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Napster Server Protocol Has Been Published
C|Net is publishing a story about a Stanford University Senior who reversed-engineered the Napster server protocol. The story also mentions a Web page in SourceForge which gives links to various Napster clients for different OS's. I wonder how many new Napster servers clones we'll have soon.
Your argument is a bit naive, and I think you're fully aware of that.
There have always been studio bands that tour extremely rarely. Touring is an extremely grueling process, which can totally tear up the lives of musicians and their families. A lot of bands do not tour, and rely on studio album sales to keep their efforts going. They shouldn't be forced out on the road just so that you can save your $10-15 and listen to the tunes for free.
2. However, what they are really afraid is that artist can get big and earn big bucks without going through a record label. They are scared shit because once artists realize this, the industry will go in for a major overhaul.
I don't see how free, illegal distribution of music gets the artists money without the record companies taking a cut. Artists realize the power of internet distribution, and are trying to capitalize on it. Napster is most definitely not a way for them to do so. Napster is a way for their hard work to proliferate to a million ears without a single penny of income.
Really, the main reason the RIAA and the industry in general is scared of napster, MP3 and digital music in general is that the vast majority of their income comes from your purchase of actual physical media, which becomes obsolete every 4-8 years.
The main reason I worry about it is the artists loss of income. There are a lot of smaller record companies, especially now that pretty much anyone could start one for under $10k, that are getting screwed in the process. A lot of electronic bands are getting ripped off unimaginably, especially since a lot of them rarely, if ever, play live. They're on smaller labels, just getting started, and are losing a lot of income due to things like napster.
At some point, you're taking food out of a musician's mouth. Rationalize that with as much rhetoric as much as you like, it's the basic fact beneath all this.
Yes, the protocol is already very well documented by other people. No, this is not a publicity stunt of mine. Yes, my documentation is pretty poor. No, it's not very revolutionary. It's me learning how to reverse-engineer a network application. Please don't get pissed off at me; I'm not really trying to prove much of anything with this release other than I have the very beginnings of how the protocol works.
David E. Weekly (dew, Think)
David E. Weekly
Code / Think / Teach / Learn
h4x0r for
Napster and Hotline are two of the many reasons our bandwidth is filling up (streaming media and games are other reasons, but we've found that games aren't sucking up too much bandwidth -- yet). When the first Hotline server showed up on our network, we noticed it right away: bandwidth usage on our Internet connection was suddenly 100%, all the time. A little research showed that all this bandwidth usage was coming from JUST ONE USER! We immediately blocked the Hotline ports (and explained to that user why Hotline's use of bandwidth wasn't acceptable -- he hadn't realized what a bandwidth hog Hotline was and had been acting ignorance, not malice). Now Napster is doing the same thing, sucking up bandwidth that has nothing to do with the primary goal of this institution (it is, after all, an academic institution and academic Internet use gets first priority over everything else). Furthermore, a little packet-sniffing shows that most (I estimate 90%, though I don't have hard figures at the moment) of the traffic is OUTGOING -- people outside of the college downloading MP3s from Napster servers within out network. There is no way that this can be construed as being the function of our Internet connection.
The legality or otherwise of Napster's primary use (sharing MP3s) had nothing to do with the decision to block it except to make the decision process marginally shorter. If folks had been passing around Linux .iso images, we might have argued it for another five minutes or so, but we still would have reached the same conclusion: we have limited bandwidth, and we need that bandwidth to remain accessible to everybody. A small number of users cannot be allowed to continually suck up all the available bandwidth.
Of course, in a few months another bandwidth-hogging program will appear, and we'll have to block yet another set of ports / IP addresses / whatever. And the game of bandwidth whack-a-mole continues...
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The real meaning of the GNU GPL:
The real meaning of the GNU GPL:
"The Source will be with you... Always."
You are so totally wrong that anyone can expect to be a studio band in this day and age and be signed to a major label. Try it, just try it. Hell, even bands that _lip-synch_ tour now! You're making this up. How is a band supposed to self-promote except through touring? You don't seriously think the label does promotion? They only do that for about 3 albums a year for which they're prepared to do tonnage. They'll do it for the Spice Girls. They won't do it for you and they won't sign your band unless you agree to tour and promote the album for them. The tour may be written into the contract. You pay for it yourself out of the advance that is taken out of your supposed royalties.
There's no such thing as losing income that was never there in the first place. That's like saying that bands lose huge amounts of income because there aren't coin slots on every radio. That's like saying recording acts traditionally make money instead of losing it. That's totally flat wrong...
Do you have any fscking idea how much a band has to PAY to get a gig at certain well-placed clubs? How much a band would have to PAY to get radio airplay, to get a video in even light rotation on MTV? You're so off base it isn't even funny. Music has _never_ been a sensible job, and in recent years (the last twenty or so) it has become even worse, and it is the record labels who have done the most damage. Have you ever read a music industry contract? Did you know that jotted down notes on a memo pad (seemingly innocuous) routinely become a legal straightjacket for acts, forcing them to accept a deal whether they like it or not, or to quit the business entirely ('deal memos', in other words, that force the band into an unspecified deal, at which point all the leverage is on the label's side and the band takes a really BAD deal because they have no choice- in effect they have already signed without seeing the terms).
That's not even getting into the fact that large numbers of 'indie' labels are in fact wholly owned subsidaries of major labels, kept for their 'image', or semi-independent indies kept on a very short leash. You didn't know this? Let's see a list of the labels you're thinking of, so we can look up whether they are actually run by BMG or EMI or Sony.
I don't know who you are, AugstWest, but either you have a lot to learn about the way this industry works, or you're just a label flack busily fighting for your side. And that's cool, fight away if such things please you. But the picture you're painting is a damned lie. You're trying to induce guilt by suggesting that not supporting the industry is depriving musicians of money. It would be more accurate to induce guilt by suggesting that _supporting_ the industry is supporting a system in which musicians are routinely screwed with mind-bendingly nasty deals whose implications they don't even guess at until it's too late, in which musicians are routinely broken and left to have their bands break up, twisting in the wind with no label support, in debt to the record company from failure to recoup even modest advances, contractually bound to not play or record a note except with the record label that is now no longer interested.
If you want to support that, be my guest. I think that turning the acts loose with whatever mp3 popularity they can get is probably a lot more likely to result in some sort of income for the band. That becomes a question of business, and whether the band can charge much for a gig, can sell CDs out of their kitchen, can print up posters or have T-Shirts made.
At any rate, if you're worrying about artist income or artist rights or artists' welfare, you're worrying about the wrong things. Start figuring out how you can destroy the major labels if you want to do some real good. Things were out of hand even as early as the '80s, but now they are just ridiculous. Don't even support it.
These guys have several million dollars from a round or two of venture capital financing, from forward-looking investors in Silicon Valley and/or San Francisco.
My guess is that they are going to try to get bought out by someone like MP3.com or one of the Big Five (Four with EMI bought-out?) music groups.
The 30 or 50 people who run Napster are in this for the money. Big time. And who can blame them for that?
But lets make sure that the open source servers are fully operational before they decide that they need to strong-arm them into nonexistence. At some point, Napster, will be demanding control over all the client software. They have to do this or its game-over for the next tier of investment opportunity. Its not a matter of if; its a matter of when.
They have already shown that they are _extremely_ sensitive to PR issues. If you want proof, see how they handled the whole Linux napster client fiasco in December. So it will be interesting to see how they respond to such an open threat to any perceived proprietary nature of their technology.
Please moderate this up so people will realize that Napster is a larger company than they would have you believe. Their web site is a ploy to make them look tiny.