Slashdot Mirror
The New World of Gnutella
Frater 219 writes "The censorship-resistant systems Gnutella and Freenet got some reasonably positive editorial coverage in the Sacramento Bee and Nando Times today. Here's the article. It's rather good stuff: 'Echoes of the old hacker manifesto begin to ring loudly once again: Information wants to be free.'" Good piece, go read it.
>Please explain to me how having 600,000 songs at my fingertips is wrong when I'm paying for
>bandwidth, diskspace, and promotion. (equivelent to reproduction, distrubution, and promotion in
>the old world)
Because that doesn't at all take into account paying the people that created the music, the artists, the engineers, the producers, the graphic design folk that make the album covers and so forth.
The current model SUCKS at that; the artists get cheated and gypped. I'm the first to say it. But your model sucks even more -- the artists don't see ANYTHING -- not a red cent.
You can pay for all the bandwidth, disk space, and promotion you want, but you're still just being a warez d00d, collecting other peoples' work without paying anyone, and there's no way do dance around it.
>How bright is this?
Brighter than a future where no art gets produced because y'all take away the sole source of artists income without offering anything in return or coming up with any alternatives... But, hey, information wants to be free, gimme gimme gimme.
The way music is distribted now doesn't work well.
The way you'd like to have it distributed won't work at all.
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(Turning off my +1 because this looks like a long night....)
You're starting to get somewhere, but you're changing the subject. I'm just answering your question "if I have all the diskspace in the world, and I fill it up with stuff that I got free that's actually being charged for by the author, what's wrong with that?"
And it's rather self-evident. The authors and the artists and so forth have released this product with certain terms. You may or may not agree with them, but to violate them is to disrespect the artist's wishes. You're free to do that, but don't expect later arguments about supporting artists to hold any water. If the artists want to give it away free, they will. If their labels won't let them, they'll ditch the labels and do it their own way. If they don't do that, well, then, obviously the money is more important to them than the freedom, and therefore IT'S NOT YOURS TO TAKE FOR FREE.
Now, I like your scenario of everyone doing music for the love of it, and popular artists somehow getting paid just for being popular (although the math is kind of vague in there). I really do. But until and unless such a scheme exists, it's vaporware, and you're pointing to it and saying "SEEEEE, it COULD work!!!" and taking and taking and taking, and not giving back anything to these popular artists that are supposed to be getting paid for being popular.
You want this scheme to work, make it work: set up a record label that gives the music away free. Go on, do it. Get artists to sign up, come up with a business plan that gets people paid somehow for this, and I'll be the first one, really, the VERY FIRST ONE to sign up and help out. C'mon, let's do it, lets figure out free (in the GNU sense) music.
But until it's there, and it ain't there now, you're still just taking free (in the beer sense) music away from people who are trying to make a living selling it on a per-unit basis. And scrambling to justify it with a lot of what-ifs and if-only's.
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Information does not want to be free. Information is a non-breathing, non-living entity with no feelings and no desires.
People want information to be free, and that's the crux of the problem. As soon as capitalism returns to its roots and begins giving people what they want (in order to make more money, of course), then we'll see a resolution to this problem.
I want my information free. Don't you?
Suppose that your disk is happily sharing with the rest of the world that your DNA has a gene that your employer thinks makes you unsuitable for your work, or anything else you don't want to be known about yourself.
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Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
Glad to see someone else has kept some perspective on this whole issue! The great thing about these tools isn't what they're being used for right now (largely "piracy"), but the potential they have to change the way things are done in the future. The legitimate uses far outweight the illegitimate here.
This is much more important than whether John Doe can get his mp3s easier. The distributed nature of things like Gnutella allows for a Net where the individual is *really* empowered, not just nominally so. With traditional avenues like the Web, you're still under the control of a large corporation, governments, etc. This inevitably leads to easy censorship by such groups. Now, however, one can distribute information much more freely.
It could be used by people in countries such as China, where incoming information is strictly censored, to get the information being denied to them by an oppressive regime, as just one example.
The distributed nature of these systems also helps contribute in a way to the robustness of the whole. If one source goes down, there are likely others to fill in. This is good regardless of the type of information being transferred.
And who knows what uses will be found for this in the coming years? When VCRs first came out, it was lobbied against furiously by those in power in the movie industry, fearing it would be just a piracy tool. Yet, while undoubtedly some use VCRs so, the VCR has become an important, legitimate tool for people. And it's created businesses unforeseen when it came out (such as video rental stores).
I think too many people have been looking merely at the first uses to which the technology has been put, rather than considering the potential it has to benefit us all. Criminals have often been the first to use new technology, this doesn't mean the technology is in any way less legitimate. Trying to ban the technology is not going to solve anything. The criminals will still use it, and the public will lose a useful tool.
I don't want the information about my last Doctor visit to be free. I don't want the information about where I live or my favoutite porno movie to be free for every John Q. Nobody to claim rights to and play with until his hearts content.
Of course not, but it wants to be, so you have to fight against it. The problem we have here (if you consider Napster a problem) is that it's not only the information that wants to be free, but an overwhelming number of people who also want it to be free. So while it might be easy for a bank to fight against the natural inclination of information to propogate, after all only an few try to steal money digitally (and it's easier with a gun anyway), it becomes quite a bit more difficult for the RIAA. Especially with information that already is everywhere (CDs), but now it can get everywhere else (Internet).
So it does want to be free. It just is, and just being is quite a good way to be free, if you can follow a sentence with three tenses of the same verb describing a word with multiple correct translations.
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Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
"Information wants to be free."
I disagree in some cases.
At my workplace we're about to begin the ever tedious job of an ISO 9000 audit. I have much information that I thought wished to be free that is sitting on my desk. Sadly, it has not yet made that wish apparent by filling out the appropriate paperwork to become free. Of course I can not violate and ISO standards and just give such information to those who need it. After filling out the paper work it must be approved, dated, given some bizarre version number and distributed on the website.
Since it has yet to make it's wishes clear to me I believe that my information in fact does not wish to be free, regardless of it's usefulness to those who might appreciate it. I plan to soon impose my wishes on the information and fill out the paperwork on it's behalf during a midnight run to the copier. May God keep me save from the ISO storm troopers!
Come to think of it, my information has yet to make any requests to me. Has anyone else been able to communicate with their information? If so, what did it say?
Please. Why do people feel the need to gloss over the purpose of programs like Napster and Gnutella. I'm an Open Source Programmer, and I know damn well that Napster is used to download illegal mp3s more than anything else. Same with Gnutella.
Implying that it is "censorship" to protect one's copyrights is absurd. I know that this is an "advocacy" site, but keep in mind that this sort of doubletalk makes you guys look like the small children who, when caught with their hands in the cookie jar, protest their innocence to the last. The fact that Slashdot implicitly condones such action reflects poorly on the Free Software Community. Not all Free Software Users wish to violate copyrights; for many uf us, that's the reason we switched to Free Software.
Sorry, I don't buy that this is the Linux-using David vs. the big, bad, coporate censor Goliath. People use Napster to break the laws. We have bans on certain types of guns which are used to break the law (eg, assault rifles, which have *no* legitimate purpose), likewise, Napster could be legally banned. Sure, maybe 1/100,000th of Napster users download only legit mp3s, but let's not paint to bright a picture of copyright violations, eh emmett?
Information does not want to be free. People want other people's information to be free. How can any reasonable /.er get up in arms about doubleclick.net gathering surfing information, and then claim that information wants to be free.
I certainly don't want the contents of swiss bank accounts to be free. I don't want the information about my last Doctor visit to be free. I don't want the information about where I live or my favoutite porno movie to be free for every John Q. Nobody to claim rights to and play with until his hearts content.
Napster/Gnutella was designed to facilitate the distribution of private mp3 collections. These will generally consist of copyrighted material. I think that its important that people not forget that, while the music companies are big and evil, they have rights too. That means that they have a legitimate gripe with the free distribution of material that they've paid to protect and that they want to sell. I know that napster can be used to distribute other non-copyrighted material, and that's great, but lets not forget the tainted ground on which the thing started. I'm a big free speech advocate, and I download mp3s too, but lets not be totally ignorant as to why napster was created.
The Hacker Manifesto was written back in the ancient eighties by a hacker named Mentor. Read it.......it may be about you.
Also of interest may be the Hacker's Ethic. Something of a code that should be lived by, particularly by those reading these pages. It's where the, "Informationwants/should be free", quote comes from.
"Share your knowledge. It's a way to achieve immortality." -- Dalai Lama
The people here who are defending copyright don't seem to get the point. Freenet isn't about violating copyright -- it's about giving people the power to share information anonymously and inviolably. Freenet can be used to trade MP3s the same way that a 1 GHz Pentium III box can be used to bash someone's brains out.
It's tempting to try to stamp out IP violations (not to mention terrorism and kidd1e pr0n) by regulating probable channels of distribution, but history shows that when the government has that kind of power, it's never used as it was intended. I'd rather have an internet with Freenet and illegally distributed music than an internet where copyright is sacrosanct but everyone who downloaded DeCSS or visited Peacefire.org or looked for harm-reduction information on ecstasy could be traced and have the law loosed against them.
Fantasy? You know the corporations and the government would do this if they could. We need hardcore privacy protection not to permit immoral acts but to preserve our freedom to act morally.
note: if you prefer, "unreasonable/reasonable," "unsustainable/sustainable," and "antisocial/prosocial," among others, can all be substituted into the above paragraph for the controversial m-word...
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Go ahead, blame me... I voted for Nader!
Am I the only person who hates Napster/Gnutella with a passion?
The network at my university has been maxed out at 98% outgoing or so, 80% incoming for quite some time due to Napster. How do I know? Because last Wednesday, they banned it, and this dropped to about 30% outgoing, 50% incoming.
The network here has been mostly unusable for months, and it has been because of Napster.
Now, admittedly, the biggest reason for the outgoing is most likely the fact that Napster doesn't close when you click the "X" in the upper right of the window. Instead, it backgrounds itself and goes into the system tray. This means that people who have no clue how to use a computer excepting to play mp3s and use a word processor get Napster on the advice of a more knowledgeable friend, and proceed to share out gigs of mp3s to the world 24/7. With Gnutella, this probably isn't as big of a problem.
Anyways, I can't be happier that it is banned, and I can hardly feel bad for people whining that they can't steal music with ease anymore. If you can't even take the time to browse IRC or the web for your pirated music, you're pretty pathetic. You're getting it free to begin with, so I have no sympathy for you just because you might have to actually do the smallest bit of work to get it.
My rant for now,
-[Blaine]- "'Oh dear,' says God, 'I hadn't thought of that,' and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic."
People use Napster to break the laws.
Some laws need to broken. Some need to be smashed so hard their teeth rattle. And please spare me the little kiddy not wantin' to pay for CDs spiel, I've heard it, it doesn't apply here. Please explain to me how having 600,000 songs at my fingertips is wrong when I'm paying for bandwidth, diskspace, and promotion. (equivelent to reproduction, distrubution, and promotion in the old world)
let's not paint to bright a picture of copyright violations, eh emmett?
How bright is this?
Keep the music flowing.
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This is perceived as a threat to traditional publishing and recording industries just as radio was, and the mimeograph, and television, and the photocopier, and magnetic tape, and the compact disc, and the videocassette recorder, and many other technologies that made sharing information easier. Freenet doesn't do anything different from what can already be done with those technologies, it just does it more efficiently.
tangent - art and creation are a higher purpose
postmoderncore - art and creation are a higher purpose
Just like to mention that an alternative to copyrights is the Street Performer Protocol by Bruce Schneier. He predicted the advent of systems like this and offers up a partial solution.
I haven't seen anyone really take a stab at setting it up yet though.
Debatable: 'Protecting one's copyrights' is censorship. It can be interpreted as warranted in the interest of promoting economic reward for creative endeavors (which is actually intended to encourage creative endeavors, not economic reward per se), but it is still the suppression of someone else's speech.
Non-debatable: 'Protecting one's copyrights' has certainly been used by organizations, normally large businesses, to censor the speech of others in the case of satire, parody and so forth. The key point here is how far copyrights extend. Parodies of Mickey Mouse (including all kinds of offensive parodies that 'most people' wouldn't like) are actually legally protected but despite this are impossible to defend from armies of lawyers. There are many other examples.
People tend to forget that copyright was created at a specific time with a specific purpose, and that as a legal creation is rather malleable (as has been shown by its constant extension...). /.ers should realize this, especially as it is being extended further and further by things like the DMCA.
There are two basic problems. One, as it becomes more ingrained and gathers more powerful interests behind it, copyright begins to seem a natural moral concept (not an economic incentive). This means that the idea of banning devices which could facilitate copyright violations becomes more palatable. Two, as the technology changes, violating copyright law becomes easier and easier.
All this really means is that it will be extremely difficult to maintain the status quo, and that's what we're seeing: large forces attempting to extend the reach of copyright so that it becomes totally ridiculous, and other forces (perhaps only intending to turn the tide a little, perhaps not) straining to render copyright utterly unenforceable.
A simple "for/against" standpoint doesn't really work anymore, especially since copyright is a legal concept and certain players are able to change the laws in their favour. This is a point that many, including the AC to whom I am replying, appear to miss. Is it 'censorship' to say that you cannot reproduce my work now? In 5 years? In 10? 100? 1000? When does my work (which inevitably drew upon public domain ideas) become part of the public domain? Similarly, is it censorship to say that you can't parody my work? Cite my work? Say bad things about my work? Mention my work?
It's a matter of degree. The key point is not really about copyright 'violations' but rather: what do we want copyright to be? What is the best middle ground between encouraging creativity and encouraging a free and open exchange of ideas? And how do we get there?