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Interview With The Creator of Napster on ZDnet
Carnage4Life writes, "Here's an interview with the creator of Napster on ZDnet where he talks about various issues including designing Napster, what plans he has for Napster and the growing number of bans on Napster in college campuses due to the fact that it is a bandwidth hog." Beyond the issue of "bandwidth hog," something that more colleges/unis are being threatened with is lawsuits from the recording industry because of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. You'll be seeing some more on the DMCA from us this week.
Companies and universities don't need to up their bandwidth when it's being used for activities that aren't in line with people job or education requirements... Why should they?
"We need to upgrade from our T-1's to T-3's because our employees insist on listening to music."
No. They can just say "our new policy is that if you want to listen to music here, please bring your CD's... we don't have the resources to allow for people to stream audio through our network"
But is so much easier to sell a pretty product with promises and use that money to make it better than it is to create a very high quality product that makes its money through repeat buying and reputation for quality. (just to play bil^H^H^Hdevil's advocate. (-;)
'Course this is a good reason why the OSS developement model works good. The quality is built by people who use it and really care. Because there is no money involved, nothing is rushed, cruft can be easily discarded, and programs -work-. Then later the marketers come along and get to add all the shiny happy buttons, but they are basically left to stand or fall based on their ability to appeal to the peole who need and depend on friendly goo-E's.
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+&x
An unusually excellent article on the whole napster mess here at USC can be found here.
Basic summary: the folks at ISD (the network admins) issued a preliminary statement that they were going to ban napster due to bandwidth concerns and legal worries (even huge universities don't want to be sued). As you might expect, students expressed outrage at this proposed suppression of their so-called rights (this is a debatable issue, leave it for the next post). Then USC's legal department came back with their answer... and it was no!
Turns out that there is probably more chance of losing future lawsuits if USC starts censoring out certain websites, than if they just let students have free access to the entire net, no questions asked. (Think of all the problems that internet filters have.)
So, instead, ISD held a nice roundtable discussion with student groups and hammered out a compromise. The rule now stands that whatever site you want to access is open (the head of ISD was quoted as saying to the effect that he didn't really want to know where students were going!). The only limitation is on bandwidth: students who exceed 40% of their bandwidth allocation (about 500k/sec) for more than two consecutive hours will have their ethernet port shut down. It's a nice incentive, especially since they are really slow about reactivating ports. Everyone involved agreed that this was an acceptible outcome of the situation.
"I came here to kick ass and chew bubblegum. I'm all out of bubblegum." MSE USC APX AIA CSI CASp
Personally, I'm not an advocate of bootlegged music, but I can't help rooting for Napster. We all know that music CD's are grossly overpriced. I don't think that the RIAA would have to worry that much about the bootleg industry if they could keep their prices reasonable; but paying $18 for a CD is absurd, especially when they are cheaper to produce than vinyl LP's (which sold for under $10). CD prices continue to rise in spite of the fact that the music industry is bigger than ever. I believe that the music industry is top-heavy with overpaid execs who aspire to add another $10 mil to their compensation package.
Is Napster going to eat into CD sales? Absolutely--and I believe that the end result is going to be a lot of pruning in the industry. Hopefully, the end result is going to be a dramatic drop in CD prices before they lose totaly control over music distribution.
My guess is when the app comes out of Beta, they will have enough proof to show advertisers that they have enough eyeballs to put banner ads into the client. Plus they will be able to prove that most of the users are 18-24 yrs. old-- a marketers dream! I'm almost positive that they will incorporate banner ads. I also think that they will offer a "premium version" of the client with added features for a price. So they'll probably have a basic free version and the upgraded version. Just look at RealPlayer. The've sold tons of the upgraded versions even though you can get the baxic for free.
--- RFC 1149 Compliant.
Knowing this, I was a little surprised when I read to following in the ZDnet article:
Now this is weird. A true unix-developper creates a windows program (ok, that is possible
Strange
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If code was hard to write, it should be hard to read
Gnapster
gnome-napster
GTK Napster
iNapster
jNapster
Knapster
Linux Napster Client
Jnap
OpenNap
;)
Would anyone like to throw some review of the different Napster implementations available for Linux? Or should I just run Napster over VMWare?
EraseMe
What really tickles my toenails about this article, is how the author of napster keeps harping on 'Prettying Up' the client.. even though he knows that there are major issues with how stable/efficient the infrastructure underneath is.
As a professional GUI designer, this type of problem runs across my desk a lot. Marketing maniacs push and push a product to market as fast as (in)humanly possible. They don't really care if the program actually functions, they just want it to look fancy and have a lot of useless features. (HOT LINKS!! WTF?!?)
This is a common trend in the software business today.. and it REALLY has to stop.
Less features; better programs. Everybody (well, everybody but the management) is happy.
Don't mind me, I just had a GUI change thrust into my lap by a certain clueless manager. IT'S ART DAMN YOU!
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rJames.org - illustration
Someone said making napster illegal would be like making (among other things) the USENET illegal. The problem with this analogy is there isn't the same level of direct culpability with regards to the USENET as there is with Napster. The USENET is a far larger and amorphous entity than Napster is. Who would you find liable for file trading on the USENET?...The USENET isn't a product of a given company like napster is...
Another analogy was made to VHS and cassette tapes. I would say this isn't the best analogy but instead think of "video stabalizers" or "cable decoder boxes". So called video stabalizers have long been used to try to break copy protection in copying a tape from one VCR to another. Similarly, cable decoder/descrambler boxes have long been used to circumvent the cable companies scrambling. Now, the problem here, and with napster, is that all three products have the possibility and potential to be used in a completely legal manner. If I am working on a video project on some crappy old VCR, I might use a video stabalizer to improve my image quality; if I by accident knock my cable box off my TV and break it and want a new one without wanting to pay the cable company, I may just choose to go buy one from a shop down the street. Similarly, if I am an independent music producer (some small indie band or whatnot), I may choose to try to use napster and it's chat rooms to promote my band by giving away free samples...
Legally the question becomes then not can the product be used for legal purposes, but what is it most likely to be used for. And this is where the law gets REALLY hairy. Then, "intent" has to be proven, which is a mess in and of itself, and it gets crazy. Two perfect examples though are syringes and "burgalarious tools". If you are caught in a drug bust, or whatever, it is against the law to carry a syringe without a valid reason why (at least this is true in Massachussetts...some MIT students recently got in trouble for just this (amongst other things)). Also, if you are caught breaking into a house and you have a bag of hammers, screwdrivers, etc. (esp., lockpicks!), you can be cited for illegal possession of "burgalarious tools". In both these instances, the person is usually caught doing something else, and these are secondary charges the cops like to tack on additionally, but still, a good example of how something completely legal can be found to be illegal.
It's scary, I know...
Now, departing from the legal side, Napster has technical problems galore (still being so new). Here's just a couple complaints:
- Multiple servers that don't communicate, and yet provide no notice to the user that there are in fact multiple servers nor which server they are on
- Search queries that can't be aborted
- Lots of firewall problems
- Lots of connection issues
- Lots of UI problems (like I can't look at what files someone has without explicitly adding them to my hotlist)
But hopefully, these will all be sorted out in later versions...so I strongly hope napster is around for a while yet!And now on to the article...first, I was amused to see this sentence in the second paragraph:
"At a time when the MP3 industry is under fire from multiple directions, the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) has filed a lawsuit against the small start-up company out of San Mateo, California, known as Napster. "
So there's an MP3 "industry" now, is there?...heh...
And here's a bold lie by the RIAA:
"We love the idea of using technology to build artist communities"
Yes, when it's a community around an artist that already is well set in the industry...new small artists not really interested in the RIAA? Uhuh. No way...The RIAA is not only not interested in them, it doesn't like them! They are potentially dangerous!
And here's a misnomer on Shawn's part too:
"I think it's pretty obvious to most people that Napster is not media specific".
Well, no. Currently, it is. It doesn't have to be, is what I think he's trying to say, and eventually won't be, but currently, yes, it is.
But in general, I don't think this article really says anything new. Big companies hate it, small individuals like it, and so it goes as per usual... Interestingly, Jon Katz was recently at MIT and stated this was an excellent example of how Geeks and young smart computer kids have usurped the "Corporatism" that exists today. I wondered about one point he made: he mentioned corporatism was different than capitalism, but I just don't see how?...