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Napster Wars
barjam wrote to us with the news from the MP3 front. Apparently the RIAA has
filed to have Napster pull all major-label songs from Napster. There's another take from Canoe on the story. The Canoe article states that the RIAA has gone a step further and wants to have Napster shut down on a preliminary injunction.
Just out of curiosity, exactly what does your comment have to do with the subject at hand, namely Napster? Exactly who is insisting that Napster go around deleting files from everyone's hard drive?
The RIAA is hoping to dupe a judge into doing just that. If I were the judge in question, I would be furious with the RIAA for attempting to make such an ass of both the judge personally and the legal system as a whole.
Or was this meant to be a non-sequitur?
I can't speak to the poster's initial intent, but his comment most certainly was not a non-sequitur.
Napster does not store any files on its servers. It facilitates the exchange of files between client machines only, with no traffic going to the napster server at all.
It is basically a big index, much like the old FTP indexes that circulated around the internet in text format in the days before the world wide web. It tells people where they can find things, nothing more. Last I checked, this was a protected form of speach (although the DMCA, not to mention the fiasco that is The War on Drugs, may have eroded this particular right).
Insisting that Napster remove content is insisting that Napster invade individuals personal computers and delete files, an illegal act in most jurisdictions.
The original poster's satirical comments that the editors of slashdot had better remove all the illegal content from the poster's personal computer, "or else," serves to illustrate the stupidity of such a demand rather well, actually.
In short, the RIAA is making an ass of both itself and the American Justice system.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
I suppose that this is the right time to do it. All the college kids lost thier high speed lines. They won't get the huge backlash that they would of if it were mid school year.
The "Industry" just controls distribution, and boy do they ever control it. You'll have a hard time finding a record store that carries used CDs and major label new releases, because if the store is found out, the label will stop distributing new CDs to them or refuse to allow them to advertise they have those new releases in stock.
So now there's an entirely new way of distributing music. And the current distributors are scared. They are terrified of their own obsolescence, and they are swaddling their greed in a rhetoric of justice. They don't care about music, or artistic integrity, or artists' rights. They care about their money, and absolutely nothing else in the world. The new reality is that the link between artist and performer is the music itself, not the industry's permission to distribute it.
We need Columbia Records for music the way we need buggy whips to drive a car. They're just not part of the equation anymore.
--
This is not my sandwich.
The Post ran a HUGE story on Napster today, Chuck D, etc.
It can be found here.
BilldaCat
"If the courts allow Napster and services like it to continue to facilitate massive copyright infringement, there is a grave risk that the public will begin to perceive and believe that they have a right to obtain copyrighted materials for free," -- the RIAA
"[A] government of the people, by the people, for the people" -- Abraham Lincon
The RIAA seems to forget something - all these laws that the "public" dosen't understand, or disregards... the "public" are the ones who define the laws. Oh, sure, in the short run, you'll see lots of fines, even some people with jail time. But if the pendulum of public opinion *really* swings to the concept that there is nothing wrong with Napster, the laws will be disregarded, ignored, and then changed.
There are plenty of laws on the books that are ignored, some with rather serious reprocussions that were considered "vital" at the time that they were written and passed into law. When was the last time a married couple was charged with sodomy for oral sex?
As an occasionally aspiring artist myself, I know it's not in my best interest to see the IP laws pass out of vogue, but all laws are, in the end, a fiction created by people agreeing. I'm *not* saying that it *will* happen, just that in cases of the public opinion versus a law always causes the law to eventually lose.
And don't even try to say "America isn't the internet". This is not an internet issue... it's the RIA_A_, and the IP laws of America apply.
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
Napster is not morally wrong. Certainly not in the world that we live in today. What I think IS morally wrong is the fact that these corporations continue to try to expand their control over copyrighted works, and even worse, continue to have the copyright term-length extended. The whole reason we have copyright was not so that huge corporations could buy up everything in sight and own it and profit from it forever. It was to expand the amount of creative works in the public domain that everyone has free access to. The idea was to give artists an incentive to create by allowing them to have exclusive control over their works (to the extent that was allowed by copyright laws) so that they could profit from them for a limited period of time (originally 14 years I believe). Now, works that were created and/or copyrighted in my lifetime will probably not enter the public domain in my lifetime. THAT is morally wrong! So, don't expect me to shed any tears over whatever money/control the record industry thinks they're losing to "pirates." As far as I'm concerned, the record industry and others like them are the true pirates that have stolen more from us than we ever could from them.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
> "Most in the online business community recognize that what Napster is doing threatens legitimate e-commerce models and is legally and morally wrong."
Translation: We don't know how to make any money off of napster. We don't give a shit about the morality of it, but we do have lots of lawyers.
> "If the courts allow Napster and services like it to continue to facilitate massive copyright infringement, there is a grave risk that the public will begin to perceive and believe that they have a right to obtain copyrighted materials for free,"
Translation: This scares us shitless.
> "The record companies are trying to shut down Napster--an entirely legal system of file sharing that reflects the heart and soul of the Internet"
Translation: Everyone knows that napster is used almost exclusively to violate copyright, but it does have legitimate uses, so the law is on our side. Yeah!
-- Too lazy to get a lower UID.
It would be interesting to create a set of remixed tracks, each track itself consisting of the maximum allowed length sample from a number of different songs... each track in the set would contain a sample from a slightly different time index into the original song.
Thus, songs could be "striped" across multiple mixed tracks which could then be distributed freely. All you'd need is an index to tell you which "mixes" you needed to get back the whole original song you were interested in.
If enough people were involved in the distribution of different tracks, how could they sue anyone even if they found out who you were?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
[To the tune of "My Sharona"]
So you want to share some songs
Share some songs
When your Napster's gone you'll use my Gnutella
RIAA Copyright qualms
Copyright qualms
They will never find you with my Gnutella
Screw Metallica, and the rest, never gonna stop
I won't give it up. I'm gonna rock. You'll never
catch me with my... my... my... my WOO!
m-m-m-my Gnutella!
m-m-m-my Gnutella!
OpenNAP - http://opennap.sourceforge.net/ -- someone's already beat ya to it ;) And http://www.napigator.com/list.php for a list of Napster servers, including the main napster servers, and other OpenNAP servers.
the real at&t mix
I think it was Wednesday, Hillary Rosen and the guy from Gnutella were on Talk of the Nation. Maybe I am just partial, but the guy from Gnutella was very cool, and Hillary was, well, a total bitch. She played the part of Dragon Lady very well.
She was sitting there absolutely lying to all the NPR listeners every time she opened her mouth. Finally, near the end of the show, she said that "Napster was bad because Metallica had to tell them who to remove," or something like that. The Gnutella dude spoke up and said, "But that is what the DMCA - which the music industry pushed so hard for - says they have to do!" Then Hillary had the gall to poo poo his comment.
I really wish that comment had happened near the beginning of the show.
The more I hear the RIAA and their ilk spout off, the more I want to punch something. Preferably Hillary Rosen's nose.
Peer to peer file sharing of *illegal* materials is already illegal. What they can't do is enforce it. It's like sharing illegal software with your friends via ftp or something. They can't do anything about it, whether it is illegal or not.
What it does is send a clear message to all those who have been doing it out in the open and even making a business out of it.
I certainly think the "fine line" is simple to distinguish.
This is from npr.org; here's the Napster hour segment of the show at 28.8.
http://www.npr.org/ramfiles/t otn/20000607.totn.01.rmm
TomatoMan
-- http://frobnosticate.com
As some above have said, (and I'm not trying to be redundant) there are many other places to get MP3s, most of which existed before Napster.
Oth.net used to be an amazing source for them by listing searchable FTP sites full with albums and singles. There's always other less dependable websites like AudioGalaxy.com and LycosMP3. There are all BIG, well-known WWW sites, which, although not quite 100% reliable are well established. This does not cover the thousands of pages you can find if you go to Hotbot and search for 'mp3'.
Then, of course, there's IRC. Here again, there are hundreds of communities across dozens of servers all working on one thing: getting/trading MP3s. (My recommendation is to try some of the IRC servers on the Eris Free Network).
Then of course, you've got other Napster-like clients like GNUtella, FreeNet, and Globalscape's CuteMX (most of these share more than MP3 files).
And college students will always have the trusty, reliable LANs where students share their large collections.
Ok, so you knew this already. Bottom line: MP3 is not going away, not now, and especially not at the hands of the RIAA. If they are only half as smart as their lawyers are blockheaded, they would work with some of these companies, as well as organizations like the Frauenhoffer Institute to develop a replacement for the MP3 file format. One that maybe sounds twice as good for half the file size, so you can get 320kbps encoded songs for 3MB or so. New technology is the way to fight MP3. If enough people think it's worth it to pay $0.50 for a song that sounds twice as good and can be downloaded in half the time, guess what? They'll be more likely to get that song as opposed to an .mp3 file. Relatively secure encoding already exists. The band Phish released MP3s that you could listen to for free three times, then a window popped up that reuqired you to enter a credit card number and pay some small amount of money to continue listening to the song (apparently, an executable was appended to the WAV file before it was encoded... You couldn't remove this prompt, or extract a WAV file with WinAmp).
If Lars is reading this, spend money on getting new media developed, not on paying your lawyers. You may win against Napster, but not against MP3.
Why I want to know is how can many of you people support GPL'd software, and disapprove of people redistrubiting it at will ("sharing" in RMS's terms), but be all for violating a music artist's license?
If an artist chooses non-redistribution as a license, it should be honored.
Or are many of you saying that we should ignore the GPL and companies can start redistributing binary version of gcc at will?
--
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
You don't even have to go that far with it. The music companies aren't doomed to extinction, but they'd better damned well change they way they do business if they want to keep the same profit margins. As in, offer us something we can't get off Napster.
In fact, the biggest reason I root for Napster is because I know it will force the music distribution people to offer us more, or offer us the same for less money, in order to keep our business. They've been gouging us on the price of CD's since their debut, and now the pressure is on.
You listening, Columbia? You want me to buy the new N'Sync album, rather than just download the tunes? Well, what kind of deal are you willing to make me, you greedy bastards? (insert evil laughter here)
Come on, guys. You can spend millions on your lawyers fighting pointless lawsuits for the next ten years, or you can use that money to bring your company into the digital age. Deal with the new reality.
-David Wong
Phallic Symbols in LOTR