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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
The Post ran a HUGE story on Napster today, Chuck D, etc.
It can be found here.
BilldaCat
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.
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.