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Metallica Remains Silent
As you may already know, 30,000 Napster users have appealed to Napster on the basis that they feel they've done nothing wrong in the recent Metallica-inspired crackdown on accounts. Rap artist Dr. Dre has turned in his list to Napster, and we can only assume that there will be appeals there, too. Also, after numerous attempts and promises from Metallica's publicist, we still haven't gotten Metallica to answer the questions that our readers asked on May 4th. We have made several good-faith efforts to work with Metallica and their publicist, but it looks like they're never going to respond. On the lighter side, The Onion has posted the sad news about Kid Rock, and someone sent this image to us. [Updated 18 May 2000 7:40 GMT by timothy] Metallica's publicists have promised to try to get our questions answered "early next week," and that would be both more fun and more satisfying for all involved, I'm sure, than stony silence and accusations. Attn: Lars: The real debate is online :)
Forget the browser. They should sue Microsoft for their "Network Neighborhood" piracy software. As we all know, the only purpose of the Network Neighborhood is to allow people to access files on each other's computers, including MP3s of copyrighted songs.
Metallica are well within their right
Technically, I have to concede this point. I do not, however, agree with them. Their efforts in this regard indicate such a lack of understanding of the current state of technology that i wonder if they're still using 4-tracks to record their work.
i like their music too, but if i intentionally illegally copy their work then i must suffer the consequences.
i don't like their music any more. your masochistic overtones indicate that you are a troll, whether you know it or not. fuck it, i'll bite.
if i intentionally copy their work it will be solely as an act of civil disobedience to demonstrate the sheer stupidity of attempting to treat information as physicaly property given the ease of duplication. people argue over whether or not "information wants to be free." information already is free. there is no room for argument on this point. anyone trying to treat it any other way is living in the past, denying reality, and will be appropriately left behind as the revolution moves forward.
</rant>
Anthony
"I think any time you expose vulnerabilities it's a good thing." -Attorney General Janet Reno
Yeah, kinda sounds like MyMP3.com doesn't it? You know, where they could determine that I actually had the CD before I could listen to the MP3?
Of course, what sounds like a rational idea to 99% of humans ends up being shut down by RIAA.
The RIAA and their members aren't going to make anything available online until they figure a way to screw you at least as badly as when you buy a CD.
Do you even know anything about perl? -- AC Replying to Tom Christiansen post.
I'm not sure who's "paying the bills" right now, but I'm sure the long term goal is to set up Napster as a web-based equivalent of a brick-and-mortar record label. More people certainly know about Napster than Gnutella, etc. They mention "proprietary MusicShare technology" that their client uses, so I'm sure they could try to parlay that into some kind of subscription-based service.
Remember that all these software clients are just at the beta or preview stage, so once they are finally at the release stage, they could also sell the client software for profit. And, since they control the database of MP3's, they could easily make it so older/beta clients would no longer work.
Nothing, you idiots! Dr. Dre's dead, he's locked in my basement!
:-)
Ok, now *I'm* violating copyright for quoting Eminem, right? Oops.
Raptor
Raptor
"Procrastination is great. It gives me a lot more time to do things that I'm never going to do."
The subject line says it all; Metallica has already alienated lots of their fans. Listening to the Napster users' appeals isn't going to change their public image; they have commited a MAJOR screw-up; it's even likely that they realize it, but can't turn back now.
The damage has been done; I can't say I feel sorry for them.
I can just see it now....
"Hush little baby don't say a word
And never mind that noise you heard
It's just the beast under your bed
In your closet, in your head!
Exxon Gas! You car'll go fast!
Funnnncoland! And Disney're sponsoring our band!"
I honestly shudder at the idea of corporate patronage being the trust behind advancement of the arts... :)
What part of "shall not be infringed" is so hard to understand?
- A.P.
--
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
Surely such energy could've been harnessed for the betterment of everyone involved. Why not work with the fan community rather than against it?
Ita erat quando hic adveni.
(And yes, I know you're likely to have to reboot or go to someone else's machine to view the animation, but trust me it's worth the effort).
Mike
-- Could you use my software consulting serv
easy way to get around it: append 1 second of near silence to the end of the song and voila; the md5sum is now different.
rename the file slightly and its impossible to tell which song is a literal copy of a cd and which is 'almost the same'.
music industry still doesn't get it.
price the music realistically and the "crime" will go away. just like booze in the early part of this century.
--
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
But as will all things, the rebels become conservative. Metallica isn't worried about changing the world, they just want their piece of the pie. They've become part of the status quo.
It's the same with Dr. Dre. Wasn't he supposed to be a bad gansta from da hood? For anyone who didn't know it already, I think these debates have pretty much revealed him to be no different from any of the other so-called artists.
Art is about art, not money. Ask the great painters and composers and sculptors who died poor and alone.
Got Rhinos?
I have to shrug and cheer on the napster kiddies- even though they're being dumb- honestly, there's lots of good music out there _already_ being made by people who understand this stuff. The big record companies, the MTV bands, are just locked in a sick codependent relationship and it's dumb to support it at all. People are frothing at the mouth over the 'right' to download metallica for free but... why Metallica, exactly? What have they done, what has Dre done that's so great? Open your mind, listen to other music- there is SO MUCH music out there of all kinds and people still fixate on what they are fed, like Windows users.
Still, whatever: never try and teach a pig to sing, etc.
The last time I posted to an mp3 thread on Slashdot, someone or other pulled me aside (in ASCII) and said, basically, "Give it up- people don't want to listen to you because you AREN'T metallica, you're wasting your breath". And certainly I've seen some evidence of that. But I've also occasionally seen a person or two like what I have to say, or like the music I pointed them at. Turns out I had some decisions to make- am I doing it to beat Metallica, or am I doing it for me, because I make music like some slashdothackers write code?
I chose the latter.
So, I went quiet for a bit, rather than arguing loudly that I ought to be listened to seven times in every mp3 thread. And since the last time I posted, I cut an entire new album, "Cirrus", which is the anti-metallica ;) it's ambient music, with more of an edge to it than your usual musak ambient stuff, done with a synthesizer I took apart and hacked with the electronics of. I finished up the "Dragons" album, and made the CDs of both Cirrus and Dragons available (they're $5.99: a previous poster thought all CDs should be under $5. I'd do that in a heartbeat but $5.99 is as low as mp3.com will allow me to go- still beats $17, doesn't it?), and "anima" is still there, and "Extended Play" and "Hard Vacuum" (I wish the confounded site would put anchor points in so I could have these links refer to the spots on the page where the songs are) and I even went back and put up 700x700 cover jpegs of all my covers. This lets you see what the CD will look like a little better- and can also be used if people want to just download the songs and the cover and burn the CD themselves (which I am happy to let people do- that's why I'm making it so easy to do).
And, after about two days of rest, I'm going back into the studio to do yet another album. These days I prefer to just DO MUSIC rather than bitching about Metallica. If you think my music sucks, check again in a week and I'll have done something else. Check again in a month and God knows what I'll be up to. If you haven't checked in a week or a month, there's new stuff. It's like any form of art (or indeed the art of programming)... you learn by doing, not by arguing about it.
These days I get really crappy page stats, the idea of 'push' marketing totally failed me. When I stopped pushing, people stopped showing up. So I'm giving up and going with 'pull' like I should have all along- just plain trying to do good music, lots of it, huge amounts of it with something in it for just about anybody. Every now and then I'll mention that somewhere (like I'm doing now) but don't expect a recurrence of the BUY MY ALBUM stuff- that was fun but the time I spent doing it was time not spent doing more music.
Sorry guys- not optimal. You may be on top of the heap now, you may be in a position to turn the screws on your fans and squeeze money out- I'm in no such position- but check back in ten years and we'll see who's better. You keep right on playing with lawyers and I'll keep on playing guitar and bass and programming synthesizers and stuff... and I can only say, in all honesty, I don't think I will ever, ever need or want to be as stupid and shortsighted as you are being.
Get back to the music- or get pushed out of the way. It might take a while- that's OK, I and a legion of hipper mp3-oriented indie musicians have all the time in the world, and we're not tied up with perverted entertainment industry contracts like you guys are. Enjoy your glide back to the bottom, 'cause there's plenty of air beneath your wings but there's no power in your engines. (heh, thinking in aircraft metaphors- as it happens the next album I'm doing is on the theme of cool WWII aircraft :) ) Cheers, all the slashdotters who've checked out my music- and all the slashdotters who haven't and won't :) 'cause we're all in the same boat, really, aren't we?
"Dr. Dre has requested, however, that Napster simply delete his works from their directory rather than blocking users from using the service at all."
I'm sure Dr. Dre is going to get raked over the coals for this. To be fair, it's possible that he meant to block at the directory level, rather than simply deleting users.
Honestly, it's a little disingenuous for Napster to claim that they can't block individual music at the directory level. They certainly could look for all the Dr. Dre songs and block those individual titles. There's not going to be that many combinations. Yes, users can just rename the files, but it's a war of attrition that Napster will eventually win. Eventually, the renaming will get unrecognizable, and people won't be able to find the songs anyway.
In any case, none of this is going to stop Gnutella anyway. But I predict that Napster is going to go down.
--
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
The Washington Post printed a fairly well-informed article today explaining how Gnutella is different from Napster and why it's got some people scared.
This is kinda off topic, but for a while now I've been wondering, how does napster make any money?
I mean, assuming they got venture capital to start with, they have to have some sort of business plan...
But the client is free...
And I have yet to see advertising on their website or within the client itself... (other than ads for themselves...)
What's up? Who's paying their legal bills?
Or am I missing something obvious?
"You want to kiss the sky? Better learn how to kneel." - U2
Sig:
Barbeque is a noun. Not a verb.
There is nothing wrong advertising MP3 players if they do infact have plans to begin distributing their music *themselves*, from *their* website. Of course since they probably don't.. the point is moot.
My personal thoughts all along have been that;
a) Although it is in contradiction to the stance that the band has taken against commercialism. They do have a right, in our society, to be reimbursed for the work that they do. If they want to ban Napster users, who might or might not (depending if they own the albums), be stealing music, then they should be able to.
b) This stance does them no good publically to appear so advesarial (SP?) to their listening public. What they should offer as a remedy is the ability to download MP3's from a Metallica controlled website. That would require some sort of registration with Metallica, that would also include proof of purchase for the albums that have been bought. Sort of like a fan club distribution.
For those of you who never belonged to a band's fan club, the band usually sends out singles once a year to its members. If they were to distribute such singles off their website they would gain; direct contact with their fanbase; a distribution system that would eventually allow direct to consumer selling, they could double the normal price of a single, and the consumer would still be seeing a savings.... anyway, I'm rambling.. bottom line is Metallica is wrong to be attacking Napster, right to be asking Napster to ban fans, and wrong not to be offering those same fans the opportunity to purchase or recieve copies of those songs directly from Metallica..
anyway just my $0.02, (well 0.01 cents since I'm in Canada.)
Los Angeles, CA -- Today the New Kids On the Block (NKOB)
continued the the record industry's war against Napster. The New Kids
management gave a copy of 5 Napster users who had illeagally put
NKOB songs on their virtual servers. "This probably doesn't even begin
to touch the number of napster users pirating our art!" said former
NKOB member Jordan Knight Thursday. "We have evidence that
their may be as many as 9 people on napster with our songs!" New Kids on the Block
joins Dr. Dre and Metallica in the ongoing war against music piracy.
"I think we're the ones hit hardest" said Knight, "Metallica and
Dr. Dre have sold millions of albums in the last few years; We've
only sold 7 since napsters introduction and I think it's quite
apparent piracy is to blame."
Click here to read too much about my personal life
Rather than a single application, gnutella is a public protocol with numerous independent implementations, and it is architected to survived both nuclear blasts and lawyers - there is no centralized server.
There is some anonymonity, although it is far from perfect (I'd like to see both the downloads and searched done through encrypted channels) but because there is no central server, search engine or user registry there is no central point of control (or chokehold).
There probably aren't as many titles available as through Napster, but that's mainly because it's not as well known. But if I run Gnutella now, let's see how many files there are available this afternoon... well I'm tired of waiting, it's over 3700 hosts, 413,000 files, and 7,700,000 MB. So even though there may be fewer files available than Napster, there's a lot out there.
Mike
-- Could you use my software consulting serv
In their chatroom appearance recently, Metallica said that one of their goals was to educate fans. [The chat was a lame PR pitty-party which avoided any clued-in questions from the other participants.] More likely, they're receiving a crash course in techology. So I'm hardly surprised that they blew off Slashdot.
Perhaps they're starting to realize that their "Let's fight for Good(tm) by suing pirates" crusade is hopelessly misdirected. Their industry is changing with technology--viewing these technological shifts as a simple piracy issue is hopelessly misguided.
The current model only works because CDs are expensive to produce and distribute. But as music becomes trivially cheap to exchange, is that the end of professional music? Will the artists starve?
Hardly. Painful though it is to use the names Mozart and Metallica in the same post, an even cursory look at history shows that artists have flourished for a very long time without expensive, monopolistic distribution schemes and lawsuit bullying.
Musicians of the future will be supported in the same way Mozart and Beethoven were:
Patronage. In the modern case, it may be corporate or governmental support, perhaps like auto-racing teams, in echange for logo or ad messages. Or think of it like an investment: companies put money into talent in the hope their tours will be profitable. (Isn't this what the record companies do now?)
Comissioned works. Poets and sculptors are often hired to create works for the public. Increasingly, popular bands write ad jingles, for instance. It's easy to imagine a CD sponsored by a company.
Performances. Of course, popular acts already make a good portion of their money from tours.
The new technology kills the costs that necessitated the big companies: 1) access to fans via printing and advertising, and 2) manufacture and distribution of the music. Both are now effectively costless.
Smart bands will figure out that CDs aren't just art, they're also ads for their band. They'll get their word out as far as possible with the Napsters and Gnutellas, then reap the rewards of name recognition and touring fees.
For the "Metallica has all the right in the world" advocates... I agree to this. Metallica does have all the right in the world. However, the wealthier you are, the more responsibility you have to share that wealth. Look at McDonald's, for example - they solved a lot of PR problems just by starting to donate to charities. Microsoft, on the other hand, got a lot of bad press, when Bill Gates commented that they would NOT give ANY money to any charities any time soon.
There is also the other factor, that what you give to the world, you get back threefold. It really is good karma to give things away. Within limits, of course, (gotta maintain that self sustaining balance) but the better off you are, the more you're able to give. And it will only do you good in the long run.
Of course, I am now actively boycotting anything that comes out of RIAA, and I'll be buying my CDs from non-RIAA organizations like mp3.com instead. Not because they are executing their "rights", but because they are being greedy, and are radiating bad karma.
Who Wants To Date A Norwegian?
This post is protected under Copyright, DMCA, ASPCA, and has a patent pending.
Master of Napster
End of m-p-3, crumbling away
I'm your source of implication
Banks that pump with fear, sucking money clear
Leading to corporate destruction
Find them, Net-PD
More is all we need
We're dedicated to
How I'm suing you
Come download faster
Away with Napster
Our cash burns faster
Away with Napster
Napster
Napster of Puppets I'm pulling your strings
Warping your mind and trashing your dreams
Blinded by greed, just buy the CD
Just call my lawyer, `cause I'll hear you scream
Napster
Napster
Just call my lawyer `cause I'll hear you scream
Napster
Napster
Free music, no way. Were R-I-A-A
Loss of cash becoming clearer
Sound monopoly, financial misery
Chop our breakfast on a mirror
Download you will see
More is all we need
We're dedicated to
How we're suing you
Napster of Puppets I'm pulling your strings
Warping your mind and trashing your dreams
Blinded by greed, just buy the CD
Just call my lawyer, `cause I'll hear you scream
Napster
Napster
Just call my lawyer `cause I'll hear you scream
Napster
Napster
Napster, Napster, Where's the song that I've been after?
Napster, Napster, You promised mp3's
Laughter, Laughter, All I hear is corporate laughter
Laughter, Laughter, laughing at my cries
It's not worth all that, stupid little spat
Just a rhyme without a reason
Neverending ways, drift on jury days
We don't even know the reason
Download you will see
More is all we need
We're dedicated to
How we're suing you
Come download faster
Away with Napster
Our cash burns faster
Away with Napster
Napster
Napster of Puppets I'm pulling your strings
Warping your mind and trashing your dreams
Blinded by greed, just buy the CD
Just call my lawyer, `cause I'll hear you scream
Napster
Napster
Ha ha ha ha