure out how to adapt themselves and they will. The smart ones already have. The sort-of-smart ones are watching anxiously from the sidelines, hesitant to jump in.
The Law of the Jungle has no Ethics. Somewhere, a fluffy kitten is purring. In Space, they let you eat powdered ice cream.
**>>BELCH
The RIAA is Nazi Germany and Eric Clapton is Hitler. Death. Mayhem. Destruction of Biblical Proportions.
Whew! Let's go home!
**>>BELCH
You can shout all you want for it to stop, but chances are it won't. It's beyond your or anyone else's control. No use bellyaching. Shovel the driveway and go sledding with the kids.
**>>BELCH
And you are sitting ... here?
You're wrong in thinking that musicians are getting screwed. They're not. Musicians make almost no money from selling CDs anyways; they tend to get contractually raped by the same recording industry fatcats who are bitching about audio CD piracy (conincidence?). Have you heard any artists publicly complain in genuine about MP3 proliferation? I haven't. I have seen some posters where RIAA payed artists money to sign their name on an anti-piracy statement. But by and large, most artists couldn't care less.
It's a well known and time-honored fact that music artists make far more from concerts than CD sales - anecdotally, look at who the rich rock stars are: guys who are really good live (David Bowie, the Stones, Aerosmith, arguable Ricky Martin, Madonna, etc.) A lot of well known artists seem to prefer MP3 to convential distribution, simply because they're tired of being whored by the recording industry. It's cheaper and more effective to have your singles put out electronically, especially when that means more fans paying $60 for a concert ticket that the record company doesn't get a single cent of. It seems like every day some label forces another of their artists to take down MP3s off their site (see Tom Petty, Pete Townshend, many others) in spite of that artist's protests to the contrary. What does this tell you?
--
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
...via MP3s, raise yer hand. *raises hand*
I was JUST about to reply to the one person who posted "Show me a RL example of someone who bought CD's from MP3s"...specifically, around a month ago I bought "Nightfall in Middle Earth" after finding one of the two record stores in Louisville that had it at the time, and will be getting the rest of the catalogue as soon as I can get the money up to special-order the albums what haven't been re-released in the US on Century Media yet.
I had not heard of them before hitting mp3.com, and it was largely by MP3s found on the net (plus "Into The Storm" being played on the Attitude Network on WTFX 100.5--yes, at least for two hours on Saturdays starting at midnight, real metal is still played on the air, at least in Louisville-- webpage is at www.foxrocks.com, and they MAY have started streaming by now). MP3s, including a few on Napster, were what convinced me to scare up not only the particular album but the entire catalogue (unless it's bands I KNOW I like, and half the time even then, I don't like to buy CD's unless there are at least three or four songs I like on it).
For that matter, there's another band called Angra which I similarly discovered via MP3s on various sites, and I'm hunting down THEIR entire catalogue, too...
Further yet, it was by previewing mp3s of songs off the latest Dream Theater album that led me to buy it (I like Dream Theater, but I also wanted to make sure it was worth shelling out $15 US for ;).
There are other bands, like Symphony X and Strativarius, that I've been considering buying albums from largely on the basis of MP3s of their music I've downloaded, often off progressive metal sites and often from official band sites. (Other than on the Attitude Network and occasionally on the Real Audio feed of KNAC, it's rather hard to "hear before you buy" with progressive metal [which happens to be one of my very favourite genres of music]. MP3s are, at least for me, a godsend. :)
Let's just say that, at least in my case, the existence of MP3 sites and utils like Napster have actually helped fill the coffers of Century Media, as well as the retirement funds of more than a few prog-metal artists. ;)
As for non-prog-metal, I can list another album that I've bought because I heard the MP3s first--Metallica's "S&M" (heard one song, liked it, found the MP3s, liked it enough to buy it).
Also, like others, I've gotten a few rare MP3s that would be considered bootlegs even in the vinyl versions (one set being a rip of a rare Motley Crue bootleg [yeah, yeah, yeah, I KNOW people will be crying blasphemy because I DARED mention Motley Crue and Blind Guardian in the same Slashdot post. You may all perform impossible acts of self-fellation, because one of my other favourite genres is hair metal. So there. Nyeah. ;P] from the Starwood show on New Year's Eve 1981--the show that led to the band actually being signed by a major label, and which includes a funny bit where Vince Neil totally fucks up "Shout At The Devil" as well as version 1.5 of "Looks That Kill" (yes, there's another version on the demos for "Shout At The Devil; if memory serves, it's been rereleased on the Motley Records rerelease CD's)...which I could probably not find outside of record-collector's conventions for less than $300 US.)
As an aside, I'm also more likely to buy from an artist if they put MP3s up--not just because I can preview, but because I think it's damned cool they're supporting the format (instead of something like Winblows Media or Real Blah-dio or SoDoMI). Personally, I'm hoping that when Lizzy Borden's new album comes out next month that the official website posts MP3s of it; if not, I hope someone else posts MP3s from it (so I can preview--odds are Lizzy and Metal Blade will get my money anyways, but I like to PREVIEW, damnit :).
-Windigo The Feral (NYAR!)
Expressly forbidden is expressing enthusiasm for FUN. Also including, but not limited to, are the following: beer drinking, using a computer to download anything, or upload Shaping electrons in a suspicious manner, etc. Any violation will result in a nasty letter from the dean and suspension of computer privs. Note: we've also decided to let the RIAA on campus to go into your machines. Your continued compliance is appreciated (and not optional).
Enjoy our NEW attitude towards higher learning!
1. It was used to pirate copyrighted material.
2. It was hogging a lot of bandwidth.
I told him I thought it was rather silly, and that people would just find a way around it in time. *shrug* Wasn't really a big deal to me, since I don't live on campus, I just download my MP3's at home with the cable modem, then FTP them to my work computer for my listening pleasure.
---
When in danger or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout. --Robert A. Heinlein
Answer the question AC.
Deal with the issue AC.
Is it right for a university to cripple the access that people pay them for to curb activity that could be either legal or illegal.
When do they start forbidding the downloading of JPG files? After all kiddy porn and bestiality pics could be distributed in jpg form.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
>>* The university can get 'supposedly' into hot water with the RIAA.
The RIAA would get their ass kicked in court by any University.
If having MP3s of any type was illegal, you'd be right. However some bands freely distribute music in MP3 format and allow people to trade them.
Have you ever heard the expression that "It's better to let 10 guilty men go free than to imprison one innocent man."?
If you can't prove that any specific student is illegally copying any specific MP3, then there are no grounds for this.
>> * They are paying for facilities for educational use.. not porn or other crap
Education does NOT mean...
1.Open mind.
2.Insert knowledge.
3.Close mind.
Education at the collegiate level is about the free exchange of information and ideas.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
>>I mean seriously, if you were in charge of such a network, and a chunk of it was being eaten up by a protocol that you knew was used for (more often than not) illegal activity, and condoning such activity would put you in a bad light to the students (and the parents of) who really wanted to use the net for research, what would you do?
I AM a network admin for the company that I work for. There is one user who takes massive amounts of bandwidth by opening up 8 windows in netscape and downloading massive amounts of patches and updates. When he takes too big a slice of the pie, I reset his connection. All without leaving my desk. If I had to do it on a university level, I'd throttle all connections to insure that no one person could take too big a slice of the pie. Once someone takes on the responsibility of policing network activity, they can no longer take refuge in just being a carrier. When will the MPAA sue this school for not stopping movie piracy? If they took steps to stop music piracy, they *should* have done the same for movies. Right?
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
I would not consider four hours before a deadline to be cutting it too close.
Some people don't consider 4 minutes before a deadline cutting it too close. What is your point?
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
I guess you have never had a hard professor in your life. I have many projects that I would start on within a few hours of receiving them and still be cutting it close. I have spent up to 120 hours in one week getting two projects done. Got A's on both.
I have had rough assignments and rough professors. I have procrastinated as well, when I got a bad grade because I waited too long, I just started sooner next time. It would have been juvenile to blame others for something that was my fault.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Kano, you're shooting yourself in the foot here.
.3K/Sec.
If someone has an actual need to download Linux for their school assignment (comp sci majors), then that's all fine and dandy. They're using the bandwidth the school assignments for actual work they need to do.
If some anthropology major decides to use Napster to examine some facate of society, then they too are within their legitamate needs.
But if some Computer Science major decides to download tons of MP3's just because he or she can't think of anything better to do, or they're just sick of their current music collection, then that's using bandwidth that someone else may actually need.
Imagine if you'd been at class all day, then at the library til 9, then you got back to your dorm room and your assignment for the night was to download the Linux kernel and compile it before 8AM. You think "Oh that's easy...." only to try to download it and find that you're not getting much better than
Great... you just flunked your homework because some kids are downloading MP3's all night.
Yes it does matter why. If it was because of the computer science majors using the bandwidth for legitamate needs, and that bandwidth turned out to be not enough, then the University could budget for that, raise tuitions a hair and have a paper trail as to why they needed to do so (3000 people are going to be required to download Linux this semester.... 1/4 of them will need to get it during this week, and we need to know that we'll have the bandwidth to handle that.)
Now, try explaining why they need more state funding or higher tuitions when it's because of Napster. "Yeah, our bandwidth is clogged from all this MP3 traffic. No, it's not because of any course requirement, our students just like it. Yes, other students complained they couldn't get their coursework done because of all that Mp3 stuff. But we need more money please."
That reduces your bandwidth charges, but you're still using the same network that people are using to download napster and whatever else. Caching it locally does nothing to address the fact that the pipes are stuffed full. It just moves the bottle neck elsewhere.
This server, open to all the world on a high speed connection is a prime canidate for non-university people to choose for quicker downloads. The main reason most universities are choosing to block Napster is not because of traffic generated by students (who would have gotten nearly as many mp3 before and after through other means) but because of the high amount of outgoing traffic which benefits no one at the school.
I saw this in meta-moderation. Nobody is likely to see my response, but I'll write it anyway! :-P
Please enlighten me...just HOW is this MP3 craze really helping artists?
Like many other people, you've been misled. You think that "MP3" must always mean "copyright infringement". It does not mean this. Or at least not always.
So how does MP3 benefit the artist today?
Legally distributed MP3 files on mp3.com give exposure to new artists who aren't played on what passes for radio stations these days. I've bought music from mp3.com artists. I'll continue to do so.
It's free advertisement. I've downloaded files over Napster for artists who I've heard of but not heard. Sometimes I find that the music does nothing for me. Other times, I find that I really like it. If I like it, I'll probably go buy an album. (I have yet to do so myself, but I've only been using Napster a short time.)
From where I'm sitting, MP3 is just another word for WAREZ, plain and simple.
Is that bad?
I used to be a "software pirate" when I was younger. (The term "warez" wasn't in vogue back then.) I played a "pirated" version of Sid Meier's Civilization on lab PCs. I couldn't have afforded to buy a copy of it, and I didn't have an x86 box to play it on (I was an Atari ST user). But it was a great game.
Later, I graduated from college, got a job, etc. I bought a copy of Civilization. And Civilization II. And Civ:CTP (for Linux). If/when Loki finishes the rumored SMAC port I'll probably buy that.
Sid Meier (and Brian Reynolds, and their companies, and Activision, and Loki) are slightly richer because I played a "pirated" copy of Civilization when I was in college.
What a lot of people don't seem to realize is that warez kids grow up. We become engineers, scientists, techies, lawyers, doctors, and so on. We're generally on the right-hand side of the IQ bell curve, so we have money. (No, I'm not rich, but I make enough money to buy my fill of music and software when I think it's worth buying.)
When the warez and MP3 kids of today (or the DVD kids of tomorrow?) grow up, what do you think they're going to do with all of their discretionary disposable income?
Kinda sad, isn't it.
Apparently, this university has no problem funneling gigabytes of Usenet porn through its network every night, yet, with something as simple as kids trading music, they throw a fit. I'm surprised they dont ban the sale of casette tapes on campus -- My lord, they could begin commiting similar crimes, like recording songs off the radio, or recording NFL games for later viewing! Before you know it, they'll begin ignoring the FBI warning at the start of their Blockbuster rentals, and tear the tags off their mattresses! Oh, the humanity! Please God, deliver us from such acts of anarchy!
Welcome to the 21'st century..More idiots per square mile than ever before.
Bowie J. Poag
Project Manager, PROPAGANDA For Linux (http://propaganda.themes.org)
Bowie J. Poag
I'm not saying we're helping them with MP3, but we listen to radio for free, and I doubt they make tons off that either, so how is MP3 really going to hurt them? I would assume artists really make most of their money from touring, and mp3 could be considered free publicity for the tour. or not. But don't pull that "oh, we're hurting the artists!" crap, because they're already so hurt by the record company's huge cut that our horrible mp3s (of songs many of us would never have bought anyway) really don't make much difference in the end (to the artists).
______________________________________
um, sigs should be heard and not seen?
rooooar
______________________________________
um, sigs should be heard and not seen?
rooooar
I bet if you took your Technology Fees, and Housing fees elsewhere, you could barely afford a 56k dialup. By combining the collective fees of all the students for a combined purpose, universities are able to provide higher bandwidth for everybody. That "combined purpose" is educational usage (that is why you're at school).
Yeah- I remember when I was just a little net tyke and I thought everything was free. "Yay!" I thought- "nothing costs anything anymore, no one has to pay for anything!" Then I took economics, and wised up fast. If nothing else bandwidth is very pricey, even at schools. Most kids at college just don't realize this because they get unlimited T1 access. But it ISN'T unlimited and it ISN'T costless- as many schools are discovering. I remember back in the day when I was running a 64kbps 32 user shoutcast server. Even the lazy as fuck student school admins had to stop snorting cheez-whiz to tell me to cut it out...
* The university can get 'supposedly' into hot water with the RIAA.
* They are paying for facilities for educational use.. not porn or other crap
---
-
ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
The North American Automobile Manufacturerers Association has announced a lawsuit against 1 million people who carpool. "This infringes upon our copyrights", according to one spokesperson. When you purchase an American made vehicle, you have made an agreement with the N.A.A.M.A. that you will not share your vehicle with anyone else.
The goal of the N.A.A.M.A. is for everyone to purchase their own vehicle. You also will never actually own your vehicle, just a license to use it. The N.A.A.M.A. reserves the right to revoke your license at anytime.
I explained this whole thing to some outsiders (ya'know, those folks that DON'T have high speed access 60/24/365, and don't know what /. means) and at the end they told me, "You're one of the good guys, fight the good fight" (or something similar).
I said thanks, we drank some more beer, yadda blah blah, g'night.
Resistance is not futile. It is fruitful.
+&x
Sure, the music industry sucks ass and don't deserve the cash, but ultimately by pirating MP3's and filling your CDR's with them doesn't help the individual artists one bit. Musicians are already getting screwed by the industry at large, they DON'T need to be doubly screwed by people pirating their music this way.
So, we shouldn't try and fight the people who are screwing the artists, but should instead support them in their screwing activities? I've seen too many "Where are they now" and "Behind the Musics" to think that I'm *helping* Britney Spears by buying her super-duper album.
So you're left with a choice, wait a sec, Choice. How much Basement Jaxx do *you* hear on the radio? I'd never heard them before. I'm sitting in a bar with a friend and he mentions them. What do I do? Go home type "Basement Jaxx" and start listening to some cool music. Now, pray tell, how is this bad? How much more likely am I now to buy their CD? I never would have heard *of* this band, much less had an oppurtunity to listen *to* them, without more effort on my part. Well, I'm a lazy consumer. There are lots of lazy consumers. Most just buy what they hear on the radio, or MTV, or what their immediate friends have. Now we have a chance to get exposed to the full spectrum of musical talents, and love more music.
I don't believe that I need to pay $16 dollars for a CD when I KNOW that $5 went to make sure I heard about it over and over again, $7 went to some guy because he had the other $5 to tell me about it, $1 pays for all the stuff it comes in, $2 goes to the company that stole, err, owns the rights to the song, which is the only way the artist (who gets some of that last dollar, minus taxes) could get the $5 to tell me about the song. Thats fscked up.
Oh, and, for your "you can't make any money giving away music" b.s. whining. I give you this link.
75,000 people at $175 a piece, that's real money. How? LIVE MUSIC. It's really the only music worth paying for, espcecially, (and this is important) since the Internet reduces costs of reproduction and distrubution for the producer to zero.
I make a conscious choice to support MP3, I think it's a great way to share music. And nobody gets hurt (unless you think it hurts artists for more people to pay attention to them). Hell, nobody has to do anything, but me and my anonymous benefactor. Artists make most of _their_ money from live shows anyway (at least real ones), music is a live art form. NO method of recording will ever replace being there, but, new technologies can change the real world value of things, often reducing thier usefulness to zero.
Oh, and by not blindly believing the people who stand to lose billions when people turn to MP3, you might end up with more cool stuff like this (a rebroadcast of all 14 hours of music from the other link). I'm not saying all bands can do this, but some can. And here is a very definite "Yes, you can make money by giving away music. You just have to keep making it, and do it very well."
+&x
It is a key part of a strategy for the artist to take control of their own destiny and start running things themselves.
This is absolutly true. I'm not an artist, but I do know that other forms of art (like comics) have done pretty well in the transition to the internet. The two things making the online comics successful are (1) direct connection between artist and consumer (i.e. people visit you page) and (2) the inherent visualness and interactivness of the media (a web page), but there is nothing keeping us from doing this with music too: Ideas:
a) We need a way to get back to the artist from the music. Currently you could put a little blurb in the end of all the songs you put on mp3 sites asking people to come get a longer version of the song without the blurb from your site, but this kinda sucks. I think the only real solution is going to be to change the mp3 players to support attaching web shit to be attached to the song (a button to launch netscape would show up if there was such content). This would allow the artists to include visual art, lyrics, links to buy stuff (shirts, CDs, special mp3s), and advertising (people would not delete the attached content because they would want to keep the useful part of the attached information. Eventually, a good chunk of that money people spend on radio adds could be going directly into the artist's pockets via banners).
Hell, the equipment companies should be willing to give good internet artists equipment in exchange for advertising now!
b) We need to promote the idea that music is a service and not a produce (sounds like maybe sunscream is doing this). Real fans would happily visit the site (or pay) for services like "mix of the day/week" and good artists can turn out a lot of music with is good just because you don't lissen to it a lot (like live versions and good jaming). Face it lissening to the same thing over and over gets boring!
Also, we need a better system of promotion like mp3 radio and ways of finding artists (another aspect of the service philosophy). I have not been to impressed with mp3.com and I think the artists could do MUCH better by promoting themselves if we develop the "infrastructure."
The bottom line: there are MASSIVE marketing oppertunities for music on the net. All it requires is someone who can make music, write code to take credit card orders, and run a buisness all at once.
Jeff
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
It matters because the bandwidth is not there to make the students happy. It is there to satisfy the desires of those who pay for the university, which include taxpayers either directly, or through government research grants, scholarships, low interest loans, etc, etc. Those desires usually boil down to:
1) Educate students.
2) Conduct research.
Downloading linux or bsd could possibly satisfy either of those. Downloading music almost definitely does not.
The cake is a pie
Some things never change. Back in my day, it was talk and rn that got banned. Fortunately, they banned it by removing execute permission from the files. (We only had terminals in those days.) Fortunately, those of us in the know had made personal copies.
:)
No one ever noticed that the execute bit was set on a couple of core files.
The cake is a pie
Excuse me? Do you think that colleges do this out of the kindness of their hearts? What do you think that tuition is for? Technology Fees? Housing Fees?
You forgot tax money. Most colleges are partially funded by taxes. So it isn't just your dime we are talking about, but mine as well. (As an old-fart taxpayer.) I know that my old school (UCSD) got about 3/4s of its income from sources other than tuition and student fees.
Now personally, I don't mind if someone listens to music, plays half-life, downloads porn, whatever over those lines, however, I mind very much if those doing so clog the bandwidth so much that students trying to use the thing for real work, or others trying to use it for real research, can't get done what they need to get done. Remember, if you live in my state, it is my dime too.
On the other hand, if you are at a completely private school like Harvard or something, go wild.
The cake is a pie
Hell, try explaining to the average taxpayer why they need to pay more to the public universities so that students can download music instead of buying CDs.
The cake is a pie
Did it ever occur to you to work with your users (and yes they are the users of the system) instead of acting like you were god? Or do you think you are?
Students pay for the access as part of their fees. Now when a few are going overboard the better method is to work with them not get into wargames with them. Which is basicly what you're doing. They will start circumventing your DHCP pools next then start pulling from others systems and basicly working around you. If you contacted them and just nicely asked what they were doing and if there was any way that they could throttle the usage just a bit or do it in strange off hours you'd probably get not only a positive effect but may just have support from them.
I'm a network administrator now myself but I remember my college days. The more the admins tried to squeeze me the more I fought back. I finally ended up just self descructing most of the network to point that everything had to be turned off and the switches code reuploaded to them. All of which untraceably enough to me so they couldn't do a thing to me. But they knew they had pissed a student off bad. Next time around they were much more, shall we say, less ham fisted toward the student population. They got better results that way I assure you.
...It was only a matter of time before this started happening.
Back when I was in college at NCSU, they shutoff access to all the nettrek and federation servers because because they were taking 40% bandwidth.
Someone is paying for this bandwidth (the colleges) and I don't think they're paying all that money so that people can collect MP3s.
--Ruhk
404 Error:
It depends upon your university's policy.
For instance, Carnegie Mellon's Network Group: ResHall and Remote Access Guidelines has the following paragraph: (typos theirs...)
It may not remain feasible to provide unlimited connectivity for systems which are not strictly serving the
University's missions. Beacuse of this possibility, we reserve the right to request that users reduce the amount
of traffic being caused by their service, or where necessary, to remove such systems from the campus network.
In all but extreme cases, we will contact the owner of the system before removing it from the network.
It also has a clause specifically relating to copyrighted music files, specifying revocation of connection for a semester as the minimum punishment.
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
My school (Tufts University) blocked Napster way back in November when it first started getting popular. I just started using CuteMX as a replacement (which I found at download.com), but unfortunately, it doesn't have as many users.
The new Napster beta circumvents the obstacles our network administrators put up, so they went and blocked access to the Napster website completely! Well, using our good friend the Anonymizer we have managed to download the new version anyway and spread it around campus. What will the network folk come up with next? Suspensions for all Napster users?
Anyway, the whole trial and tribulation has been documented on our online underground newspaper . You should read it - it's rather funny.
-----------------
The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what we share with someone else when we're uncool. -Crowe
what a retarded way to share/move a file. this is what happens when the web tries to make everything idiot enabled. usenet binaries solved this years ago but even today some acumen is still required (of the user).
of course it takes more bandwidth to be stupid than it does to be smart, especially if want to connect LOTS of stupid people.
This sounds like the infamous (well at least to me) (l)user vs. SysAdmin debate. I have arguments about this everyday (with mostly script kiddies a W@r3z d00dz). They always fall behind the argument that "If I were doing legal things you would have no right to shut me down..." BUZZ! Wrong! In the net I administrate if you suck up the T1 day after day with anything whether it be Porn, Mp3s, Warez, Linux Distros, Games, I will tell you to stop, if you don't stop Kiss you IP address goodbye. The user has no right to the Network. It is a privilige. If all my users suddenly start using napster and my Quake games are slow as hell (Tounge planted firmly in cheek in that example :)), I'll ask them to stop, if they dont't, then its up to me whether I be a total meanie and kill the DHCP server, or just block the Napster ports. On my campus network its no different. They are absolute fascists when they block ports (No SMTP,SSH,POP, UDP completely blocked). I look at it as I am on their network and I am blessed to have such a speedy connection. If I want to download the new Slackware Distro, or something else extremely large, I am considerate enough to do it overnight, as not to upset anyo other users. If they suddenly decide to ask me to stop, I will say "Yes sir Mr. NetAdmin sir, I will stop downloading Files like that, is their anything else?". Why? Why don't I pull a "Hey man! I pay your salary! You shouldn't tell me what to do! and re-enable my ports!blahblahblah..." Because it THEIR network, Not mine, not my dormmates, not Napsters. They run it they want to. I may have complaints, I have asked politely for them to open up Port 22 and such, and they were kind enough to write me a couple of paragraphs on why they have it blocked ("Might be able to compromise security on a machine outside the network, etc" *shrug*)
Hmmmm... This might be considered a Rant, but I am able to look at it from both sides of the coin. So people really have no "right" to the net. Just count your lucky stars that you have any access at all.
Objects in the blog are closer then they ap
> When you live on campus, for 9 months out of the
> year, that IS your home. They pay tuition,
> technology, and housing fees. They've paid for
> it, they can use it as they see fit.
I agree with you...for a student, campus IS home.
(temporary but home none the less).
However, the network is a shared resource. when
the net is so saturated that real work can't be
done, there is a problem, and a problem that
can have a negative impact on other peoples
education.
Yes, they pay for network connectivity, however
so did everyone else. Here, our student network
was very saturated with napster before we blocked
it.
Yes, I am usually the first person to advocate
free speach. Yes, I hate copyright laws and think
it is generally right for people to break them.
However, people need to live and work together,
hogging all the bandwidth is unacceptable when
others have real work to do.
Of course, I had no say in my employer (a
university) blocking napster as I am not in
charge of the routers and firewall, but I think
they made the right decision for the circumstances
From what I have heard (never used napster myself)
napster uses ALOT more bandwidth than it really
should, its probably a design flaw. I doubt it
was designed with the idea that multiple people
on 1 segment might run it at the same time.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
The "CD's cost too much so I will steal the music instead of buying it" argument holds absolutely no water whatsoever. By the same argument, you can justify that it is OK to go steal some big AlphaServer systems from Compaq because you think they are overpriced. There are ways to deal civilly if you think a company is ripping you off, e.g. boycott (and, no: stealing instead of buying a product does not constitute a boycott). Theft is theft, and it is NEVER justifiable to steal from a private company in a free market.
That will be effective if the university blocks off *.napster.com. You can just change the domain name to get around the firewall! [sigh]
'Mullethead. A hairstyle that's a way of life'
Universities should be the last place this kind of thing happens. University has traditionally been a place of free-thinking etc. etc.
Also, as mentioned in the article, the RIAA is peddling the usual rubbish "that Napster helps foster a black market for illegal copies of digital music".
The whole point of any communications protocol is that date can be copied for free (unlike a concrete thing like food) and very easily.
So they be trying to ban all communication (including normal speech!) because you can copy music/films etc. with them.
The should be sueing anyone making webservers if they find one copy of an illegal mp3 on it.
Companies making Ethernet cards should be sued if they don't have mp3-blocking features built-in etc. etc.
Basically,t he same as VCR's and the like, Napster can be used legally so RIAA should get off their back and universities should stop censoring (although i suppose the uni does have a point about bandwidth been wasted when others are doing genuine research etc.
Its very simple. Napster, when it starts up, takes over port 6969. Most of the schools (at least, my school) know this is the port (because the people who use Napster are also the ones who are banning it). So if its using Port 6969, simply change it to 21, 8000, 89....something other than 6969, then they won't recognize its there. This may only work in my situation, because the admin, well, they're not especially bright, but it might work for the rest of you who have already been banned for using it.
All CampusJust Dorms
Input138GB(13Mb/s)70GB(7Mb/s) Output473GB(44Mb/s)338GB(31Mb/s)
and 15 of the top 20 hosts by traffic on campus are in the dorms.
Shut up, be happy. The conveniences you demanded are now mandatory. -- Jello Biafra
The Dead started a movement in music that is very similar to the open source movement, and readers of /. would be wise to know about it as it offers parallels to the software industry. The model is now being followed by literally hundreds of "jam bands" (see JamBands.com).
The model is simple: play lots of concerts, improvise so every concert is different, allow people to freely record and trade your concerts. You get free publicity, and if you are any good people will buy tickets for your shows and buy your albums.
Another band called Phish used this same model. Without any radio or MTV play and no hit singles this band now regularly sells out 20,000 seat venues. They just sold 75,000 tickets for the new years show where they were the sole performers (they could have sold more but the place wouldn't hold any more). These guys are all millionaires and people trade their MP3's all day (and DAT's and CD-R's through the mail too). They have an official policy regarding MP3 trading since they even have their own MP3's available for download for fee!
You wanted to know how many other bands encourage the trading of their music, look at this, the bands that allow taping list. Note that these are bands that allow fans to record their live concerts and trade the recordings. Some of the big bands on this list are Perl Jam and Dave Matthews Band. There are many other small bands that are using MP3 for publicity that don't explicitly allow fans to record the live concerts.
This site, Sugarmegs is devoted to trading MP3's of live concerts and is fully condoned by all of the bands. The bands traded are Grateful Dead, Phish, and many other bands that allow trading of their music under the same model such as Widespread Panic, Medeski Martin & Wood, Moe., and others.
There is a lot of free music out there and it's not all hippie jam bands. There are many jazz artists that allow recording and trading such as Branford Marsalis, John Scofield, Medeski Martin & Wood, Bill Frisell, and Ken Vandermark. Almost all bluegrass is tradeable and some of the major bluegrass festivals have special sections for people to setup microphones (Merle Watson Memorial Bluegrass Festival, for instance).
There is a movement in free music (and subsequently free promotion of artists!). Much like free software, not all copying of music is copyright infringement!
Burris
I really don't think that as long as there is a "Free" method to getting the content that has a relatively low risk of getting in trouble for having, people would pay for the content. The copyright laws need to be modified to better reflect real life. This seems to keep boiling and boiling, sooner or later it will explode and the rules will change.
Never knock on Death's door:
More race stuff in one place,
than any one place on the net.
You think 5% of total bandwidth is bad? Try up around 20%! Northwestern University in Chicago banne d access to Napster because it was sucking up nearly 20% of their bandwidth. My college, the Illinois Institute of Technology, never had a problem w/ the bandwidth usage, but the RIAA did come in and threaten to sue if the school didn't shut the student-run MP3 servers down. There's now a special rule that expels any student who runs an MP3 server on the campus network. Hmm, I wonder if the RIAA considers Napster an MP3 server.
"I threw up my hands in disgust and wondered if it had been such a good idea to have eaten my hands in the first place."
If you worked for the IT department of any majorish college, you'd realize that napster usage is growing at an insanely exponential rate and it is totally saturating the bandwidth available to all students. Such Universities HAVE to ban it -- the fact that its downloading mp3s is mostly irrelevant....If it were perfectly legal game-playing (or pretty much anything not DIRECTLY related to school-type education) that was causing the bandwidth saturation, they'd have to ban that too..There's only so much bandwidth to go around when you have thousands of users with local ethernet speeds into your outsider router.
embee23 said...'Although I may personally use it at home, it has no place on an academic network.' I say...When you live in residence the academic network IS your personal access... Besides I thought one's tuition and monthly residency fees subsidised the IT infrastructure... Do your job, supply demand through innovation not CENSORSHIP.
Why not implement a bandwidth cap that only is applied to traffic going OUT onto the internet from the dorms? And inside the dorms, have 100 Mb switched ethernet.
At the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, each dorm port (serving 2 computers) has a maximum bandwidth usage of 500 MB/day. That isn't so bad except that the network admins will switch off your port the next day if you go over that limit, and the limit applies to traffic going ANYWHERE, including to the room next door! Also, there is no way to tell how far you are into that 500 megs.
Frankly, the top reason why most people have gone over (and I know at least 30 people who have been shut off), is not something like Napster--it's sending a few hundred megs down the hall to burn a CD (or someone downloading a gig worth of stuff from their local network Windows file share). And the other common reason is that the school gives out hubs to people with multiple computers, so even traffic inside the room gets counted in that 500 Mb/day limit!
Most students hate this policy, especially engineers who have 2-3 computers in their room. The main reason seems to be that people are getting their ports shut off by the overly strict enforcement of a bandwidth policy (send 501 megs, and your port is off the next day) which is undoubtably intended to catch people running giant public warez servers.
I believe that the network admins would have far fewer headaches and the students would be far happier if only outgoing traffic to the internet was limited (and it could even be a stricter limit than 500 MB/day), as this is the major cost to the university--internal bandwidth is basically free once the lines are installed.
"You can represent this entire problem as a 3x2 matrix"
You're absolutely right that a large amount of bandwidth can be used downloading an ISO, but how often does that happen...once....maybe twice a month. And JPEGS are small files...hardly of any concern to a network admin. A group of 10 people surfing would have a hard time generating the amount of bandwidth used by a single napster server. Granted, napster is a great idea, and it does have its place, perhaps the university should have an internal napster server, and not allow access to the external ones, using the "free" 100Mbs bandwidth on the LAN. Bandwidth is an expensive thing, and single users screwing it up for the rest of the users because they want to set up their own private radio station is not condusive to a learning environment. If these users want to do this, then maybe they should invest in a DSL. Then they can pay for the amount of server that they want to run, without having to worry about the other people on the network being affected. -Z
perl -e "print(pack('H37','4d65726b7572795a40676e7572642e6e6574'))"
Perhaps they should not ban napster at all.
Could they not just route napster (or any bandwidth hogging packets) through a separate gateway? Could the offending network IPs (i.e.. seen connecting to a napster server) not be moved to another gateway, which would eventually choke down to a molasses like crawl.
This would enable the legality issue to be skirted, and penalize network disrupters.
Or the network admin could just face reality, and upgrade their network to cope with increased use.
I don't ever envision the day when we won't be plagued with bandwidth bottlenecks. I am sad. That is until the world net will be taken over by the sort of AI "Matrix" portrayed. They will have the sense to overbuild the damn thing to encompass any possible network sortcomings. At least they will be able to trade mp3s & frag to their cold-heart's content.
Minty Toothbrush
.oo.
..
If an infinite number of monkeys typed at an infinte number of
If an infinite number of monkeys typed at an infinte number of
computer keyboards, they would all be
What I suppose I'd like is an extended version of fair-queueing. Fair-queueing is a mechanism used in gateways which prevents transmitting hosts from bogging down the gateway machine with too many datagrams (as in the case of an over-enthusiastic TCP implementation). The trouble is, it only deals with the originators of traffic, not the recipients; further, it doesn't directly deal with the sizes of the datagrams, only their number.
(Fair-queueing is described in RFC 970. It's very interesting reading. A quote:
There's a good deal of material in there about applying game theory to network overloading.)
I'd like to be able to take the fair-queueing model and throw a choke on each host's queue tighter than the "natural" one imposed by network and gateway load. But so far I haven't seen a means to do this. Ideas?
There seem to be an awful lot of posts here along the lines of "blocking napster won't stop piracy, we can still use FTP", etc. The point here is not total elimination of piracy. Of course there's always going to be piracy, and don't think the RIAA doesn't know that. The situation they want to prevent at all costs is a majority of people actually pirating when they might otherwise buy music.
Yeah, you can put your mp3s up for ftp and such, but it's not going to be nearly as convenient as searching on napster. Napster provides a very simple and easy interface to piracy. People who might otherwise not spend their time searching though banner-ad laden warez sites and obscure sites with poor bandwidth for a few choice mp3s can now go out and grab most things they want with ease, and without having to pay for it. Napster is within the threshold of effort most people are willing to put forth to get free music. That's what the RIAA dreads. Not piracy, but rampant piracy used in place of legitimately paying for music.
College dorm students are a special case which is even more inclined towards this behavior, as they tend to have very little spending money in general, and access to large amounts of bandwidth through school.
--
Kevin Doherty
kdoherty+slashdot@jurai.net
Kevin Doherty
kdoherty+slashdot@jurai.net
They can easily prove they wrote it, since they claim to have done so.
True, but for this kind of suit that fact is meaningless.
To shut them down all they need to do is prove it is used for piracy as a primary purpose.
Not quite. You cannot hold a manufacturer responsible if someone intentionally misuses its product. RIAA has to prove that Napster wrote it specifically for pirating MP3's. Check Napster's documentation; it's chock-full of warnings that Napster is not meant to promote piracy. There's even a warning or two in the program itself. Simply put, Napster does everything it can reasonably do to prevent its illegal use. That's a big point against RIAA. Frankly, I don't see what RIAA can legally do about it.
>>Although I may personally use it at home, it has no place on an academic network.
When you live on campus, for 9 months out of the year, that IS your home. They pay tuition, technology, and housing fees. They've paid for it, they can use it as they see fit.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
"MP3" and "WAREZ" are not synonyms. I have a few hundred mega od MP3s and I own the CDs. I use MP3 to play music on my computer(s) without shuffling through stacks of CDs for the one song that I want.
I have d/led MP3s off of the net and if I like what I hear I'll buy the CD. If not, It's deleted. I don't have an ethical problem with that.
MP3s *COULD* help artists if they weren't prevent by their contracts from directly selling them on the net.
I'd rather pay $2-3 each for the songs that I want instead of $18 for a whole CD when I only like 3 songs.
MP3 has the ability to reduce the RIAA's power. Instead of 5 year 6 album deals, artists would only want 2-3 year 2 album deals to get their names in the public eye then switch to online music distribution. The RIAA knows this and this is why they fight MP3.
Go to MP3.com you'll be able to hear music from bands whom you'd never know about if this were 4 years ago.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Now imagine that you wanted to block all game, non-school related ports. 5190 (everquest), 26900 (quake), etc... you'd end up with hundreds, possibly thousands, right? Now say you grab some of the common dcc ports, add in irc ports, etc. You end up with this huge list of ports.
Now, to be sure you arn't getting any non-school related data, you block it on both sides.
Wow, that's strange, all of a sudden only 1 in 5 attempts at going to a web site actually works! You end up with it constantly trying to get a tcp connection, you hit stop a couple times, it tries on some new tcp connections, and you finally get through. ftp's are usually fine, as once you get connected, you don't have to disconnect. but web was just horrible.
The reason? The destination port might be port 80, but the source port changes with whatever OS you were using (AIX didn't have a problem most of the time, but windows sure did!). hence, you were using a source port that some non-school related app might have been using! and this is why they were timing out.
After presenting this arguement to the community network at school, the network admin would not admit this was the problem, but he did agree to lift all but the major ports. and wow, the problem went away.
So, if you hear about these kind of problems at other institutions, remember that for every tcp connection, there's a source and destination port. The destination port is stable, and with some programs (like quake) the source port is stable, but others use the OS-defined TCP sequence port. (Which, nmap uses to do OS fingerprinting). And it's excellent reasoning to do prohibitive routing against specific programs, not everything.
Of course, at home, we have port 5190 routed to 127.0.0.1 so.... `8r) No nEverQuit at our house!
--
Gonzo Granzeau
Gonzo Granzeau
"Nothing the god of biomechanics wouldn't let you into heaven for.." -Roy Batty
All in all, mp3's are pretty cool for those of us who are artists.
I'm not an artist, but I do know that other forms of art (like comics) have done pretty well in the transition to the internet. There are a few things holding online music back a bit:
a) We need a way to get back to the artist from the music. Currently you could put a little blub in the end of all the songs you put on mp3 sites asking people to come get a longer version of the song without the blurb from your site, but this kinda sucks. I think the only real solution is going to be to change the mp3 players to support attaching web shit to be attached to the song (a button to launch netscape would show up if there was such content). This would allow the artists to include visual art, lyrics, links to buy stuff, and advertising---people would not delete the attached content because they would want to keep the useful part of the attached information. Eventually, a good chunk of that money people spend on radio adds could be going directly into the artist's pockets via banners.
b) We need a better system of promotion like mp3 radio and ways of finding artists. I have not been to impressed with mp3.com and I think the artists could do MUCH better by promoting themselves if we develop the "infrastructure."
c) We need to promote the idea that music is a service and not a produce (sounds like maybe sunscream is doing this). Real fans would happily visit the site (or pay) for services like "mix of the day/week" and good artists can turn out a lot of music with is good just because you don't lissen to it a lot like live versions and good jaming.. and some artists will find this more fun then the normal production thing (I think TMBG had a song of the day phone thing for a while).
Jeff
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
From the article: The university has an annual budget of $75,000 for bandwidth.
I was just at a _community college_ board meeting, and they have a monthy bill of almost $10k.
Either this Uni has a severe lack of bandwidth, or someone isn't giving the whole truth.
Zeni
I can use up an aweful lot of bandwidth downloading Linux/*BSD isos to burn. Similarly, a big grab of JPEGs or other big files will eat bandwidth. Do the Universities want to stop this too? Maybe any graphics-intensive website should be blocked.
Or is bandwidth the scapegoat, and they are really worried about the RIAA and copyright issues?
Being able to use the campus network to surf the internet from your dorm, as well as other benefits, at a university is a privilege. Why then, don't they allow students to use clients such as napster, but make the student pay a nominal fee. If Napster truly were a problem on the level they say it is, the fees would easily pay for a boost in the connectivity, reducing the hit the network takes from Napster users, and fairly distributing the costs of this expansion to those who will actually be using it.
---------------
Yes! That guy!
I work at a fairly large university in Florida (UCF), and I can definitely say that napster has been causing problems with our online network..
We just killed the DHCP connections for 25 people in our dorms for this... though we couldn't find a way to definitively say the users were using napster, it was very obvious from the packets flying back and forth.
We have a multiple t3 connection to i1 and a 45 mbit link to i2.. and napster users *still* slow down the network. Although I may personally use it at home, it has no place on an academic network.
The issue of a university banning Napster has nothing to do with whether MP3's are illegal or not. It's their equipment and they can put whatever restrictions they want on using it. They can ban all access to MSNBC.COM or even SLASHDOT.ORG if it is wasting too much bandwidth - that would be prefectly legal. Just because you pay a service fee does NOT mean they have to provide you with full service. They offer you with what they want to, they do not offer you what you want. If a single program is using that much bandwidth (especially relative to its academic value), it only makes sense to ban it. If you don't like it, you can set up your own T1 and use it however you want.
Napster users especially need to consider the needs of the other students. 5% bandwidth is a LOT and Napster users are slowing down the efficiency of people who are doing legitimate work. You don't own the connection just because all of that bandwidth is available to you.
If most of the argument on the colleges side of the story has to do with bandwidth usage, why not limit bandwidth to each host from the external network? My cable company does this to me and all of thier other customers on a continual basis. If the schools could come up with a way to do this, it wouldn't matter what the students were doing on line; they would only have a limited pipe to do it with. Problem solved.
Gosh I like being right.
-- Gunther T Dull is not responsible for his opinions.
I know Slashdot is a big MP3 proponent but I'm just DYING to know how you people with GIGS of mp3's on your hard drive can justify ripping off musicians this way. How many musicians have given permission for their stuff to be freely downloadable like this?
Sure, the music industry sucks ass and don't deserve the cash, but ultimately by pirating MP3's and filling your CDR's with them doesn't help the individual artists one bit. Musicians are already getting screwed by the industry at large, they DON'T need to be doubly screwed by people pirating their music this way.
Please enlighten me...just HOW is this MP3 craze really helping artists? I don't want to hear any 'theoretical' answers either, about how musician A 'could' distribute their music with MP3's and avoid the record companies...I'd like to see some REAL EXAMPLES of it and see if the artists are REALLY PROFITING from MP3's. All I've heard so far is lame excuses and pontifications about 'freedom' of speech.
From where I'm sitting, MP3 is just another word for WAREZ, plain and simple.
'Some of your friends are probably already this fucked'
Check _that_ out- a balance sheet for a typical major act _success_ on the order of 3 _million_ dollars of sales selling a quarter million copies.
Gross profit, $710,000.
Artist Royalties, $351,000.
Actual artist _income_ after all items on balance sheet and recouping of advance- $4,031.25!
That's right- after paying for the studio, mastering, video budget, processing+transfers etc, after the tour (earning 50,000 gross on expenses of 50,875 not counting manager or agent's cut), the band that got a 'quarter million dollar' advance to pay for all the tech toys and tours and professionals, the band that made THREE MILLION dollars of business for the record company, have each earned about 1/3 as much as they would working at a 7-11, but they got to ride in a tour bus for a month.
You're crazy if you think almost anything wouldn't be an improvement. I don't know, maybe I can't satisfy you that mp3s can help artists. How exactly is mp3 exposure going to cost the artists _more_ than pay to play in LA and all that crap? At what point does mp3, free-as-spam-but-less-annoying distribution start to make artists capable of doing better than the industry- say, earning them _half_ as much as they'd make working at 7-11? You have no idea how fucked musicians actually are (to use Steve Albini's apt term for the condition...). Are you a musician? I am, and I'm building a studio- I've already talked with one slashdotter about recording him free for the purpose of making mp3s, and I've been talking to another artist I recorded who's currently living in Lithuania, about putting some of his back catalogue out there. Exposure is life- but there's something more important that that, and it's control and cashflow.
When artists don't have control over their own businesses, they're hosed- and that's what happens with the normal industry, it's 'Let us take care of it!' and the results are a damned wasteland. mp3 does not directly make artists money- but guess what? It is a key part of a strategy for the artist to take control of their own destiny and start running things themselves. Some might be tour-minded, and build on their talent and a popularity in mp3 to travel the world on a shoestring, paying their way by booking small gigs, saving up for their own PA and equipment and RUNNING THE BUSINESS effectively. They might make a bit more than working at a 7-11! But they'd be living their dream and not paying to play. Some (I like this option) will do extensive studio work, to become able to create amazing high-fidelity sonic experiences in music- and would give away the mp3s forever, but if you want to help them, BUY A CD. Not even an mp3.com cd (interestingly, mp3.com does not go for exclusive rights like a record label does), but a homegrown CD. First few, burned off a CD-Rom burner, and then it's time to save up and have a crate of CDs burned professionally- there are loads of people who can do this and throw in 1, 2, 3 or 4 color process inserts, even shrinkwrap, having the whole thing done to a 'mainstream' quality level. Of course if you're in it for the long term you set yourself up with the physical plant, printing your own art or pressing your own CDs in industrial duplicators... and so it goes.
Yeah, it's hard work, but you can earn money through hard work, and you can't really earn money with the industry, so why not? And mp3 is one very important thing- it is promotional material that YOU DON'T HAVE TO PAY FOR! You don't have to PAY people to distribute mp3s of your work. They will anyway, particularly if it's any good! What you do from that point will illustrate who you really are, and whether you deserve to earn anything...
Go read this: Major Labels: some of your friends are probably already this fucked. Think about it. One part of Tim Yohannon's intro article is particularly telling, I think:
1.It doesn't really matter what you say or what you sing, but how you conduct your business and what your motivation for doing it is.
2.It is only by being completely separated from governmental and corporate sponsorship, collusion, or connections that one can really claim to be "alternative" or "independent".
3.Unless there is an ongoing class consciousness to one's communication and expression, then it is inevitable that you will be assimilated into mainstream values, no matter how culturally "hip" you attempt to be."
This neatly sums up what I want to do with my abilities as a musician and sound engineer. It's not _about_ what style I use or what gear I can offer in my studio- it's about why I'm doing it and where I'm going with it.
For a long time, I didn't know what I wanted to do with that side of my life. I knew that the dream of being a musician for money was a fantasy, but I didn't have what you might call the radical consciousness to come up with any alternative. I sort of wanted to work with the tech side of things, but to what end? To be signed to a corrupt machine and help con other people and probably spend all my own money doing it? To languish obscurely playing with mixers? Who's listening? What would I be doing it for?
I think I have a better handle on these questions now. I'm siding with the punks, the indies, freaks like Zappa (the greatest independent music businessman ever, long live Zappa!). I am dedicating myself to giving people access to tools and information they need to do this kind of work and produce this kind of art themselves, rather than thinking they need to buy into the industry game to get it done. Sometimes I'll make money. Sometimes I'll spend it. Right now I'm in debt and am sorting out the hopped-up ADAT I'll be basing the studio around. (tweaker alert- Alesis LX-20 is a _beautiful_ machine to soup up, all the audio circuitry is on a daughtercard you can remove and tinker with! And there's loads of clearance for substitute parts, and you could shield the whole audio daughtercard. Sweeeeet).
So, highly-scored AC, you may say MP3 is just another word for warez to you- I say you don't sound like a musician yourself, and are not qualified to pass judgement on this. I am, and I've done more homework than you- and I would say conclusively that MP3 is the new radio, and furthermore it is a breakthrough in public access to production of media that's equal to open source and Internet collaboration on software. There are many similarities.
You don't directly make money on mp3. You don't directly make money on commercial music publishing either, you can play rock star for a few months if you're lucky and end up in debt for thousands of dollars. The difference is that with mp3 YOU GET TO CONTROL your business- if your music doesn't have a business, don't expect to make money, but if you do, even something as random as selling band mousepads or nerf guns imprinted with the band logo or pet rocks, you get to totally control your mp3 output, use your own mixes, sell your own merchandise and hire your own people and run all this yourself, taking whatever profit there is for yourself.
Do you really think major label acts get to choose their own mixes (hint: Nirvana was not allowed to use their own mix for "In Utero", you think you'd get more clout than Nirvana circa 'Smells Like Teen Spirit'?), manage their own expenditures (bands are legally required to produce things like videos under contract, but it is the band that pays for ALL aspects of this, not the label) and so on?
It's not so different from open source. It's really not. Power is being able to control YOUR OWN situation. Using mp3 as a promotional tool is an important part of being able to control the other aspects of your own music business- you give it away but you're not signing yourself over to any contractual requirements, are not waiving your rights to your own material or signing it over to the corporation outright. This is incredibly powerful.
Or would you rather go and personally try to buy space for your single on Top 40 radio?
Well, in theory, the whole purpose of wiring dorms with high-bandwidth connectivity is to promote _academic_ use, not for commercial/business purposes. At Stanford, for instance, students pay like $80 for a _year_ of 10/100BaseT connectivity to the campus backbone. That's subsidized for academic reasons, not so students can share MP3s. So the situation is even a little different from that with @Home.
But the fact is, you give high bandwidth to a bunch of people who generally don't have a lot of money (as most students don't), you're going to see a lot of piracy: software, games, music, videos, whatever.
Interestingly, a student I know told me just last night that apparently the academic version of Office 2000 sends a serial number to Microsoft over the net, and if you disconnect from the net on installation, it requires you to call an 800 number before it lets you install the software. This is apparently not true of the non-academic version. This is obviously to prevent an entire dorm from just copying one copy of the academic version of O2K.
Adam
I am Jack's complete lack of surprise.
...but the bandwidth concerns are legitimate. Bandwidth is an expensive thing, after all. Of course, colleses should be upgrading to 100BT at least; these networks are meant to be used for research but I've noticed that 10BT networks seem to get clogged very easily at colleges (recently there hasn't been a night where I could do almost anything on the Net because RIT's network, and that of its chosen ISP, were down or choked with who knows what). Research cannot be done with a clogged network.
This is a troubling issue. Censorship shouldn't happen at universities. But this isn't censorship (see below for my explanation oh why it's not). And hogging significant portions of a campus network's bandwidth just so you can get MP3's is very inconsiderate, if not outright rude.
I remember the old days, when people didn't rely on Napster to get their MP3's; those methods work just as well today as they ever did before. Even if Napster is banned, that doesn't mean you'll be unable to get your music fix. Banning Napster is certainly a Bad Thing. But you can't deny that Napster is a bandwidth-hog by its nature, and it's clogging up very expensive networks that were never meant for this purpose.
Now, the RIAA lawsuits are another matter entirely. I hold that the RIAA has no legal grounds for suing Napster, since the software does not itself infringe on any copyrights, and even states that it's not meant to be used to infringe on them (OK, so everyone knows that it is meant precisely to infringe on copyrights, but thanks to our wonderful legal system only that which is written down has any legal bearing at all). Frankly, I think the RIAA's going to spend millions of dollars on a suit which they'll lose out of technicalities.
Oh, this is so easy, it's like shooting fish in a barrel. You want concrete examples? Here, take this one...
In 1998, I found out that the world is a hell of a lot bigger than I thought. Why? Well, I'm a metalhead. I love metal. Unfortunately, I (mistakenly) thought that metal was just about dead. Turn on a radio or eMpTyV, and you will see very little evidence of metal. There's some industrial rapcore shit (e.g. Limp Bizkit, Korn) that is being labelled as "metal" by The Media, but of course, this type of music is rarely of interest to real metal fans. (Oh, and I guess they pay lip service to has-beens like Metallica and Megadeth, who have indeed made great metal in the past, even though they've switched genres over the last few years.)
So I wasn't buying much music at the time. I couldn't find anything good.
Then I heard about something called MP3 that would let me listen to music from the Internet. Also, at about that time, I heard that Peter Jackson was making a 'Lord of the Rings' movie, and someone commented that they wished Blind Guardian would do the soundtrack. Alas, like most Americans, I had no clue who the heck Blind Guardian is. Guess what I did? I grabbed an MP3 player from Aminet, and I downloaded a Blind Guardian MP3.
At that moment, I discovered that Metal is alive and well. Healthier and better than it has ever been, in fact. It simply isn't covered by the American media companies. But it's out there. Now I have found and previewed hundreds of bands that will never, ever be played on any radio/television station in America, and have bought somewhere around 400 or 500 CDs from online shops, recorded by bands that most people have never heard of. I think about 8 of those CDs are by Blind Guardian.
Many of these are expensive imports, but it's worth it. Oh, but there's North American bands in there too. Yep, believe it or not, You Can Still Rock in America -- but only the Internet people know that you can.
I'm guessing that it has all added up to about $6000 so far. (This is a rough estimate.) That's $6000 in sales to one single customer (me), which never would have happened if it weren't for MP3s.
Hope this helps.
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As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
I am the primary network administrator for a small college. Last term we had a serious problem here with one student consuming huge quantities of bandwidth moving bootleg movies in VCD format, so we've been doing a lot of thinking about this issue.
Let me tell you this: I have zero interest in wasting time blocking you just because you happen to be bootlegging. I won't even notice that you're bootlegging unless you're being a bandwidth hog in doing so: one FTP session looks much like another from the outside.
If you are being a bandwidth hog, you're harming your neighbors, and I will stop you from doing that. Everyone on campus should be able to get a fair share of the bandwidth, and if you and your pals are hogging it all, I don't care if you're moving VCDs or Linux ISO images; I'm going to raise a fuss and, if necessary, happily shut you down.
If I get a note from the RIAA saying you're bootlegging, I'll do what's necessary to keep them from suing the college's pants off, because it's damn cold in Massachusetts right now and we can use all the pants we can get. But if you're bootlegging without hogging, I honestly don't give a damn.
Do you have any clue how TINY the percentage of profits a musician actually makes off of the sales of his/her album?
I think most musicians, even a lot of the big-name stars who have the most to lose from mp3 piracy (as opposed to freely releasing an mp3 themselves), support the mp3 revolution. Tom Petty and (in a big way) David Bowie come to mind as examples of people who have really embraced the new medium.
For a brief, freakish time, recordings as a medium were intensely profitable for a very few musicians (but never so much for them as for record companies). Those days are over. MP3s represent a brand-new way to use recordings for their original purpose -- a marketing tool to sell either the live performance or the sheet music.
The beauty of it is the beauty of the internet -- I no longer need to grease the palms of radio DJ's, I no longer need to get an "in" with a major label -- many of the barriers that formerly blocked new musicians from "making it" are now gone, and a band can even be from Midland, TX or The Netherlands and a guy like me could stumble across them. Or even Italy. (Just three of my favorite bands that I never would have heard of through the standard radio play / movie soundtrack / local bar circuit methods.)
The recording industry is corrupt. (Duh.) Most of us musicians, even those of us who are in the system, have seen it as a necessary evil. MP3's are a way around them!
(Braveheart mode on)
FREEEEEEDOOOOOOMMMMMMMMM!
(Braveheart mode off)
One band I know of is even using mp3's to give fans who are musicians the opportunity to make their own remixes!
All in all, mp3's are pretty cool for those of us who are artists. Most musicians are NOT whores to the music industry (much as they've tried to be) and lose almost nothing; many of those who are tied in with big labels have already embraced the new medium.
MP3's aren't going anywhere, and those who fight against them will only lose their money in the end.
just my 2 zorkmids