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Interesting Way To Protest Napster
^Gargoyle^ writes: "Here's an interesting way one Napster user is causing problems for Napster. In a nutshell, he's creating songs that are exactly the same length as a legitimate song, but with an annoying cukoo sound in place of the song. An interesting way to protest copyright infringement." This is the best form of protest I've seen so far... it makes pirating copyrighted music more difficult, without doing something stupid like trying to make peer-to-peer networking illegal or making it illegal to rip your own CDs. Mind you lots of Fingerbang fans are gonna be really annoyed when they waste all that download time!
Since there are valid free songs on Napster, this is a bogus example on it's face. I'm not even going to explain it, I think you know where you're off.
.02
My
Quux26
My
Quux26
www.crashspace.net
I agree. Notice I said "recordings made at live venues" :)
Open Source. Closed Minds. We are Slashdot.
I'm sure Metallica and their buds over at RIAA could then find a way to sue the user for using the Metallica name. You all may or may not remember the nail polish fiasco where Metallica sued Urban Decay because of a they marketed under the name Metallica. Litigious little buggers, no?
"As for 20 vs 278 million, yes, 20 million is indeed a minority. But it is 20 million Now, less than a year after Napsters release. How many do you think it will be in one year?" 20 million individual users? or 20 million different user id's? How many in a year... depends on how much Napster charges and hypocritical the users are when the well runs dry. Please don't quote polls that say, "I promise I would pay to play if only it was available." We weill have to wait and see.
To the poor fool who started stopnapster.com.
Michael,
Did you know that people like you and your predecessors have fought tooth and nail against *every* recording technology that ever came down the pike?
When Edison first commercialized wax-cylinder records, howls of protest came from musicians who feared that noone would hire them, if they could play music at home on a phonograph. Eventually, the more enlightened members of your profession realized that they could make far more money from a popular record, than they could make from playing gigs.
When Sarnof set up the first radio broadcast stations in the United States, musicians sued to prevent radio stations from playing their music on the air, figuring that if people could hear them on the radio, they'd never bother to buy their records. Again, the brighter musicians realized that people who heard their music on the radio were much more likely to buy their records.
When cassette tapes became available, the hue and cry was raised yet again: Who would buy records, if they could just tape their friend's records? Surveys show that the people who buy the most blank tape, also buy the most CDs.
When CD's hit the streets, some of the most ignorant musicians actually refused to let their albums be released on CD's, because CD's wouldn't wear out, and nobody would buy more than one copy!
And now, when it's become possible for millions of people who've never heard of you, to stumble across your work on the net, listen to what you do, and maybe decide that they like your work and that they'd like to go to one of your shows, short sighted fools throw away the opportunity.
Have it your way: If I ever see an MP3 on Napster or anywhere else that purports to be a song by the Tabloids, I'll ignore it or delete it.
Gee, I wonder if you were any good?
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
"I am amazed at the people who would never dream of stealing a book from a bookstore (and thus indirectly from the writer) but have no problem stealing music from the artists who create it."
talks_to_birds: Christ!
talks_to_birds: Every time I read this I want to strangle someone!
talks_to_birds: Idiot!
talks_to_birds: The music on Napster is not being stolen from some CD store, nor is it stolen from the artists!
talks_to_birds: It's a copy of some one person's copy of the CD that they bought!
talks_to_birds: Somebody, somewhere bought every single one of the cuts available through Napster!
Thank you for making my point. Theoretically, your argument says that only ONE Napster user must buy the CD in question, then they can legally make an mp3 to share with all the other users on Napster who may or may not have purchased the CD in question. I don't care how you choose to see it: Anyone who downloads a mp3 of a song from a CD that they do not personally own is a thief.
talks_to_birds: This is an issue revolving about whether you, as the purchaser of a CD, has the right to make as many (any?) MP3-quality copies of the cuts and distribute them as you please!
talks_to_birds: The RIAA thinks you have no rights whatsoever regarding the use of the CD's you buy! You can listen to that one original, but that's it.
Here you are wrong. In the USA, you have the right to make as many copies of any media you purchased that you care to make. The copies can be stored on any other media you choose. Where your rights stop is in delivery and distribution of those copies. You may not sell or give away a copy, nor may you sell the original and keep any copies. You may not make a public broadcast of the media's contents for profit (or not) without the written consent of the copyright holder or the agent of the copyright owner. Your right to copy anything on any media is secure, at least in the USA. What you get to do with those copies is what is in question, not your right to make the copies.
talks_to_birds: Don't forget that the issue of copying was unknown until MP3 quality copying became possible.
Again, you are wrong. Ask any media distributor about copyright violations worldwide. For the past 20 years the MPAA, RIAA and software industry has fought to have our government to deny trade relations with countries who do not respect USA copyright, such as China and the former CCCP. The issue of copying has been around for a long time. Where the hell do you think the legal concept of copyright came from in the first place?
talks_to_birds: Hell, my kid's had a dual-well tape player since the very first one she got, when she was maybe five years old! What the hell do you think you're supposed to do with two-well tape decks? Make copies!
That's the biggest red herring I ever saw. Ever hear of logic? Didn't think so.
talks_to_birds: This whole deal is about whether you have the right (any right!?) to make and distribute MP3-quality copies of CD's you own!
Again, it is not. It is about what you can do with the copies you make from the media (CD or other) you own.
talks_to_birds: Have you heard about the RIAA wanting the government to clamp down on the production and sales of blank cassette tapes? Hell no! The RIAA could care less about cassettes!
talks_to_birds: Inconsistent? You're damn straight!
Totally irrelevant to this issue. Wow, you *really* can't form a logically sound argument.
talks_to_birds: I, for one, think we all should be able to make whatever copies we want to of our own personal property!
And guess what? In the USA, you can do just that. You just don't get to give away a copy of material where someone else holds the copyright.
"Oh, well. I guess I'm just afflicted with a terrible case of outmoded ethics."
talks_to_birds: No: you're an idiot!
I may be an idiot, but I am not a self-justifying thief.
sorry it took me so lomg to respond -- took me a while to pry from my mouth all the words you tried to shove in there.
/.) but also my deepest psychological motivations (see, i'm a thief, cause i don't like paying for things, cause i'm cheap, and a hoodlum)! the ignorance! the egotism! astounding.
your assertion that all money derived from enjoyment of the work of an arist somehow rightfully belongs to that artist is both completely philosophically unjustifiable and completely at odds with the way that all forms of art eventually manifest themselves. consider the percentage (0) of the cost to get into the museum which goes to the artists whose work is displayed there. consider the amount that i'm forced to pay to hear metallica on the radio, or that the station is forced to pay them. again, the number to concentrate on is 0.
so clearly, your ignorance of the manner in which art is disseminated and its profit split up is hopelessly divorced from reality. the fact is, music is often played for free, and art is often displayed at no cost to the public and no profit to the artist. explain to me again how much you pay to see a public art exhibition? is this stealing? should we shut down free museums? should artists be fuming, suing for a pay-per-view standard to be imposed? and would this or would this not make them money-grubbing assholes?
your a priori assumption that all showings of works of art should profit the artist is neither common sense nor embedded in the law. many forms of reproduction and display are legal. you've drawn a line as to what is and what is not stealing, and that's just great. and i fully expect name-calling from egocentric solopsists who mistake their own subjective judgements for legal, ethical, or moral absolutes. but that doesn't make it right.
i haven't stolen from anyone. in fact, i think it's fair to say that the sum total of downloads i've performed have resulted in a greatly increased incidence of purchasing -- of bands i wouldn't have heard of, of albums i'd listened to in some small part, of entire genres to which i had little exposure and no willingness to explore because of the cost.
so get off my effing back. i spend like crazy, and moreso because of downloads. how you can be so self-righteous, claiming to understand not only my behavior (having had contact with me consisting entirely of two or three exchanged messages on
god is just pretend.
He couldn't be lars, there's no "um" "uh" or "err" in that post:)
Fist Prost
"We're talking about a planet of helpdesks."
-Jaron Lanier
A couple of dj friends and I came up on a variation of this, but not so harsh - encode the actual tracks exactly the same length or longer, but reduce the quality of the sound or the range of frequencies beforehand. This way your track is out there, but people still have to buy the cd for the full quality. Once the record companies realise this, they will probably embrace Napster ...
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Oh, this guy is a riot. I saw one of his titles on Napster, was intrigued, downloaded it and then a whole bunch of his other stuff.
That was last night, and so I haven't really listened to much of it yet. While, at first glance, the guy *cannot* sing, he's a hell of a lyricist. (Inability to sing never stopped Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix or Dire Straits/Mark Knopfler.)
I think everyone gets the fucking obvious point now. Why must the record companies insist on attempting to keep me from buying their things?Because nice predictable business models make shareholders happy.
How about other bands that have supported MP3 sharing? Limp Bizkit? Motley Crue?
I especially love Offspring's little tactic: selling unlicensed Napster merchandise. Just in case you didn't hear the story, while Offspring was happy to proclaim their support for Napster, they didn't get Napster's approval before selling stuff with the Napster logo.
I'm not sure what that was supposed to mean... I guess just a protest of corporate control of information?
In a fit of self-destructive stupidity, Napster sued Offspring. The two have since reconciled; I understand that Offspring's proceeds from selling Napster gear is going to charity.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
Sure, let's all put fake songs on Napster. And some virus script instead of jpegs or exe files on ZDnet. In fact, let's make it IMPOSSIBLE to trust any content, shall we? Who needs trust on the internet, anyway? Right on, man!
The Geek shall inherit the Earth
This could be a fun hack for someone with a better mind than me. Create software to "fingerprint" any mp3 file. Then you could license it to Napster to include with the client(under pressure from publishers) to upload the fingerprint with the mp3 file. Then they could keep a database of copyrighted fingerprints....the fingerprinting could be fun - combination of time-sequence of fast fourier transforms - to get the frequency distribution of the sounds over time?
The record companies will soon be employing people to piss off Napster users.
Seems like a good part time summer job to me.
I knew Napster for Be didn't allow uploads but figured since Macster asks for your directory for uploading it did. I was wrong.
Insanity is the last line of defence for the master diplomat. But you have to lay the groundwork early.
Namely, the how-to section. He says that you can rip MP3s using WinAmp, but I checked their site (despite the fact that I'm an experienced user of it) and no, WinAmp does not rip MP3s; it only plays them. He should do his research first before creating such a project.
There is an IRC style chat capability installed with the program. Granted, many people may not care to hear anything new or independent, but saying that there is no way you could find a new band on Napster is not true.
I do think that some people would go in the genre chat rooms and try new stuff. Who knows, maybe in a year or two, after everyone has been saturated by the top 40 crap, they will start getting hungry fo something new.
I got fed up with hearing Britney and Eminem on the radio, so I simply changed the title of a few Nine Inch Nails songs that were of approximately the same length.
I get around 20-30 downloads a day of these fake songs, and with Napster v2beta6, people have been sending me some rather hurtful remarks over the chat program.
My goal is to have all the current Top 40 songs as fake mp3s, not to protest Napster but to protest poor taste in music.
- Dogz
(For those who don't know what Tubular Bells is, it is a music score used in some horror movie [friday the 13th?] and it runs about 35MB in MP3 format)
--
Never hit your grandmother with a shovel, for it leaves a bad impression on her mind...
...and what is the distribution of searches for those songs? Surely it's not uniform... It might not be Zipf, but I'd be surprised if, say, the number of searches for the top 1000 wasn't much larger than the number of searches for the next 10000...
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
Just imagine how bad it'd be if someone with nothing else to do subscribed them on every spam list, and their phone was listed in all telemarket directories. They'd receive lots of junk e-mail and annoying phone calls. That'd be terrible, wouldn't it ?
:) Or wanna call them to complain ? What about junk mail ?
Hey, pinky, are you pondering what I'm pondering ?
Their info, as publically available on whois, is:
Registrant:
FIX, STEFANIE (HAND-2-MOUTH-DOM)
PO Box 322
NEW PALTZ, NY 12561
US
Domain Name: HAND-2-MOUTH.COM
Administrative Contact, Billing Contact:
FIX, STEFANIE (SFO146) sfix@CORNELLS.COM
FIX, STEFANIE
PO Box 322
NEW PALTZ, NY 12561
914 658 8215 (FAX) 123 123 1234
Technical Contact, Zone Contact:
Fix, John (JF113) john3@CORNELLS.COM
310 White Plains Rd
Eastchester, NY 10707
914-961-2400 (FAX) 914-961-8443
John Fix seems to be the sysadmin. He probably has nothing to do with it, just keep the site up.
Stefanie Fix is the one who had that brilliant idea.
The fax obviusly is fake. But can someone who lives in US check if that phone 914 658 8215 is valid ?
Domain stefaniefix.com also has the same data.
Does someone know good telemarket directories they may want to join ?
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Roses are #FF0000, Violets are #0000FF, find / -name '*base*' |xargs chown -R us && mv zig greatjustice
--
It would have to be done using digital signature technology since this information would be distributed, not kept on a central server (like the Slashdot database).
A system that allowed for Ebay style comments rather than moderation points would be much better.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
Several people have mentioned using a trust model. So here's an example of one http://www.advogato.org/trust-metric.html
See Stopnapster.com for a site started by artists who have something similar in mind. Hey, they need to eat too.
There website www.stopnapster.com is trying to convice artist and user of napster to post "Napster bombs" and "Trojan Horse MP3s" to protect artists copyrights. The authours themself say they cannot do this, as there website is done on a Mac.
Apparently they think that enough people will do this to stop mp3 swaping on napster.
I dont think it will work very well. Look at the site. Rather poorly done website in my opinion.
I dont have a
While this is certainly an interesting method of protest, it isn't failsafe. Here's a situation where digital media can shoot itself in the foot.
If all the protesters are using the same digital-quality file and only deleting the end off so it's the right length, there could probably be a patch for Napster(and other DFSs) to get around it.
What I'm envisioning is that the software comes with a 5-10 second sample MP3 of this cuckoo file. If you'd like, whenever it starts to download a new file, the software would check what it's downloaded with the sample file[s] to make sure that it's not a known fake. This would be quite similar to searching for viruses. In the end, you could even have Napster distributing these under a different name in order to keep people using Napster and to increase revenue. Similar to how people say that some of the companies making the [radar detectors/fuzz busters] were the ones making the radar guns under different names.
------------
Withdrawal before climax is very ineffective and those who try this are usually called "parents."
Point of this post? Well - peer review is good unless you're dealing with organizations that have gobs of money.
Wah!
Of course, the Fix brothers are two dorks running this operation on the 12 systems in their TrueValue hardware store (where they work as stockboys) while the warbling, questionably talented Stefanie is on tour, apparently oblivious to their efforts. Odd, he doesn't even seem to have any means to contact her until her tour ends. Must be on the Third World tour.
He claims he didn't do it for publicity, but admitted as much in the above article. Come on, Slashdotters, let's stop giving this guy more than his 15 minutes of fame!!!!
Anyone ever read Idouru, by William Gibson? What was the 'mud-like' world that whatshisname lived in? Something City. I have a horrible memory for that type of thing.. Excellent with other stuff.. Anyway. That was completly underground, completly geekish, and very possible. I'm warning all you you now, cause I know only geeks read /. : Keep it that way, if it ever becomes more than fiction! pleeeeeease. People spoil everything.
"I don't want the world, I just want your half"
GG Allin: A "performance artist" best known for pissing and shitting while on stage rather than his music . Yeah a real class act. If I puke on your front porch will you give me 20 bucks to see it? . --------the following is from UBL------------ For years, G.G. Allin promised to leave this world with a suicide on stage, preferably on Halloween. Instead, Allin died a traditional rock & roll death -- cocaine and heroin in the veins -- which is the only traditional thing he ever did. In the strictest sense, Allin was not a musician, he was a performance artist with an insatiable desire to shock. Allin was notorious for performing in the nude, defecating and urinating on stage, smearing excrement all over himself and the audience, attacking the audience, mutilating himself, and ending the show quickly; his last concert lasted under ten minutes and ended in a riot. His music was the aural equivalent of his stage show -- an amateurish, barely competent series of short blasts of loud violence on albums called Eat My Fuc , Freaks, Faggots, Drunks & Junkies , and the aptly titled America's Most Hated. Eventually, the consequences of Allin's onstage antics caught up to him and he spent several years in jail. Upon his release in 1993, Allin began touring again, but only for a couple of months; he died on June 28, 1993 in New York, leaving behind a recorded legacy that can only be called vile and repulsive
The original reason to use Stefanie's music was because we had her permission. We realized that this technique would get her music out there, but 99.999% of the folks would be pissed off about it. So, we changed the plan and used parts of real songs (short pieces so we fall within "fair use" and "parody" legal definitions) to fool those who listen to the start of the song, and then filled the rest with garbage.
Now I don't know about you, but if I was stealing frozen bagels from a supermarket, I'd rather find frozen waffles in the package than one frozen bagel and 500 frozen roaches. But since using Stafanie's stuff was arguably promotional and downloaders were upset at getting a decent song (IMHO) instead of the excellent song they were hoping to get, we opted for the bagel/roaches file approach.
John
"We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers." Carl Sagan
I just don't get it. There are tons of valid reasons to be for or against Napster, and I respect everyone's opinion on this, but I don't understand why you - or anyone else - would waste time and energy protecting someone else's corporate profits. Hey, guess what, the companies in the RIAA all have large and well-paid legal staffs to do this job much more efficiently and legally. They don't need your help and didn't ask for it, why are you volunteering it? If you want to contribute to the music industry, send Lars a check, get an internship at Sony, or help your girlfriend write a song. Or, hell, write one yourself! There are plenty of ways to spend your time that might actually be useful.
When I download any MP3s that are even remotely legenthy, I make a quick copy (while downloading the rest) just to make sure it IS what I wanted. This is not necessarily to ensure it isn't messed up, but it works great for that problem as well.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
How is posting bogus files harmful to Napster's interests unless Napster's purpose is to violate copyrighted materials.
Your entire post is a fallacy. What if Napster were only used for non-copyrighted materials? Then Napster would still want to act against this sort of thing.
Perhaps what you meant to say was: "How is posting bogus files masquerading as copyrighted materials harmful to Napster's interests unless Napster's purpose is to violate copyrighted materials?"
However, even in that case, the principle of the protest is a poor one. That is, posting fake files is harmful to any distribution system like this, even perfectly valid ones. If Napster was used only for free files by up and coming artists, then someone got angry at one of those artists, that someone could do the same thing-- would you support him?
To expand to an example that's not so new, killing people is generally agreed to be a poor form of protest. If you don't like a government official, you don't protest by assassinating him (unless you're a militant nut). Gandhi's civil disobedience is far more respected than, say, the endless rounds of guillotining in France. Why is that? Is that because they didn't kill the right people? No, it's because in principle, killing people is just plain wrong.
To relate that back to the Napster example, I would like to propose that lying to people is also a bad principle. This is far more contentious than killing people. But I think most people would agree with me that performing this sort of trickery on a copyright material-free Napster would be wrong.
Its just like disk based copy protection we used to see on the C64... They come up with some brilliant way to keep people from pirating their warez, one second later some kid comes up with a way of defeating it.
Time for the electrical engineers to comment. Unfortunately, MD5 is not going to work. Anyone who thinks it will likely does not understand the issue.
MD5 is a protocol designed to detect even single bit changes in a file. Note that this works on the file level. MD5 does not care what the file contains. In this case, we are proposing to prove that two files contain the same song. So how can we modify one of these files?
There are probably other ways to do this, but I think I've made my point.
MD5 *could* be used to prove that filea.zip and fileb.zip are likely identical (provided they are also the same size). It likely can say file1.mp3 and file2.mp3 were made from track #2 of Some CD when the same encoder and ripper are used, and Some CD's #1 and/or #2 are from the same production run.
MD5 could be used to prove that Bob has the same MP3 file as Alice, although their sources could not be easily proven through this method. But can I say that given this copy of "charttopper#1" that I have an MD5 signature usable to find all copies of "charttopper#1" online? No, you can not.
Now IANAL, nor a PE(yet), and I have not used Napster at all, but I do not think MD5 is the answer here. One could come up with an algorithm that tries to use characteristics of the music itself to look at this issue, but the likelyhood of it working for every possible song in any possible case is nearly zero. It might work for many cases, however. I do not support nor like piracy at all, but this concept of restrict piracy by restricting user rights is also crazy.
I just worry about the person automatically kicked off their ISP due to the fact that some file they downloaded matched the MD5 signature of someone's protected file, even if that file was a completely different one. There are only so many files one can distinguish using any hash algorithm before two come up with the same signature.
We have the COMPLETE video of Cartman's Mom and Mr. Garrison in Shiesse Fraulien nAVI at your local alt.binaries.movies usenet group. Very shocking indeed... there's more than watersports going on in the Cartman Dungeon!
Hello! $15 million in VC funding sounds like "profit" to me. Are those folks at Napster working for FREE? Don't think so.
What are they about to deploy exactly?
--
Have good ideas? Want good ideas? ShouldExist.org
I never said it was okay for people to put up copyrighted material for trade. After all, those people should be (and in some cases are) banned from using Napster. All I'm saying is before everyone cheers this guy on, he is *ALSO* violating the terms of use. It's like murdering a rapist - two wrongs do *NOT* make a right!
"I'm not even supposed to BE here today!"
http://www.suck.com/daily/2000/ 03/24/nc_index4.html
Then they ran another piece on it this week:
http://www.suck.com/daily/2000/07/11/
So it's not that new an idea.
sulli
sulli
RTFJ.
if you keep a title, and change the contents, isn't that plagiarism or copyright infringement because you're stealing the name of a product, but changing its content to suit your own purposes without the expressed written consent of yadda yadda yadda?
not like most of the record labels or artists would really complain... but I do think that IS illegal.
This is why (almost) *everything* on the web needs some form of reputation management.
Sure, the court will rule against Napster and everyone will just say "Hey this is wrong... let's stop trading MP3s and go back to buying CD's instead". Yeah... some law is going to change 20 million people's attitude overnight.
And even if they COMPLETELY stamp out MP3's in the United States, I guess I can head on over to China and Russia to pick up my free music.
We can fight the coo-coo egg guy by extending on the concept of trusted favorite users...
What does everyone think of that?
-- Betting on the survival of the media industry is a serious risk. I advise investing elsewhere.
I guess Napster should introduce some kind of a moderating system, so such trollz would not be visible to most of the decent beings on the network. This shouldn't be too difficult considering the fact that their network is centralized.
it's probably lars, being the computer whiz he is.
There is no way Napster can promote Indy bands. You search for a band because you already know about it, meaning a)the marketing matrix has you, Neo b)word of mouth c)saw a story about the band somewhere d)band is local to your area (modified a && b). If you don't know about the band, you can't search for it.
my only comment is that anyone that does this better be DAMN sure they patched all security vunerabilities in their system before doing so. cuzz you definatley will have some very pissed off people that have some scary computer skills after you.
*** I suffer from a colorful array of psychological problems
Was it Lars Ulrick?
science is a religion
Now that's an interesting idea... There are allready plenty of "online gaming clubs" (Check out MicroSloths "Zone") As many of these folks allready have 7x24 DSL so they can play, it's not going to be too hard for one of these people to install linux on that old pc of the their's and then install one of the Napster clones.
:-(
I'd do it myself, except that Qwest (Formerly known as US West, AKA, US Worst) can't do DSL to my house. Nor do we have cable modems here in New Mexico.
LongTail SSH Brute Force analysis tool is here!
depending on the bitrate that is used to encode a song as mp3, the md5sum would probably not be consistent across songs.
Amazing magic tricks
We can. We do. I'd tell you about it but that would be self defeating.
Insanity is the last line of defence for the master diplomat. But you have to lay the groundwork early.
The problem with this particular approach is that it will never go beyond the first person who downloads it. If he could come up with something that isn't immediately appearant but becomes increasingly more annoying, it would probably work a lot better.
This Sig Intentionally left blank
For that matter, maybe a newer version of Napster could include a "preview" app that extracts a random 5-second chunk of the music.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Molog
So Linus, what are we doing tonight?
So Linus, what are we going to do tonight?
The same thing we do every night Tux. Try to take over the world!
If you encode the same music twice (with diferent encoders) you will end up with two diferent files, and I am not counting the diferent ID tags. MD5summing would be almost useless, it would only indentify if two files are the same one, but the same music would have tons of diferent MD5sums making the fake "cucko" sound just one more.
--
"take the red pill and you stay in wonderland and I'll show you how deep the rabitt hole goes"
[]'s Victor Bogado da Silva Lins
^[:wq
Really takes "spam" to a new level does'nt it!
Real men don't need signitures!!!
You know how much of a pain in the arse this is? Like I'd sit around and edit mp3's all day...
Good point - but to be truely Leet you have to do all that with a Commodore 64 or an A500.
The law has always been about "intent" and the INTENT of Napster has always been to pirate music. For God Sake, they have e-mails from the founders of Napster that say EXACTLY that. The LAW has always gone after mass piraters. What Napster has done is effectively turn each and every one of its users into a potential mass pirater.
I think that depends on various discolures made at the concert...
You obviously don't believe in a market based society. Like DeCss the cork cannot be put back in the bottle.
I think you owe someone an apology.
Perhaps it's you that shouldn't breed. He made no mention of Napster storing anything beyond song information an user information.
And the issue of whether people are downloading things from Napster is a largely semantic. They facilitate the distribution of copyrighted material. The 'troll' anonymous coward posts about how people only do this because they won't get caught is quite correct.
Don't breed.
--rmst
--------
Never call a man a fool. Borrow from him.
Oh, so we help rid the world of copyright infringement by (according to the instructions):
;)
" 3. Edit the songs adding noise, sounds, and other info.
5. Connect to Napster and start laying eggs. "
By modifying and redistributing the songs, you will most certainly be infringing on the copyrights of the artist(s) according to copyright law. There won't be a question of legality about making songs available for download - if they have been copied, modified and redistributed, that's illegal. Unless of course the song in question is GPL.
What an asshole.
FINGERBANG RULES!
Out of order? Fuck! Even in the future nothing works! - Dark Helmet (Rick Moranis) "Spaceballs"
Not true. The best way to promote Indy bands is to monitor your "uploads" of particular artists. If a person get band "X", send them an instant message and suggest that they might also like band "Y".
True enough as far as it goes, but once you've been Napstering on a fast connection for a few weeks, you probably have most of the commercial stuff you are already interested in. Then you start looking for more obscure stuff. You start searching for artists just to find folks with neat collections and see what else they have.
Maybe that person will be on-line, and you start talking about the tastes you both share, and what you might also like, but haven't been able to hear. I don't know about the rest of you, but for the wife and me, Napster is all about introducing people to new music. And, all the musicians we know and have discussed this with agree with what we are doing. One even suggested that the RIAA should be paying us for our promotional activity. (BTW, the major labels do not send short, crappy sounding snippets of songs to radio stations and magazines. No, they send full CDs, bought and paid for out of the artists share of the royalties. Who is ripping who off?)
Admittedly, lots of people are using Napster to get the same damn songs that they hear on the radio (stations programmed by the same couple of radio networks). But Sturgeon's Law: "...but then 90% of anything is crap!" applies. People who want the Brittny Spears single that they can already hear 200 times a day on the radio deserve to get a recording of barking seals or whatever. But somehow, I doubt that I, or many people, will ever hear a single bark.
"How perfectly Goddamn delightful it all is, to be sure" Charles Crumb
You're misinformed. Copyright protection does not extend to titles. I can write a novel and call it "Gone with the Wind" or write a song and call it "On Broadway" or make a movie and call it "Star Wars."
If I promoted the title in way that would confuse a reasonable person into thinking my work was someone elses' work (like advertising my "Star Wars" with with words, "Long ago, in a galaxy far, far away..." then the author of that work could sue me for unfair competetion and would undoubtedly win.
Now. Creating a cuckoo bird version of a popular song and making it available via Napster is done undeniably for the express purpose of confusing potential pirates into thinking they're stealing the genuine article.
But think real hard now. Do you think the owner of the original work is going to exercise his right to sue?
Insert witty sig here.
This idea is basically right...
There could be quite a few ways to take Napster down or at
least render it unusable...
1. Pollute their database:
Napster have to be using some sort of a database. probably
Oracle / Informix or whatever.
What they probably do is store the users files in their database
and retrieve the file to a query only if that user is currently
online. In my opinion that's the most logical way of storing a
large (and mind you the 20 million users, each with 100 MP3's
counts as large) database and stilll be able to query it in
a relatively normal time.
A hacked version of gnapster (the GNU Napster) which is GPL'd
can be created by a mediocre programmer hired by the RIAA to
spoof their database. Let's face it: They have only so many disks,
and Oracle can grow only so large before the site starts choking.
I can hear your rants:
"But napster can delete record created by the bogus user..."
- Millions of users can be created by the attacker (that
alone would probably f**k the napster system)
- The attacker can use a pool of IP's run the attack
- The attacker can be become relatively untraceable by using
a large set of accounts, each with a sall number of mp3's
2. Pollute their database (iteration 2)
But why indeed settle for just making life tough for Napster
adiministrators whan you can go for the real perpatrators? The users!
If the napster database can be polluted in an "online" manner:
Create a few thousands of online connections from around the
globe, each running a version of the hacked napster client,
publicizing the avaiablitiy of many mp3 files. Whenever a user
starts downloading a file, the hacked client always sends
auto-generated "white-noise"...
Assuming that the attacker could fund (and of course it would
cost quite a lot of money) enough "hacked clients" to be always
online (they would have to switch user id's all the time to
avoid detection) he could make the process aof downloading
copyrighted musci one big pain for the pirates: Theoretically,
the number of spoofed entries would overcome the number of
"real" ones... Most users will finally give up after a single
digit number of attempts to downlod a song.
Any attempt by Napster INC. to actually make sure that the files
that you are reporting on are really the files you claim they are
would basically force them take one more step into the legal mess
they are already in:
They will no longer be able to hide behind those lame excuses of:
"We're just publicizing lists, we're no responsible"
"We are not participatin in the actuall downlod..."
Any attempt by the user community to "rate" other users
like in E-Bay, or basically anything else could be matched
by a compotent attacker.
The deficiency in Napster is basically what makes them so strong:
The are free, and they only hold lists of files which they do not
validate.
Sorry for the length...
Which the holders are required to defend or face dilution of the mark.
Actually, this is also the way you can allow for 'popular' music to really grow from the ground roots.
If you listen to a song you like, you could just - somewhere - sign a list to say so. When you are choosing songs, you could choose songs by people whose tastes you respect, or by sheer popularity, or whatever other criteria you choose. You could just look at this list to make your decisions.
Fresh artists could offer incentives to listen to their music, or even target people who they respect (and who they know other respect) for them to listen.
etc etc
-- Matthew - matthew.gream@pobox.com, http://matthewgream.net
That's great, but the combination of the relative anonymity of Napster along with the dynamic IP used by most ISPs will mean that it could be *very* tough to actually get a real name out of a Napster username. Without a warrant, I'm sure the ISP won't divulge the name of the user connected at a given IP address at a given time - if they even record logs of that. So, you could track the user to a given ISP, but that's it. I wonder how many IP addresses AOL owns? @home? Bell Atlantic DSL?
#2 LEGAL WAY: Another simple method is napster gets an update that tags each song download. when a user encounters a trouble song they simply click a button to report a problem. The server gets info on the previous user and with a simple program visible only to napster one can determine what users are sending this out by tracking the song's origin of corruption and simply remove their IP address (so they can't reregister) again on the system...Again, most users have dynamic IPs, so that won't help matters. Just log off the 'net, log back in, re-start Napster and you're online again. Banning users a-la-Metallica was done using CLSID keys in your Windows registry. They're easy to remove if you know where they are. The information is readily available on the Internet. If someone is using one of the Open Nap clients - which weren't written or authorized by Napster - things become even more complicated: there's no real way to ban a user.
(Speaking as one of the 300,000 banned by Metallica, I was back on within an hour after they cut me off.)
Further, you really don't want to have a "Kill User" button in Napster. Maybe the guy has a bad rip of a rare song? Depending on how bad the rip, and how rare the song, I might be happy enough with it.
While a recent study shows that most Napster users are in their late 20s - early 30s (!), I'm sure there's still a large number of users in their teenage years, ones who don't see the implications of being able to arbitrarily ban a user because they maybe don't like the list of shared songs. That's not to imply that most teenaged users would do that, but impulsiveness does become less prevalent with age and wisdom. (Speaking from the perspective of the ripe old age of 26. [grin])
A moderation system, similar to Slashdot's, as suggested by some other reply, would be ideal. It's a great idea.
Until then, I'll keep on using my bandwidth-consuming quality-control system: I grab at least two different copies of each MP3, audition them for quality, move the better one to my collection, and delete the poorer one from my "untested" folder.
MP3 collecting has basically become a hobby for me. I have the CDs for most of the 900+ songs in my collection, and I still encourage people to go out and buy CDs if they hear a tune that they like. But it's fun to collect and hear new stuff. People sharing off me will be pleased to note that the MP3 collection I share is all tested, is all recorded at a minimum of 160kbps, and is all correctly labelled. Not to mention, it's usually logged into at least three separate Napster servers simultaneously every night.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
Please don't trivialize racism this way.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Expanding a vast wasteland since 1996.
Inside reports "Who's The Boss? Springsteen Imposter Scams Napster", and includes reffernce to the Cockoo thingy.
ZDNet has a comment ary
Enjoy.
I'm not giving her full name here because I think she's had her 15 minutes and I'm not giving her another second of publicity.
I suspect that the Napster users her husband is in essence, lying to in order to get her name and music out will react similarly.
I hope this kills that woman's music career beyond hope of recovery.
Tech Public Policy stuff
Stunts like this will simply help speed up the evolution of peer to peer filesharing.
Browser? I barely know her!
In the Metallica case, I don't think they sampled the content of the files, but rather assumed by the file name that it was a copyrighted song.
If Napster banned these people based on filenames, then they should ban this offender. If they don't ban this offender, then the people in the Metallica case who were banned, should be reinstated.
1 - There's no guarentee that all songs will have the same signature, unless people only distribute files from the same exact source - 1 person posts it and everyone else replicates it. Different CD drives, different sound cards, etc, will make small differences.
2 - Though that's an issue, it'd be great for Napster to incorporated MD5 into their servers. That way, bands that didn't want to be part of it could present Napster with a list of signatures of files that were theirs and say "Please prevent the transfer of files with these signatures". As they found variances of them, they could present those to Napster as well, though pretty soon Napster would be a legitamate service with 20,000 users trading about 500 songs and no commercial viability.
And also the same way that live DJ's have kept their performances from making their way onto other people's mixes... In "Soundbombing", DJ Evil Dee breaks up every song with tags like "Evil Dee is on the mix, c'mon kick it!".
Wah!
Better yet, why not do an MD5 on the file and then store the MD5's on the napster servers.
;-)
People could then appove or disapprove of a particular song, and then napster could moderate up or down that songs karma..
Its been done here?
(please please moderate this up
Official GOD FAQ.
If a lot of people do it, it could lower the signal to noise level on Napster to that of Slashdot. At that point, people will just buy the CD instead :-)
--
Fuck the system? Nah, you might catch something.
I saw what I thought was another interesting approach to foiling the "mercenary bot". Some user, I can't remember his napster username, had inserted "METALLICA SUCKS" and "SCREW METALLICA" into most of his mp3 filenames, even though a lot of the songs weren't even metallica songs. I couldn't help but chuckle at the time.
If this was expanded to an even greater scale, and included... say, inserting Metallica song titles into other filenames, it would be very hard indeed to get the same sort of list that Metallica had compiled previously. Of course, would somebody try to make the argument that this is obstruction of "justice" or something?
Why can't the geeks of the net keep anything underground anymore?
They keep plenty of things underground. You just haven't heard of them because they're...well...underground.
Angry responses may indicate you've struck a chord here, so to speak.
To survive, a non-monopolistic distribution channel must add value to the distibuted stuff over and above what the channel charges. This has to happen both for the consumer and the producer of the stuff. What you've done here is to point out a value that a network based music distribution system could add for the consumer: content assurance. Up to now, I haven't seen why why music lovers (who don't mind ripping off the channel - and artists) should go along with content protection schemes that impose restrictions on how the content is used, ala DVD. This approach might offer them a reason. It still doesn't address the monopolistic nature of the current music distribution channel, or resolve questions of copyright and fair use in the digital age. And these issues will still drive people looking for ways to "route around" the official channels that are seen as greedy and repressive by many.
A digital signature could verify that the content being transferred was the real mccoy. It could also spot your eggs. I can imagine a technological arms race analogous to the computer virus industry (through the looking glass) springing up. Even though detecting spurious content would be slower than producing it, if you are the only one producing eggs, you will lose that race. The RIAA would have the resources to win, though. Gee, that's swell.
How can we disintermediate these guys? They are terrified of that possibility, why? What value do they add for artists that we could satisfy otherwise? The incentive might be 50% royalties for artists, and 50% reduction in costs for consumers. This on an exploding marketplace for digital music that could make further reductions in margins attractive.
Just a dream. *sigh*
"Even if you are on the right track, you'll
get run over if you just sit there." Will Rogers
"Even if you are on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there" - Will Rogers
No, it's not copyright infringement, because they are not trying to pass someone else's work off as their own. They are just choosing an amusing naming scheme for files. I don't think that anyone's likely to believe that their cuckoo noises are really black sabbath recordings, so to claim that they're violating anything is a stretch.
They DON'T let copyright infringers use their service. As soon as a user is identified as a violator (a la Metallica and Dr. Dre) they pull you off.
--- RFC 1149 Compliant.
True, but that still accomplishes the purpose of stopping copyright violations because it makes it easier to identify individuals who are most active in distributing illegally copied files (since they will likely bubble to the top as the most trusted).
This assumes that napster users would rather (to use the ebay analogy) 'sell'(have songs downloaded off your HD), rather than 'buy' (download songs from others' HDs). Who would want all their bandwidth tied up by download requests from others, which good manners inhibits them from declining? Kind of like making it to a list of the 100 richest people in the world, and having to fend off persistent solicitations.
I do it all the time. There doesn't have to be a feature in napster. As soon as you start up the download open the file in Winamp(or whatever) and you can play the part you've already downloaded.
Notice that the "time remaining" that shows up in Win-amp is based on the length of the mp3 when you first started playing it so as more of it downloads it'll go past what 'looks' like the end of the file.
Also keep in mind that if it isn't downloading fast enough winamp will eventualy stop prematurely.
I havn't tryed it with gNapster but I'm sure someone will chime in to tell us if it works. I don't see why it wouldn't.
Yeah, yeah! And I can distribute an album called "U2"!!
Slashdot is jumping the shark. I'm just driving the boat.
Ok
If you simply let users preview a random selection, say 5 seconds from somewhere random in the song, then it is much more unlikely to be worked around.
If you let users preview the beginning few seconds, then the people will play the actual song for that many seconds and then start their stuff. But if it is random, then they dont know what to pad and so they'll have to go away
Oups, I forgot a detail :
It is obvious that this suggestion only applies to commercial music as there should *not* be any embedded ad in free music at all.
--
Trolling using another account since 2005.
Two files share the same MD5 checksum only if they are absolutely identical (or you're really lucky!). Two mp3 files of the same song may be different even if they sound the same - if one original cd was slightly scratched, say, or if the two people used different encoders. Good idea, but MD5 isn't the way to do it.
Which really does the copyright owners' work for them--sort by score . . .
Hmm, so what would the feedbacks be?
*cool thief!
*steals crummy stuff, don't bother
. . .
:)
hawk
Well, since that is exactly what the site linked
to in the article suggests, I don't think you
could really use the phrase "more clever". How
about something more accurate, like "the same as".
Here's a hint - We have 7 - 13 client machine's going in two different locations (East & West coast) and we change the user id's every now and then. I would guess that based on a fair number of posts to this thread there are a bunch more folks who now have funky files in their napster music files.
Are you prepared to start paying in order to download your MP3's? That's what any settlement is going to take, a means of compensating artists the revenues that they could be getting if people were buying their CD's and getting royalties through the record labels.
Maybe Napster could make it so you had to fund an account, where you'd pay something like 50 cents per song you download and 10 cents per song you upload which would go to the artists... But really, who's going to stick around Napster when they have to pay to download music?
Anyone know of any Napster client/protocol vulnerabilities?
While I certainly wouldn't condone such behavior, I think it would be very fitting if someone could help this self-appointed savior of the music industry to undermine his own tactics.
If you download one of these "eggs", delete it at once so that it's not shared to other users. No big deal.
But, if you were the enterprising sort who happened to get one of these by accident, you could easily determine the IP address of the Napster user who was sharing this.
Napster Beta 2 Version 6 has that wonderful instant messaging feature, so you could even let the user know beforehand why it is that he/she will be rebooting Windows within ten seconds.
Not to say that I would do such a thing. Indeed, it's not even in my skillset. But I also know it would be easily possible.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
A reputation manager solves the problem: material can be rated by people after they've downloaded it. The system could track exact duplicates, so the they would inherit (and share) the original's rating - i.e. it would be a distributed rating system, just as the content is distributed. And the rating would be influenced by the repution of the person doing the rating. This catches bogus files, truncated files, mis-named files, low-quality files, etc.
People should be rated as well. People who's material is rated highly would themselves get a high rating, and future material posted by them would have a rating influenced by their poster. Low-rated people would include newcomers, and trouble-makers (intentional or technologically incompetent).
Jacob Nielsen has written about reputation managers. See his article at http://www.useit.com/alertbox/990905.html .
Well said. I've found the likes of Napster usefull only for finding the obscure stuff that no one I know has. I doubt someone would want to waste their time altering the contents of every song in existence. What I find more annoying is the hacked clients on gnutella (and the bloody thing isn't really even open source yet) that will return something (most likely an add/promotion for the particular user's interest) to any and every search.
This is exactly the right solution. It is so obvious. The name of a file does not have to correspond with the actual content.
The Napster protocol needs to be extended to actually include a label that describes the content, commonly that is done with a cryptographically strong hash function.
The result of a search would then group files with the same hash value together. It would display the number of files that were found with the same hash value and the different names that were attached to it. The user could than choose from where he wants to download the file. That would not only solve the problem of differences in file names and it would also attach a weight to each entry.
The more files you get with the same hash value, the more likely it is that the content is actually genuine.
I am surprised that this is not already part of Napster. I have been talking about this for many month already.
Let's hope that we see Napster thrive.
So, because only a small portion of the Napster population will ever be motivated enough to waste time on a project like this, people will download a bunch of songs, come up with one or two trojan mp3's, pause to curse, and just get them from somewhere else.
This is equivalent to blowing up a crowded restaurant in a city you don't like and killing a bunch of civilians because you don't think that you can effectively communicate with them. Sure, people stop to look and it throws things off for a little while, but are you really doing anything other than creating a climate of annoyance and distrust?
I hate reactionaries who think that they are doing great things because they piss people off.
--Hail Mary, for she has the largest shotgun of them all.--
Which is what they did (stopped using the buses for example).
The bus came by and I got on
That's when it all began
There was cowboy Neal
At the wheel
Of a bus to never-ever land
I'd rather be lucky than good.
How is posting bogus files harmful to Napster's interests unless Napster's purpose is to violate copyrighted materials.
It seems to me that if Napster acts against what this protester is doing then by all rights they are no longer a service provider but admitting that they are in the business of providing content (in this case copyrighted music that they have no right to distribute). Doing this would invalidate all the arguments about Napster not being in business specifically to violate the copyright of artists and record labels and instead reinforce the greedy VC funded company trying to get rich of other peoples work image.
--
Since you do not need to have the entire MP3 to preview it, this should not be necessary. You can start the download and play the part of it you already downloaded. Of course, it still sucks but you can limit bandwidth-waste to a minimum.
And besides: There are chatrooms in Napster -> excellent way to blame those users that are spreading fake MP3s.
--- If OS were buildings, then the first woodpecker to come around would erase 95 % of civilization.
Lawyers are bringing a class action suit against the perpetrators of this prank on behalf of cuckoos. In a statement released earlier, the lawyers said, "although we appreciate that the technique is being used in an attempt to uphold copyright, we find it intolerable that the cuckoos used in this exercise are not being reimbursed for the use of their music."
In related news, an argument has broken out in the alt.fan.fingerbang newsgroup as to whether the "new mixes" are an improvement or not.
AirSupply: go ahead, cut me off.
Actually, it was. I remember connecting to it with a 300 baud modem on my C64. THat was pretty damn cool.
It just so happens to be that this is carried through via the act of subverting names of songs.
---
seumas.com
The next step will be US government selling sugar on streets in packs labeled "best crack in NY", "ecstasy","pure 100% heroine", etc. Narcobusiness will die horrible death, addicts will instantly be cured.
Yet next step will be solution of bank robbery problem by stuffing every bank with lots of fake money.
-- Si hoc legere scis nimium eruditionis habes.
Oh well... Napster admins would just ban all that corporate networks (they are very well-defined, most of them have single-digit number of exit points, which are firewall exits).
-- Si hoc legere scis nimium eruditionis habes.
Titles CANNOT be copyrighted. Read the circular from the Copyright Office if you are unclear on this point.
Trademarks and service marks are something else.
Yeah. That's what I said. Did the fact that I said "trademarked/copyrighted/something" lead you to believe I was 100% sure what protections were in place? All I said was that I know you can't just name your band after another band... Elektra records, a large label, tried to and lost, even though the other band had not done anything to protect their name, except for releasing (on underground labels) a few records.
Josh Sisk
Thad
Thad
A lot of comments here state that unathorized copying of copyright music is illegal. Some say that if it is done noncommercially, that is, sharing mp3s, without any kind of reimbursement - the way it is done on Napster - is not illegal (according to AHRA etc.), others say it still is. From an ethical point of view it really doesnt matter whether or not.
In a Democracy worth its name the laws should reflect the will of the people, not the will of a few rich corporations. Does the people want free (as in beer) mp3s? According to the overwhelming success of Napster (20 million users, so far), yes, the people wants this.
So, the logical conclusion of a Democracy should be to legalize mp3 swapping, not trying to stamp it out (which is futile anyway). Since this is not happening I have to conclude that we are not living in a democracy. If we are not living in a democracy it is futile trying to change unjust laws working within the system. Massive disregard for such laws will make them unenforcable, which will in the end lead to their revoking, so this is a much more effective way to do it.
And, BTW, if mp3 swapping became legal, artists would not starve. Enlightened self-interest on the part of music fans would see to it that the artists they liked could make a good living (otherwise the artist would stop making music and work at that 7-11 instead). Escrow systems a la the street performer protocol is another option.
There would be much fewer multimillionaire artists and the record industry as we know it would collapse. However, IMO that is a Good Thing.
/Dervak
...such as people that post bogus files for that reason.
OK. I'll bite. What constitutes a bogus file - one that is intentionally mis-named? Once Napster starts adding in editorial control such as mandatory filename standards, they're starting down the road towards assuming responsibility for what is served or facilitated by their system.
Also, if you make the file naming standards mandatory, then it's now a simple matter for an artist to request that all MP3s allegedly produced by them not be traded, as they have not provided any publically redistributable files. And I suspect that artists would win this one in court if Napster refused to comply.
As long as the files being put up are valid MP3 files which do not violate copyright law, Napster has no reason to ban those users.
---
---
"Go Metallica. Die RIAA." -- Linus Torvalds
If they have a negative feedback system, then stopnapster.com could organize a movement to flood the database with fake negatives, or positive feedback for the trojan mp3s. The whole thing would still be too messy for the casual user.
Agreed, bad MP3 encodes are the worst problem that Napster has.
:-)
I don't see why RIAA is so worked up. Most of the music traded over napster is of poor quality. I mean I heard cassettes left out in the sun on a hot afternoon sound better then some of the songs I got off of there.
Ok, its not all that bad, but more people should start using lame. 'Nuff Said.
Second to poor encoding is bad taste in music... but I wont go into that now.
Later
Mike
Step away from the coputer... You're dangerous to yourself and others.
Napster does NOT store songs or a song database on their servers. You may be surprised to know that the songs are being stored on your computer and other people are downloading straight from your hard drive. So, when you hear reports on CNN (Communist News Network) that people are downloading stuff from Napster, their wrong. Dead wrong.
I think that the music industry has a profound tool here in front of them, probably the best media for reaching a LARGE audience since radio was invented.
Don't breed.
--cr@ckwhore
Skiers and Riders -- http://www.snowjournal.com
While Stefanie has gotten a bunch more people to hear her music and had a few more hits on her website, she has also taken more heat than you can imagine... Remember, most of the folks who heard her music didn't want to hear her music and were probably expecting something completely different. We didn't just label it as music that sounded like hers, and thereby reach out to her udience. Instead we labeled it as everything! Not a lot of Kid Rock or Black Sabbath fans that can appreciate a good old folk/pop tune, eh?
He uses the above statement to explain that this is not a stunt to get attention for his wife and her "music", yet he just explained that they decided to use Kid Rock, Black Sabbath and other popular band names to get people to listen to it, because they probably would not listen to it otherwise.
I think you're missing the point. They clearly stated on their site that they used her music because they didn't want to steal from someone else. Now.. question:
If I was going to use this cuckoo-egg scheme to market my music (which is aggressive, not unlike TOOL, 311, Chili Peppers) to people in a sneaky way, it would make sense for *ME* to choose to "fake" popular heavy songs and thereby expose people who might actually LIKE my songs to them... but it wouldn't be very good marketing for me to take my same, aggresive songs and put them on napster as Britney Spears or Frank Sinatra tunes... because the people who are likely to be downloading either of THOSE types of music, are not likely to be my target demographic.
Likewise, they chose to use the names of the MOST POPULAR DOWNLOADS, because they're trying to be a thorn in the side of music piracy, and the best way to do that is to annoy the MAJORITY of the pirates, not only the niche pirates. (niche pirates being those who would only steal from new age artists like Yanni.)
-The Reverend
-The Reverend (I am not a Nazi nor a Troll)
=(.\')=
As far back as I can remember the only people who thought gAyOL was cool were people who thought they found something unique and/or special.
I recall holding back laughter during a class presentation when some douche was introducing us to the wonders of the internet (gAyOL) and how he tried hard to keep his bill under $50 a month.
gAyOL is to the internet what MicroSoft is to software and Intel is to microprocessors. Their business models work on hooking uninformed users and keeping them ignorant and dependent.
If you disagree then it must be overrated, redundant or trolling.
Kinda funny... but how long do you think it'll be before someone cracks his box wide open?
/. readers probably have...) but I've traced some trolls down just as an exercise. I found one's age, sex, home address, aliases, multiple e-mail accounts, ICQ number, religious affiliations, etc...) It's creepy how easy it is to trace someone once you have a shred of factual info on them. It sure made me paranoid since I'm not even that good at doing this.
I don't just mean getting access to files either. It would be pretty easy to set up a script to DoS him everytime he shows up, and probably fairly trivial to trace who he is, and mess up every net account he gets elsewhere? (hey, some people are petty, but I've heard of people being shot for less. )
Personally, I'm no '1337 h4x0r; just above average net skills (like most
I wonder if this guy realizes how easy it is to do something like that to him?
Seems like a reasonable way to force Napster and other similar groups to be a little more legitimate in the way that they distribute things. Sure, this means that we can't get free music so easily, but we put in $15+ for each CD that we buy. This thorn will hopefully push digital music to become a more legitimate business rather than the latest "cool" stunt to show up any form of authority.
Jason
No, it's not copyright infringement, because they are not trying to pass someone else's work off as their own. They are just choosing an amusing naming scheme for files.
Heh, tell that to Negativland (the group that named one of their albums "U2" and got sued out the wazoo over it)
yup - my bad. The parent poster and I didin't really read the site before posting. (I just did after posting it)
Go get your free Palm V (25 referrals needed only!)
How To Lay Cuckoo's Eggs
...
1.Download and install Napster
...
Step 1 is pretty easy... in fact you probably already have Napster installed. The laying of eggs will work best if you can install Napster on multiple machines so you
have the best chance of letting many users connect.
Uh, right. So the same people who feel strongly enough to make these cukoo's eggs, are the same people who regularly use Napster?
Somehow I doubt it.
And advocating that people break Naspters terms of service (One person, one account, IIRC) is hardly the best way to go about it.
I agree -- both sides have a selfish concern.
The difference as i see it is that if the RIAA wins, Dr. Dre and some guys in suits get some money, and all those 'artists' who do this for the money and ho's get to keep making music. If the napster guys win, they make it slightly more difficult to make money off of recorded music, but make it possible for anyone to promote themselves, get people to their shows. The Metallicas of the world, in it for the bucks alone, because touring is such hard work, they get out. Tough.
So, yeah, the impetus for most people might be simply to steal. But the outcome, not uncoincidentally, i think, helps more people than it hurts. Conversely, sure, the RIAA is just protecting their bottom line, but in the end, this is pretty bad for everybody except the heavy-rotation TRL guys.
It's socially progressive, by accident, to steal music.
god is just pretend.
I'm sorry, but such an action will be not only damaging to the many legitimate, but will further push the general belief that MP3s are "bad." I myself have hundreds of legitimate MP3s, to which I own the CDs. I also have gigabytes of MP3s that I've legally downloaded from MP3.com. There is no way to distinguish between illegally obtained, copyrighted content and an MP3 of your own creation. This tactic will solve nothing.
Hi Lars.
=]
Lars -
look at it from the point of view of someone to whom an mp3 file just takes a second to get. a cuckoo file would be annoying, sure, but so are all those llama's with modems. and people who have most of a track or album you want. you go find it elsewhere.
how effective could this be? will i stop downloading? (yeah, right: i can grab a gig in an hour or two. 200 tracks. think about it. what percentage are likely to be cuckoo'd? not much. i'll just throw 'em away with all the other corrupted downloads)
I'm afraid I don't see how this is "not a bad idea". Sounds analagous to somebody trying to stop cocaine use by selling baking powder instead... Sure it'll piss people off, but the addiction won't go away!
"Those who can't hear the music think the dancers mad..."
If you're only trading with your friends, why not just eschew Napster and email the files back and forth or run ftp servers on your machines with accounts for just your friends to access?
Ummm ...
<a href="http://www.t50.com/">http://www.t50.com</a>
... ahem.
I didn't say anything.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
a spammer that can't spell the product he's spamming for.. djeezes..
Learn about pinball machines on www.flippers.be
I almost cannot believe there are people as rotten as you. What the fuck do you think you are doing?
You are deliberately polluting a useful service, lowering the signal/noise ratio, hurting trust among people on the net, in fact you are pissing in the communitys well, or to use your own words, you are putting roaches in bags for frozen bagels in the supermarket - and you havent even the dubious defense that you need to protect your profits!!!
It seems you are doing it just because you are evil, period.
Fortunately, this kind of attack will be largely ineffective, since this kind of intentionally bad files will not spread far. Natural selection will see to that. Most people on Napster are not interested in such crap, so they will be speedily deleted from their drives.
I hope this abominable practice dies a quick and well-deserved death. And then you should die too, fucker!
/Dervak
Yeah, sure, it sucks if you spend 20 minutes downloading a song to find it's been hacked, but if it only takes you a few seconds, it may be annoying, but just go pick another song from the list. Also, couldn't song artists say that people are wrongfully using their name? No big deal with the cuckoo sound, but what if I have a 3 minute ad for my web site in MP3 format and label it "Metallica - Enter Sandman"?
Macintosh humor! MacComedy.com
What a stupid idea. You could just easily use winamp or Napster's internal mp3 player to play the song while its downloading and listen for the stupid cuckoo crap. What a moron
d00d, you're the one posting to SLASHDOT what a dork i am. wow. i'm just saying, though
-Superb0wl
-Superb0wl
It's not that I'm lazy....it's that I just don't care.
this guy ends up on Lars' list? He better make sure he doesn't name the cukoo file after a Metallica song, otherwise you'll show up on their search and get his account cancelled.
Unix is user friendly, it's just selective about who its friends are.
While a lot of users tend to download mp3s off of Napster a lot of ripping "groups" still exist in forums such as IRC. The use of files that list the results of a hashing algorithm such as md5 on an album, for example, is often distributed with mp3s.
When downloading mp3s off of another person with Napster or gnutella, you're bound to get a bunch of incorrect, incomplete, or otherwise flawed audio files. They may play, but this is the sort of thing bands are using as an argument- this doesn't accurately portray their original work. If widespread distribution of formats like mp3 is going to work, either on a commercial *or* illegal basis, some sort of checksum system needs to be in place.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
I've never used Napster before so maybe I'm missing something, but what's to stop somebody who wants to post a decoy MP3 from hacking their client so that it doesn't report the actual md5sum of the file, but rather the md5sum that other users are expecting? For md5summing to be effective you would need some way of verifying that each client can be trusted. I suppose that once you download a particular file your own client could issue a warning if its sum didn't match up with what it was supposed to be, but then you've wasted the download time already so that's not a huge help.
-----
Free P2P Backup, Windows & Linux
If take my homegrown CD, label it up like, oh, the latest Kid Rock album, and SELL to some poor guy looking for a Kid Rock album, haven't I just infringement on the copyright? (and committed fraud in the process?)
If you sell it to some unknowing consumer, yes, that is fraud. If you merely rename one of your own songs to BritneySpears.mp3 and put it on your computer and someone else who is looking to STEAL that Britney Spears song comes along and downloads it... that's not at all the same thing. In the first instance, you make money off of another artist's name. In the second instance, you merely frustrate the activities of a thief.
-The Reverend
-The Reverend (I am not a Nazi nor a Troll)
=(.\')=
...has way too much time on his hands though.
nerdfarm.org
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
If this guy were to post say, "the_unforgiven.mp3," and this file was actually just cukoo noises, then the person who downloaded the song would not be infringing on copyright. So, if say 300,000 people were kicked off of napster because some bot identified them as having downloaded "the_unforgiven.mp3" without checking the file's content, then the allegations would be purjurious and illegal. Metallica et al likes to claim that their music has been posted on napster, and to use as proof filenames and sizes, but they don't really have anything that could hold up in court. I'd personally love to be caught downloading a replica of the black album filled with cukoo noises so i could i countersue Metallica.
Bryan Klingner, MCSE, MCP+I
Quoth the article:
we didn't want to steal other peoples music to use for the eggs and we didn't want to just use noise, so we used the music close at hand with the approval of the artist. All of the bands and or musician friends we approached said, great idea - we support you. This was generally followed by their saying they didn't want to participate for fear of the backlash. Others got bogged down in band meetings about differences of opinion about what to do and never gave the ok.
-misch
--You will rephrase your request for me to go to hell. Goto statements are not acceptable programming constructs
I should put subliminal messages into the mp3s. "Send money to:....", and no one would be the wiser!
You should never, never doubt what nobody is sure about.
You quitting proves that the karma kap worked. The most annoying of the whores shut up. --CmdrTaco
I really don't think will work too well in the long run. Napster seems to be somewhat self-regulating anyway where bogus/bad songs tend to get eliminated. I know I've never downloaded something I hadn't intended to.
The simple reason is that everyone wants to share songs, not generate hits to their website or any other thinly veiled methods to generate money. There won't be any popup adds for downloading a song, etc. like on warez sites.
I think it may fool a few people but the users themselves are all in it to share mp3's so unless there is a serious long-term effort made to contiuously flood the servers w/bogus files, it will eventually die out.
Praying for the end of your wide-awake nightmare.
On your second point, I don't really see how any entity could say, "I own the rights to a stream of data with this md5 checksum; stop distributing it." That's only one step better than saying, "If the filename start with 'Metallica -' then it must be pirated music!"
Here's a flash presentation about Napster. You might get a kick out of it.
l
http://www.joecartoon.com/buddies/chaos/index.htm
NOTE: this is not for the bandwith challenged and may be improper to view at work...
AdFuel
Sorry to say, incorrect. You can start a band tomorrow and the only thing that prevents you from calling it "Metallica" is good taste.
Sorry you are wrong... Band names are almost always trademarked/copyrighted/something... A recent example was when Elektra was about to release an album by their band "Hot Water Music", only to discover there was a underground punk rock band already named Hot Water Music... They then proceeded to do all sorts of shady things to try to get the name away from them (including sending them a contract which they claimed would allow the punk band to keep their name, but, in actuality, signed the name over to Elektra), but eventually lost and had to change the name of their band. So, no, you couldn't name your band Metallica.
Josh Sisk
Moderation has worked well for slashdot. I see a bright future for it in the Napster network.
Paul.
I'm drinking coffee out of my QLink mug right now. Big red Q on a white mug..had it forever it seems...
Wild, Wild West. Unbridled information warfare. Thank-you Napster, musicians, and counter-napsters for duking it out.
Napster thumbs nose at copyright, artist thumbs nose at Napster. Eventually, I'm sure there will be some kind of sane equilibrium, just as the Wild West was eventually tamed. The nice thing is that these gunfights are bloodless.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
but not as a form of protest. My wife has a terrible voice. For a joke, we were going to have her sing some popular songs, and then post them on Napster and watch people download them.
If you "use" (append) one minute of the "real" song, you just violated the song's copyright !!! BLAM !!!
- sigs are for wimps.
The longest journey starts with a single step.
"We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers." Carl Sagan
Love it. While it won't solve the problem, it's nice to see someone take an internet approach to an internet problem. Also love all the whines from those poor inconvenienced folks who have to check out one more box to pirate their tunes. My heart breaks.
Then pass around the md5sum of the fake one... as for the ID tags, you could probably make a utility that strips ID tags from the song so two copies of the same song with different ID tags end up with the same sum.
Mind you lots of Fingerbang fans are gonna be really annoyed when they waste all that download time
Not really. You can listen to partially downloaded MP3's off of Napster so you can check after a minute if you are really downloading what you think you are.
It still is annoying, but not as bad as you might think.
Being with you, it's just one epiphany after another
San Jose Mercury mentioned this was happening
in article last week.
(Submitted to slashdot / denied.)
We could use filters like in email or usenet.
Or sites could be rated by users like ebay or epinions.
"Free music" is a misnomer. It's more like "Warez music".
I will continue to rip and trade my music with other people who are as passionate about this as me.
The only "passion" here I see from the napster-crowd is passionate selfishness. Basically, they want something for nothing, and to hell with everyone else. The crocodile tears about the "RIAA ripping off the artists" are as silly as the RIAA expressing sympathy for the artists. Neither side cares about the artists, the RIAA just care about their money, and the napsterites just want to freeload.
In addition, Napster reserves the right to terminate the account of a user and to block use of the Napster service permanently upon any single infringement of the rights of others in conjunction with use of the Napster service, or if Napster believes that user conduct is harmful to the interests of Napster.
...such as people that post bogus files for that reason. Understood that yes, they too would be violating copyright laws and the terms of use, but this guy is interfering with the service that they're attempting to provide. If they're identified, they should be banned. (After all, it does infringe upon other's use of the service!)
"I'm not even supposed to BE here today!"
This is a great idea. Time to fight back against the mainstream bullshit we have to deal with every day. No more bending over for the trends that are forced on pop culture. Down with Britney. Down with Boy Bands. Down with Pre-fabricated hits.
Prepare for Judas Priest to take over Napster....
this guy really has too much time on his hands. i can't see anyone doing this actually make a difference. the mountains of poorly encoded mp3's out there is a much larger problem :)
"Tension is the great integrity" -- R. Buckminster Fuller
This would definitely be a good solution. Unfortunately, it works directly against the other trends in this area, anonymity of users and decentralization of the distributed application. A "trust registry" implies a central database of users and their trust levels, and authentication of access by these users.
This gets us right back into the Napster model, in which the RIAA (or whomever) has a single entity to sue to shut the whole thing down, or a list of users to subpoena to go after individuals.
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a skull.
Why can't the geeks of the net keep anything underground anymore? Last year at school, people with the intelligence level of mousepads would come up to me and ask me to help them "fix their napster." I think as far as something like this goes, if you don't understand it, don't use use it.
ps i switched to gnutella months ago. It's a little better than napster.
-Superb0wl
-Superb0wl
It's not that I'm lazy....it's that I just don't care.
I don't see this working as a protest...it will just piss off Napster users.
Don't we have enough bandwidth-wasting going on as it is? We need people wasting 4 hours grabbing an album full of bloody bird calls?
I think I'll go turn on my Napster filter...
The Divine Creatrix in a Mortal Shell that stays Crunchy in Milk
The House Between - Original Sci-Fi Series
The ECC did it first and they're songs were better. http://music.zdnet.com/features/visionaries2/ http://www.evolution-control.com/culturejamming.ht ml
Suck.com had an article about this same thing a while back. They came up with ways for RIAA to fight Napster. One was "crapster", where they would record bogus MP3s that said they were everything under the sun, but every song was really "Achy Breaky Heart" by Billy Ray Cyrus.
You can trust me. I'm with the government.
...I've supported due to MP3. Let's name the ones I've supported in the last month (see if you've heard of them!) Electric Hellfire Club
Apoptygma Berzerk
Funker Vogt (those from shoutcast radio- been listening to lots of new goth/industrial lately, as opposed to old goth/industrial that I already have)
Loreena McKennitt
Yasunori Mitsuda (this one was expensive! but I love Xenogears CREID! to death!)
Einsturzende Neubauten
Wesley Willis
I think everyone gets the fucking obvious point now. Why must the record companies insist on attempting to keep me from buying their things?
--Perianwyr Stormcrow
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
Well, all you Napster users out there can be glad I don't have an account.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
Wouldn't this be material for some type of a legal case as well? I mean, if I were a publisher of copyright protected material, I don't think I would want some jerk putting out false product with my name on it. Think about the unsuspecting napster user who has never heard of Metallica and then decides to explore their music. The first thing he downloads is a quack song or something similar.... How much more interested is he going to be in Metallica's music now?!? There are hundreds of thousands of Napster users that will never even know about what is being discussed right now. I'm sure doing even this much to protest isn't legal or even wanted by composers.
Napster will (and from what I hear, is about to deploy) have technology to filter out losers who pull stuff like this. It's just a matter of establishing who is a trustable source of music and who isn't.
What did you eat today? http://www.atetoday.com/
I would suggest that there be an upper limit of trust/popularity, such that almost everyone on the Napster network gets the highest trust. The only reason trust would go down is if something screwy was going on. That way the record companies and lawyers can't concentrate their fire any more than they do now. Of course there will always be the problem of l4m3rs who have a grudge. But what's the worst that can happen? People stop downloading from you and your internet connection speeds up. Oh no.
The evils of a client-client distributed system are rearing their ugly heads. Napster, while indeed very cool, was never a "big jump in technology" or the "end all internet file solution" that many people said it was. It's all about trust. This is where ftp reigns supreme.
There's no moderation for Spam so Flamebait is the closest category.
They are making money off of the name of the popular bands, which are copyrighted.
Bzzzzzzt. Sorry to say, incorrect. You can start a band tomorrow and the only thing that prevents you from calling it "Metallica" is good taste. Titles and names are NOT copyrightable, although you CAN trademark them, depending on circumstances.
What part of "shall not be infringed" is so hard to understand?
I've been encoding /dev/urandom (don't wanna waste that entropy!) into MP3s with names in the format:
Fuck $group - This Is Not "$song".mp3
for a long time now. I think I'm being perfectly legal; I am 1) obviously voicing an opinion, and 2) explicitly not providing copyrighted works. However, anyone searching for $group or $song is going to get a hit from my collection, and any automated "ban bot" is going to add me (unfairly and incorrectly) to its wrongdoers list. I assure you that I'm perfectly comfortable meeting any would-be persecutors head on.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Napster may dodge the bullet about distributing MP3s(ie. they provide a utility to distribute MP3...whether it is illegal to do so is not up to Napster to decide) but making a giantic resource/list of "trusted" individuals will make it easier for any artist to track down who is distributing their song if they chose to do so.
So insted of pestering Napster to stop their operations, artists who want to enforce their copyrights can go out and look for who is has the highest rating for distributing their songs and bust them.
Sounds like a good deal for everyone but users. I guess it doesn't matter since stealing copyrighted stuff isn't kosher in the first place.
Perhaps we should rid the internet of anonymity because criminals like to remain anonymous -- just like you...
If Napster got involved in monitoring the contents of files, legally they would have to remove copywrite offenses. Its the old ISP-common carrier ruling. As long as the ISP (or Napster) just provides the infrastucture, they are not responsible for content. But as soon as they monitor content, they legally are responsible for all content.
And there is no way that Napster could indicate which files were "legitimate" illegal mp3s as opposed to "fake" illegal mp3s containing cukoo noises. Doing so would indicate that Napster knew the files were illegal mp3s.
Everything in this post is false.
...this guy is just a lackey of the music biz. It's really sad that the business model which the music industry is trying to perpetuate is so pervasive, so much so in fact, that it influences people to think like this.
Firstly, I do think this is a bit of a ploy to publicize his girlfriend (was it Cracker that sang "What the world needs now, is another...folk singer, like a I need a hole in my head"...but I digress...).
Secondly, and most importantly is musicians need to realize that Napster is not their enemy, rather it's the music business cartel that controls them. A rather well publicized quote from a Sony executive early in the 1990's when Sony was consolodating recording artists (i.e. putting labels out of business that didn't sell enough records) characterizes "artists" as merely software that is sold as a commodity.
Many misguided musicians think that Napster destroys the "living" they make when in reality it's the labels that cause Poor Mr./Mrs. Folk Singer to not make money. These labels ain't stupid, ya know. They know that mainstream Amerika wants Brittany and the Boyz, and not another folk singer. Sad as that may be.
Musicians such as these are not artists; I don't think any musician worth his or her salt would care what kind of money they made, just as an ancient bard probably wasn't in it for the material things either. Music is an art. Music for money is just...software. Let these people play their silly games, I know the musicians I want to listen to don't care if people download their MP3's for free or not..
ozone pilot
Hey,
I don't condone piracy, of course (Honest!), but if I did, I'd suggest Napster authors put an MP3 rip utility into Napster which always produced the same extract, they might be able to pull off something like this. IIf they automatically removed lead- and trail-silence then used an audio-editing thing to read, say, 1 minute into the song and take the volume, and again 5 seconds later, and once more in another 5 seconds, then see if it's uniform across all the songs. They could also use something similar to let you resume from OTHER USERS!
I must say, however, from what I've seen of Napster, it doesn't seem to be the best-written, feature-rich programming I've ever seen...
Michael Tandy
...another insightless comment from Michael Tandy.
"Goodness me, how unlike the FBI to abuse the trust of the American public." -- The Onion
Which can be infringed upon and dilluted ala Barbie, Pokey, Toys R Us and all the other similar flurries of lawsuits.
---
seumas.com
Slightly offtopic... although related.. Using the same tactic of naming files as though they are popular songs, smaller artists can increase distribution by using a fake filename, but a real ID3 tag, so it shows the real song/artist name in an mp3 player. The pioneers of Napster Bombs are the Evolution Control Committee, who were also threatened by CBS for sampling Dan Rather in their song, Rocked by Rape. Anyway, check them out.
Suck had a great commentary on this Tuesday. Basically, as the noise on Napster goes up, people will be willing to pay for authentication. A Win-Win solution: you can download all you want, but you will pay RIAA/Courtney Love/whoever for a guaranty that the file is authentic.
The commentary goes into more detail.
"one treats others with courtesy not because they are gentlemen or gentlewomen, but because you are" --G. Henrichs
These guys stole the name "Cuckoo's Egg" from the computer related book by Cliff Stoll I think is his name. Isn't THAT a copyright violation? Hypocrites.
Two things need to happen first, though - secure online micro payments, and for the record companies to realise that the glory days are long gone. Kind of like the mining unions in 80's UK - they wouldn't bow to the new way of doing things, so they were destroyed.
Strong data typing is for those with weak minds.
Strong data typing is for those with weak minds.
Unfortunately different copies of the same CD may be different, esp. if there was a large interval between when the two were produced. This also screws up CDDB databases - with two copies of the same cd, name the tracks of one in your CD player and then stick in the other - it might not recognise the second disc!
I was talking with some co-workers about the next Outlook megavirus...
You send out an Outlook VBS attachment that scans all the mp3's on the user's hard drive and replaces the audio (no ID tag or file name changes) with some other audio file and then replicates itself to other Outlook users.
I guess you could have a long-winded mp3 speech about copyright infringment, but I think it would be worse to replace everything with copies of Michael Jackson's "Bad".
Watch those attachments people...
I don't know about Napster but don't some of the latest peer-to-peer clients (Gnutella, et al) offer to let you listen as you're downloading?
Of course, if there were a lot of these fake copies floating around, it would get real frustrating real quick.
Or a filter list might work. If you get a bad copy, just flag the user so their results don't show up in your searches in the future.
What these dipshits are doing is just as illegal as what they are protesting. Sheesh. In their "How to Create & Lay an MP3 Egg" they teach you how to fight online piracy as well! From the site:
Here's a brief overview of how to lay your own Cuckoo's Eggs in the Napster nest.
1. Download and install Napster
2. Download or rip songs for use as eggs.
3. Edit the songs adding noise, sounds, and other info
4. Copy your MP3 file into the Napster directories.
5. Connect to Napster and start laying eggs
Step 1 is pretty easy... in fact you probably already have Napster installed. The laying of eggs will work best if you can install Napster on multiple machines so you have the best chance of letting many users connect.
Step 2 is pretty easy. You can either use Napster to download popular songs, or rip some from a CD using Musicmatch or CoolEdit. Pick really popular songs for maximum demand... remixes or duets are very popular downloads, as are live recordings.
It doesn't matter if you are stealing to help someone or stealing to hurt em. It's still just as illegal.
Hypocrites.
People that download top 40 music deserve to have to listen to the crap. Get a life, turn off the radio, and listen to some real music.
Funny, but most true MP3 'piraters' think that Napster sucks, mainly for the reason that people can do this. In the IRC invronment, you can go into a channel and trust that you're really going to be downloading legit MP3's, and you can actually talk to people and are more likely to find rare concerts and bootlegs. I also can't imagine that there will someday be enough people using the DOS-type attacks that they will even account for 10% of the Napster traffic. I usually download a song twice, anyways, just in case.
One way to solve the problem is to go with digital signatures. If a large number of people, or specifically trusted people, sign 'valid' content, then content problems of this sort will go away. That's exactly the same way to overcome the insertion of commercial and other content junk.
QED.
-- Matthew - matthew.gream@pobox.com, http://matthewgream.net
I may start doing this soon :)
I got your wigger right here, bub.
don't believe the hype
Any geezers here remember Quantum Link? The first GUI on line service provider for C64 computers? I joined as a life member and have since had that life membership transferred to AOL (Which Q-Link became).
I can remember reading their ads in the backs of the Commodore magazines, but I don't think the service was ever available back in those days for those of us in St. Louis. We had to make due with Color 64 boards, downloading our Eaglesoft warez off of mountains of 1541 drives linked together.
Sigh... the good ole days.
-The Reverend
-The Reverend (I am not a Nazi nor a Troll)
=(.\')=
>No, it's not copyright infringement, because they
>are not trying to pass someone else's work off as
>their own. They are just choosing an amusing
>naming scheme for files. I don't think that
>anyone's likely to believe that their cuckoo
>noises are really black sabbath recordings, so to
>claim that they're violating anything is a
>stretch.
They are passing _their_ work off as someone else's! They say so on their page. And you can choose whatever crazy naming format you like for you files, as long as you're the only one looking at it.
The problem here, though, is that they are _publishing_ these files via Napster, making them visible to the rest of the net. In order to determine that the files are _actually_ cuckoo noises and not the _copyrighted music that they are claimed to be_, you would have to download the file. At which point, according to the RIAA's attorneys, you've comitted piracy via Napster, because you've downloaded a file that matches the name of one of their songs.
So, since you couldn't have known beforehand that the files contained something other than what they were labelled to contain, why were you downloading it in the first place? To listen to what you thought was a Black Sabbath, or Kid Rock, or some other piece of music.
If these people did this out of the back of their car with selling cds instead of trading mp3s, they'd be guilty of more numerous law offenses than I'm qualified to list. Fraud, Trademark and Copyright infringement, and false advertising come to mind. Being that it's on Napster and being freely shared makes it less of a crime (though how much less is best left up to the lawyer-types), but does not remove copyright and/or trademark infringement problems, because those are violations regardless of whether profit is being made by the violator.
What about the copyright on the cukoo sound? Isn't somebody going to sue him for stealing their soundbyte?
Me, I live and let live, what he wants to do with his computer and time... Is his business...
Eh...
1. No, it does not work because you don't have the information in the first place.
:-)
2. This sound like a perfect way to shutdown Napster. Fake bad reports to Napster server until every IP is banned
One thing the Net has taught us: peer review and "egoboo" are powerful forces. (Yes, I read about egoboo in Wired, so sue me.)
nojw
Patrick Bateman is editor for the Training and Services Web site.
Patrick Bateman is also Brett Easton Ellis' American Psycho. Great book. OK movie.
Rock over London. Rock on Chicago. Slashdot: News for Nerds. Stuff that matters.
Why wouldn't this happen:
I download a song that I think is a normal song. I find out it's a bunch of noise. I take a look at who the user is and never download anything by that user again.
Even if he registers a bunch of names, there's no way he can keep up.
http://www.suck.com/daily/2000/03/24/
This is the method they called "Crapster"
This idea is actually much older--witness The Beatles, "Revolution 9". They predicted the Napster phenomenon 30 years ago, and had a perfect solution!
Technically, what this guy is doing is "illegal". If you record, say, a Britney Spears song and then rename it to say "Weird Al", and then distribute it, you have actually committed fraud under the legal definition.
That's not even bringing into account the trademark issues...
Check out this article at BBSpot for another way to protect your copyright against evil Napster users.
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
Maybe only 500 songs if you exclude all of the freely permitted live bootleg mp3 files that are permitted by The Grateful Dead, Blues Traveler, Phish, Dave Mathews Band, Metallica (yes, even Lars doesn't mind the bootlegs being traded), Widespread Panic, etc.. There is lots of great music out there that CAN be traded. So even with MD5s's napster might have some real legitimate use.
www.avacal.com -- the home page of pete shaw
Well, I highly doubt they'd implement an MD5 checksum. Why? Because it would give them an easy way to stop the trading of music by specific artists. They don't want that level of control, since it will hurt them in court. Right now, they are holding on to the tenuous claim that they have no such control over their network, and that it has legitimate uses. Since we all know that, regardless of what they say, their "business" model is highly dependent on the trade of MP3s without the artist's consent, they would never take an action that would make it easier for the artist to demand that they stop. Something like plausible deniability I think.
Doesn't anyone listen to MP3's before they finish downloading them?
Deliver yesterday, code today, think tomorrow.
Why Crime likes Open Source
Gnute, Gnutella, Freenet, Napster and their like are just a facilitation for crime. If people could be caught, they wouldn't use it. But as there is little chance, they continue their criminal activities with the cry "The Internet is Free".
Those supporting Napster and MP3.com are just peddling in stolen material. They are little more than criminals.
Steal from others is now the Open Source Way. Then justify your actions on Slashdot with dubious rationales like "they don't get it".
Lets just take the music from musicians and not pay them anything.
Lets just take from others and pay them nothing.
Those arguing for its continuation are arguing for continued lawbreaking and illegal activities. Maybe they should just give all their stuff to someone else on the basis that "The Internet Is Free".
The freedom to take without getting caught. Thats Open Source.
The freedom to get rich at others expense. Thats Open Source.
Eric Raymond's communistic state is getting closer to reality.
Open Source - the criminals friend.
Looks to me, judging from the tone of the site, that this is a big publicity stunt for his girlfriend. And that someone seriously needs a life.
Money I've spent buying CD's that I wouldn't have if I hadn't grabbed the MP3's first: $350, easy. Lots of imports, blah.
This is a Chao. A Chao says "Mu."
Also keep in mind that if you "cuckoo" a work whose author is dead and gone, or a work that should have long since passed into the public domain, you are not doing anything noble, but rather shilling for the RIAA. Is it really your goal to make more money for the people who want to hide away information so that they can sell it?
--
share and enjoy
Perhaps this user is simply trying to make a point about how bogus the 'copyright violation' technology being used by Dr. Dre, Metallica, etc, is. Those people who 'scan the network' for offending songs don't listen to them, no doubt, they just look by name and approximate filesize.
As soon as you nail this guy for copyright violation, it becomes obvious that he has NOTHING illegal on his site and the way they're fingering people is COMPLETELY bogus!
Exactly which French law specifies this? I'm unable to locate it. (I would like to see what it says about extracting a loop from a song, then running it for longer than 30 seconds as part of another song.)
As others have pointed out, trust often implies a central registar which is a bad idea.
You could instead code into the client the ability to "rate" the person you downloaded music from and this would be stored on your local machine. When browsing for songs, the client would be able to sort the list based upon your previous rankings.
The downside to all of this is that a user's music preference may color what they're willing to accept. If I really, really like 70s glam rock I may only have excellent files of that. When it comes to 80s metal, I may be satisified with mediocre recordings. If you downloaded my glam rock you might vote highly for me which would lead you to trust my choice in metal recordings. The opposite may happen -- I may get a bad rap from the few metal recordings I have when in actuality I specialize in glam rock.
but they don't know about opennap. Even windoze users can participate using napigator. Problem solved. And if they do get smart enough to use that, there's always the ignore feature.
An Beck or Current 93 fans accidently download Dan Rathers talking about varfious horrors when searching for the aftermentioned bands? Actually alot of songs that include RARE in the title are actually this song. Funny song. AC/DC beats, supposidly by the Evolution Control Comittie, a rap group. Happy Mento Eaters by Beck is always this song.
when Push Comes to Shove
Waitasecond - I'm farily positive that the DMCA makes md5summing a file and sharing that illegal! Somebody needs to spend their time protesting the DMCA, not Napster...
These "cuckoo's eggs" will proliferate, so people will start renaming their MP3's "NotACuckooEggShitneyBrears_PopDrivel.mp3" to get around this.
Then the cuckoo egg producers will do the same... And it'll be a huge dynamic mish mash; what is the "genuine" prefix this week?
And as more & more people get faster internet at home, there will be more, and more, and more MP3's and egg mp3s out there... Eating disk space and bandwidth.
I cannot wait for a reasonable settlement to this whole digital music thing... I'm not holding my breath, though..
Strong data typing is for those with weak minds.
Strong data typing is for those with weak minds.
Why the fuck do you keep posting this????????????
I used to want to be somebody but then I realized I wasn't somebody material. -- Anonymous Coward
Cool... you'll be creating cuckoo's eggs as well. Napster users will say "Damn it, these are not the songs I wanted! Guess I need to go right to the artist's site and download from there."
"We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers." Carl Sagan
He uses the above statement to explain that this is not a stunt to get attention for his wife and her "music", yet he just explained that they decided to use Kid Rock, Black Sabbath and other popular band names to get people to listen to it, because they probably would not listen to it otherwise.
So which is it -- a stunt to gain attention for her or not? He says he's not doing it for that reason, and then goes on to say exactly that, but in other words!
Another thing to bear in mind in regards to Stefanie and this being her gravy train - when we started the project we didn't want to steal other peoples music to use for the eggs and we didn't want to just use noise, so we used the music close at hand with the approval of the artist. All of the bands and or musician friends we approached said, great idea - we support you. This was generally followed by their saying they didn't want to participate for fear of the backlash. Others got bogged down in band meetings about differences of opinion about what to do and never gave the ok.
No, instead, you decided that it would just be better to steal their names. Copyrighted names of bands and songs, mind you! So you're not only riding on the coat-tails of bands that actually produce something people want to hear, but you're infringing on their product! This is like selling Tab in a Pepsi or Coke can!
I don't suppose these people have considered the fact that a lot of artists DO want their music to be available via Napster and don't mind that it is traded around. But I guess these cocky SOBs wouldn't have thought about that possibility, because they're too busy rigging publicity stunts.
---
seumas.com
Hmmm.. Shouldn't Cuckoo be paying royalties for using the title of the song =) ??
I'm probably off the mark as far as language/legal/context etc... but think about it.
You can't print the title "New York Times" and then change the content to "quack quack quack..." etc... and redistribute it.
Therefore by misrepresenting the original work, and then switching the content to something else entirely, Cuckoo is probably just as well violating fair use... it's kinda fraudulent, but no money is involved... sorta slanderous in a certain twisted way (using the term slander in the general sense not legal sense, unless people stop buying albums because they think a song they thought was X, Y, or Z pop group and was bird noises turned them off the album...*Shrug*)
Not a real opinion mind you... just a different slant...
Enrico_suave
Build Your Own PVR/HTPC news, reviews, &
I've been expecting this, since enemies of Napster, Gnutella, et al have explicitly announced their intentions to engage in these tactics. In fact, Gnutella has some users who have programmed clients to respond to search queries with a flood of "SPAM GNUTELLA"s, with html pages that autoforward to porn sites, with ads ("go to www.buymycrap.com"), as well those who make spoofs of genuine material. Freenet has said that they'll have a system in which users can give negative points to files that they deem not useful (Freenet hasn't said how it's going to prevent pseudo 'users' from illicitly downgrading genuine material, however. Ah well, the war goes on). I'm watching all this as an interesting experiment in whether Gresham's law (bad money drives out the good) will manifest itself.
I suspect that a voting system quickly is going to become mandatory to avoid a proliferation of bogus/damaged/spoof material.
This is actually an old idea. There are pages up on making Napster "bombs" where you record the first half of the song, then put white noise or a message like "Stealing music is wrong!" recorded over and over for the remainder of the time.
These are actually quite a bit more clever, as the downloader won't know that the song is bogus until they've spent the time downloading and listening to the first 45 seconds.
-- V was its Victim who cried out "But why?" --
TMBG has gone out of their way to make their MP3 hugging fans happy. They created Dial-A-Song, which plays their music (as goofy as it is, check it out, Flash required): Dial-A-Song
They even went so far as to produce an album completely on-line that can be purchased for like $7/$8 called Long Tall Weekend
I think credit should be given where credit is due. Instead of crying like a large majority of their musical counterparts, they actually went out and did something that both sides could agree to, which earned them my admiration and respect as musicians and as human being.
Cash Rules Everything Around Me
Well you don't go trying to find it on the web. No one puts warez there. IRC, some newsgroups, Hotline, and Carracho(for Mac) all have lots of warez freely and publicly distributed, sometimes with no strings attached(i.e. they don't make you do anything - click a banner, upload first, etc - to get it).
Anyway, some people try to do the same type of thing to warez, mainly by infecting it with a virus. It doesn't work well though, for the same reason this and other things that degrade the music(like ads) won't work well: for warez or MP3s to spread, you need more than one person distributing them. That means that the person who recieves the file usually tries it out(uses the program or plays the song), sees if it works/is high quality, and then sends it to other people.
For that reason, this isn't going to work.
Anyone who wants to post cuckoo's eggs, will just generate the checksum too. When you rip an MP3 from an AIFF file, you're not going to get the same results with any two encoders. -jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Considering the sheer number of "legit" Napster users (often 500,000 and up) one's chances of getting a screwed up song is probably pretty small. And if any of the 499,999 "legitimate" users happen to d/l a crap song, they'd just delete it almost immediately the first time they listen to it (how many mp3 collectors do you know that would leave those files in their collection?). So these songs are not going to spread, they'll fizzle out, and thus won't pollute Napster very much, unless thousands of users start getting bored enough to put messed up songs on Napster (unlikely, most people have better things to do than spend hours/days creating bogus songs - how many people care that much about the copyright issue, which is vague at best?)
I suspect that (just like the idea mentioned here the other day about putting ads in mp3's) this won't have any noticeable impact on Napster or on mp3 trading at all. Applying some simple Darwinian theory on natural selection, "good" songs have a fitness function with a higher survival/reproduction rate, and "bad" songs will have a very low survival/reproduction rate. Thus "bad" songs will fail to thrive in the environment.
The only problem is when they look at it before you finish downloading what you want.
warezd00d: This is corrupted!!
me: Hold on. I'll send it again.
Go not unto/. for advice, for you will be told both yea and nay (but have nothing to do with the question)
The tragedy of the commons is only directly applicable in a case of scarcity or other exclusive use of a resource. In this case, since the resource desired (pirated music) can be created essentially for free, there is no way to wreck it for the majority of the users. Annoy some people, sure, but in order to affect any fraction of the users, RIAA would need a lot of hackers and huge bandwidth and a lot of well-hidden hosts.
Walt
One of the primary reasons that I USE NAPSTER is *FOR* the live recordings, and studio outtakes, etc... Stuff you *CANNOT BUY* in the store. This is also, by chance, one of the only *LEGITAMATE* uses of Napster.
If anything, this teqnique is simply going to hit the users who would ordinarily be *GOOD* users, and *NOT* the users that are using it to basically horde large amounts of songs they don;t even OWN on CD..
-- I'm the root of all that's evil, but you can call me cookie..
--
Napster is good for finding Mp3's but you can probably find any song on Napster on the internet somewhere.
-- Any comments seen here are not mine, but a mixture of alchohol and lack of sleep.
Registrant: FIX, STEFANIE
PO Box 322 NEW PALTZ, NY 12561 US
Domain Name: HAND-2-MOUTH.COM
Administrative Contact,
Billing Contact: FIX, STEFANIE
sfix@CORNELLS.COM FIX,
STEFANIE PO Box 322 NEW PALTZ, NY 12561 914 658 8215 (FAX) 123 123 1234
Technical Contact, Zone Contact: Fix, john3@CORNELLS.COM Cornell Brothers Inc 310 White Plains Rd Eastchester, NY 10707 914-961-2400 (FAX) 914-961-8443
Record last updated on 07-Jun-2000. Record expires on 07-Jun-2001. Record created on 07-Jun-2000. Database last updated on 12-Jul-2000 23:08:43 EDT.
Domain servers in listed order: NS1.EASTCHESTER.NET 206.67.47.190 TOOLS.CORNELLS.COM 206.67.47.
Blam!
I call this "terrorism" not because this is *that* frightening.
This is legitimate for somebody to protest against whatever he feels contestable.
This way is not the most efficient ever as it would not be systematical, according to the number of songs that are currently available via Napster which "recipients" will just attempt to download another copy of the concerned song, hoping this would not be spoiled.
No, let's try being constructive:
Anyway if people argue that they use Napster like an intelligent radio (which allow them to chose whichever song and which, as a radio, let them record these - digitally onto their computer in this case) then a good issue would be to ask Napster to embed (on the fly) small ads at the beginning of the downloaded songs so that the perceived ad fee would just go to whoever claims he desserves it.
I'd personally accept this kind of counterpart if I could anyway listen to the music I like.
As a musician, I'd also consider it a better proof of my interest in my listeners than just intending to demonstrate them I don't need them.
--
Trolling using another account since 2005.
This is why I feel I have the right to formally ask these people to stay the hell away from MY music with their 'cuckoo' act, and to ask Orrin Hatch to safeguard my ability to give away and share my music freely as mp3s- it's my choice, it's my music not anybody else's, quit fscking trying to 'protect' me when I don't want to be protected! It's very much like taking a street performer happily plunking away on their guitar, and forcibly locking them and their open guitar case in a steel safe with a coinslot. There! We've protected the artist! Um, did anyone remember to put in airholes? *gasp* :P
What I want to know is, who's gonna respond? If Napster wants any legal ground to stand on at all (ie their service is merely to let users exchange files) then if one user offers bogus material, they won't do anything. If they want to win their case...
What I don't get are those who are up in arms about losing their 'right' to pirate. It doesn't matter if CD prices are too high, it's still illegal, and it's still denying the artists money they may well need to survive. If you're gonna do it, do it, but don't put up some bull pretense of protesting the music industry.
---------
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Get back to me when my brain starts working.
Well, I think it's pretty clever (and humourius) to fool the Napster lemmings that way. After all, who is going to monitor what I name my files. If I put b_spears_make_my_boobies_one_more_size.mp3 in my napster folder but it contains my recipie for hot grits pudding, padded with spaces (the file, not the pudding), I'm free to do it. At least he's using a bit more clever way of protesting the leeching than Metallica...
Give hime some credit!
J.
I can download an MP3 in 10 seconds; as the availability of broadband increases, how will this hurt general Napster users? Unless it's the only user providing a particular song (in which case it's a get-your-hopes-up annoyance), the user will just delete the song and get it elsewhere. Trojans aren't going to "spread" unless the user has some incentive to keep it around.
As usual, I suggest an (anonymous) authentication scheme where good users can gain trust, and bad users can be filtered out. Napster is a little bit too technologically immature, but this would make a world of difference on gnutella.
"The Internet treats a cuckoo sound as damage and routes around it."
An interesting project, but wouldn't labelling your work as if it were actually someone else's be considered copyright infringement as well?
If take my homegrown CD, label it up like, oh, the latest Kid Rock album, and sell to some poor guy looking for a Kid Rock album, haven't I just infringement on the copyright? (and committed fraud in the process?)
This isn't exactly a great way to protest piracy on Napster. Yes, it's amusing. Yes, you'll be able to fool some pirates using this. But this is a much more powerful stride _for_ Napster than against. Napster Co. now has a perfect example for 'false' positives on its tests. Anybody getting their account pulled from here on out has a _publicized_ excuse for their actions, saying "Oh yeah, my friend told me it was one of those cuckoo tricks, so I downloaded 'em to see if it was real".
I also find it amusing they chose to use existing music for this project. Why not just use dead air? It's just as easy, if not moreso, to produce X amount of dead air than it is to produce X amount of your wife's music and X amount of dead air to pad it out to the proper length. And using dead air would cause all sorts of consternation when people play the files, wondering if they had a problem in their sound system somewhere...
All in all, this is a great publicity stunt, but it's not going to accomplish the goals that they want, and is sinking to the same level of the pirates to do it.
Unless you agree with the protest, of course.
In fact, I had thought this approach might be a good way to foil Metallica's mercinary bot when it was compiling its lists of "bad" Napster users. If hundreds/thousands of users had offered a Metallica mp3's that were really just recordings of a pet conure screeching over and over again Metallica would have had a tough time making a case for infringement. Their method of identifying abusers was far too non-specific.
I believe you grossly underestimate net users' desire to share mp3s. The 'need for Napster' is not fleeting. As long as internet users listen to music, there will be a Napster-like tool to aid them in their journey. No government will ever be able to completely stamp out music copyright infringement, no matter how hard they try. They would need to change millions of people's attitudes towards music and the net - a feat that is completely unrealistic in the short term, and an uphill battle in the long term.
Life is but a mist upon the horizon.
Really though... what are the odds that you are going to be on the same server as that person and on top of that if it is a popular song there are going to be many people that have it and therefore when you start playing the song in mid download (like I am always doing) I think you would notice. Then just get it from somebody else. If there was a HUGE amount of people that did this then it would possibly be a problem but from what I can tell it's only one or two people. It's the equivalent of posting "Britney Spears Nude!" pics in a newsgroup only to find out that it's old lady porn. Although I am much more for downloading a song of a cuckoo bird than looking at old naked ladies. I see it as being a minor annoyance. Actually a waste of time if you ask me.
:) ). But if I didn't have them someone else would have. It's the same thing with this cuckoo mess. If you notice that it's really a bird just stop getting it and get it from the next joe.
Once I went to the MTV TRL page and downloaded all of the songs that were listed there. My bandwidth was instantly bogged down by people downloading them (they are the "best" songs in the world so why not get them!
I can't imagine that there are enough people with such vehement anti-Napster sentiments for this to ever become a real issue (fingers cross.) If this becomes widespread, however, it could be a true pain, especially to those who are still labouring along with a standard modem.
Hopefully, no one will ever need to go to such drastic measures, but there is a way to protect yourself from this. One of the nice things about mp3s is that it's easy to listen to the beginning of each mp3 during the download to make sure it is, in fact, the song you want. Though this is a little time consuming, it's decidedly less so than spending an hour downloading the sweet sound of your favorite timepiece.
Nonetheless, this is an incredibly creative (if irritating,) protest idea. Kudos and chastisements at the same time.
"I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them." -Isaac Asimov
If a track had established a download track-record, a false-positive "distorted" moderation wouldn't be trusted.
New tracks might be vulnerable to abusive moderators, but if the system forced moderators to first download the complete file, it would prevent abusers from mass-negative-moderation.
If that's not good enough, then a two-tiered moderation system could be implemented, where bad tracks are identified by the first moderator, and then verified by a second.
It looks like Napster will soon be afflicted with the same problem that Slashdot has been suffering from: a falling signal-to-noise ratio, caused by malicious attempts to drown out the real conversation with huge amounts of garbage. This "cuckoo" guy is no different than the idiot who posts here about beer everyday.
If this catches on, Napster will need to implement some sort of moderation scheme. Perhaps, after a download is complete (or after it's been manually aborted), the user should be prompted to give a positive or negative point to the person he downloaded from. Those with sufficient negative points (from unique userids) could be automatically disconnected and banned from the server (by IP, not by nickname) for a few hours.
New userids are easy to create, and the Cuckoo guy could get back on without too much difficulty, but having the connection dropped will be an inconvenience.
Napster makes legitamate peer-to-peer file sharing look very criminal in the eyes of the public, its bad for our cause. Its bad enough with the copyright laws and restrictions for FAIR use, Napster will get ALL use banned!
Fear the government that fears your guns. Fear the government that fears your computers. Remove them from my email.
Well, this seems to be a problem with any anonymous multiuser information system - attacker could try to disrupt service by posting "noise" data. Since there is no algorithm which could validate wether the file is noise there should be some kind of moderation system. For example Napster/Gnutella/whatever client generating CRC check of file and chatrooms posting correct CRC. Napster should probably implement "preview seek" feature to listen to random part of song - since people usually remember songs by words in a middle, not by intro, anyway. Another feature I really miss in Napster is download resume - because of that there are so many truncated songs - sort of noise, too. Gnutella has this feature. As I said, CRC sums of songs and something like chatrooms with "moderators" providing correct CRC, and people voting would probably cut down noise level. That's similar to what Slashdot does - coments arent's thrown out, but some get higher rating.
Obama 2012: our incompetent asshole is slightly less of an incompetent asshole than the other incompetent asshole !
Personally, my way of protesting Napster is not to use it. I suppose I am one of the few members of the Free Software/Open Source "community" that came to free/open source software because it allowed me to share software without the ethical problem of theft. Thus, because not being a thief is important to me, I use free/open source software and don't use Napster. Again, I am amazed at the people who would never dream of stealing a book from a bookstore (and thus indirectly from the writer) but have no problem stealing music from the artists who create it.
Oh, well. I guess I'm just afflicted with a terrible case of outmoded ethics.
I admit that I'm playing fast and loose with the definition, but scarcity should apply because I'm not talking about availability of pirated music, I'm refering to the Napster community specifically. Of course there's always Gnutella, not to mention FTP servers. And even though the resource (Napster) isn't likely to run out of MP3s, I'm arguing that it can be spoiled by people who don't appreciate it, or serve enough crap, or disconnect quickly enough (dumping people trying to download) to increase the signal to noise ratio significantly.
;)
In regard to the RIAA's manpower needs in order to affect it, I agree. For an entity to set out to ruin Napster would require a lot of effort. Enough effort to not be cost effective. But I suspect that enough people will fail to try to contribute (by running Napster behind a firewall, by not attempting to share any songs but still taking up a spot on Napster's clogged network) that it will eventually spoil Napster as a resource unless Napster plans for it.
- StaticLimit
Thanks to people like him Internet traffic is going through the roof. If I use napster to get a song I want and don't get it I'm going to get it again off someone else. Thus doubling my networking traffic.
Good work moron!
You have to understand how Hackers think. Hackers aren't like normal users, at all. They call themselves "31337", which is basically hacker talk for "elite", and they are. They can do things with their computers that most people can't even imagine.
Their 31337 FTP siteZ are running 24/7. They write 31337 toolZ. Even if Napster went down tommorrow, their 31337 FTP siteZ wouldn't. If someone tried to mess with those sites, their boxxen would be Craxxxx0red. After all, these guys cracked into government systems. They are truly the elite of the Internet/Technology world.Unmoderated public forums are highly susceptable to the tragedy of the commons.
The tragedy of the commons applies best to public lands with natural resources. If anyone is allowed to use them, someone will misuse them and destroy it. Since everybody KNOWS that SOMEONE will rape the land of it's resources, they don't feel so bad about doing it first. After all, as long as someone is going to clear-cut this stand of ancient redwoods and make a ton of money... it may as well be me. That's the tragedy of the commons.
How does it apply online? Napster is a great repository of free music! So tons of people are happy to log in and download the music. But Napster only works because a sizable (and I'd imagine rapidly shrinking as a percentage) portion of the users not only download, but also share music freely with the Napster "community". It's this community approach that allows it to work, but as it catches on, it becomes a huge venue and it seems there's always plenty of music... so why should I spend my bandwidth and my time configuring my firewall (for example) to share my music? Feeling that you can take without giving back is the piece of human nature that allows the tragedy of the commons. It's why we have government! To keep a few individuals from trampling the rights of everyone else simply because they can. It's why Slashdot has moderation!! Because without it (and sometimes even with it) a few trolls can pump out enough static to obscure the real discourse.
Eventually, people who don't care about sharing music, and only care about taking music will begin to erode quality unless the system is carefully designed.
Creating a workable system where the participating members of the community can ensure that quality remains high is a difficult task... the nature of which changes as the community grows. Napster will definitely need this in their community.
- StaticLimit
The claim that Metallica are "just in it for the money" is completely bogus, and little more than propaganda spun by the napster-ites in a futile attempt to cover the fact that they really don't give a rat's ass about the artists. ( The only artists who'd dissaprove of napster are the "greedy ones", right ? ) BTW, Metallica have allowed and condoned their fans freeloading off them for a long time -- because they are smart enough to know that their fans are dedicated enough to buy whatever they can afford. It's the corporate freeloading that is more offensive to them.
What about people that are using Napster for legitimate reasons? DMCA notwithstanding, what happens if I want to download the tracks to Siamese Dream by The Smashing Pumpkins? I own the CD, but it is too scratched to listen to. Am I pirating/stealing/ripping off an artist if I've already bought the CD? I say no. This is just another attempt by some Tipper Gore wanna-be with nothing else to do than save society from its own evils. As It's been said a thousand times, some people just have wayyy too much time on their hands. -JC
along with several other methods of hijacking Napster... here
How big of a threat do you really think something like this would get? Surely very close to 100% of napster's users support it. At the time I'm sending this message, there are 519,427 files on the napster server i'm connected to. I doubt something like this would ever get big enough to even place 10,000 bird songs (or whatever they are) onto napster. Even if 10,000 songs were added to the server, that would make there 520,427 songs. That would make up for less than 2% of the total songs. Yes, that is a large amount, but not even close to catastrophic to napster. If one was really concerned about it, they could just play the song as it is downloading!
Today is the closing of a parenthesis opened before this sig, before this story, before this existence that is me (as if
Great, so we'll have trolls running around on the Napster client, spamming content with comments about Natalie Portman, Beowulf Clusters and hot grits... *sigh*.
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seumas.com
Why is this an issue if it has been determined that it is illegal to download songs from artists or labels that frown upon that?
If Metallica went to all the trouble to say I do not want you to obtain our music without springing the $15 bucks...I at least have the humanity to say...OK...and if I do download an illegal Metallica song, well then I should not feel "cheated" if their is annoying messages/sounds/warnings inserted throughout.... That is like a car thief claiming "bait and switch" when the ride he just ripped off from the lot has no CD player, when the window sticker cleary said "equipped with CD player" before he bashed it in...
Now if we start getting tainted versions of "Garage Band Blues" from unsighned bands (or other artists that have given the free trade of MP3's the thumbs up) then we can complain....
IMHO
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
Not a wise propostion as this could be traced back to your computer and you could be held accountable. Besides, deafing people or blowing their speakers isn't polite. http://www.hand-2-mouth.com
Here's something that I proposed earlier, but it got lost in the noise.
Simply run a web site that indexes files (of any sort) by size and MD5 checksum (perhaps of the first 1K and then of the whole file). Then, you modify an gnutella client so that it can interact with the web browser (via plugin) and retrieve the name, MD5 and length of the file you want and then download it. The wonderful part is that now you have a reliable way to index, so you can begin REVIEWING.
Reviewed content really is the way to go. Let's say, for example, that what I really want is cat pictures. I come across a file called "pussy5.jpg". Do I download it? Even if it's not junk, it's probably not what I was looking for. Instead, what you do is search through a Web site that indexes by content type and find the best-reviewed files. Thus, I safely discover that pussy5.jpg is in fact EXACTLY what I want, but that cat-stretch.gif is most certainly NOT.
The even better tactic is to replace plain files with "gnutella-format", which would be a predefined sequence of mime encapsulations. The payload is in the last enclosure, but previous enclosures could contain all sorts of useful info including description, author, distributor, copyright info, etc. Also, it would be nice if gnutella clients that are SERVING a file allow for searches based on MD5 checksum (which would require pre-computing the checksums on start-up, but if you do it in a lazy fashion, that's not too bad).
Someone wanna start the world's most popular Web site? You could even act on behalf of the recording industry by marking which files are known copyright violations so that offending clients could semi-automatically scan for them in their caches and delete them. If clients choose not to do this, then it's clearly on the head of the recording industry to go chase them down and prosecute, but you've done your duty for kink and country.
An indexed, colated, reviewed gnutella is definitely the way of the future.
--
"Recta non toleranda futuaris nisi irrisus ridebis"
"Recta non toleranda futuaris nisi irrisus ridebis"
Can you point to the law that lets you rip off live recording and out-takes, and lets you off the copyrights owned by the authors of the works? Thought not.
- Andy R.
Y2K - only 47 and half years to go!
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
it's not bull. sure, they';re fighting for 'artistic ownership'. see, and that's something that matters wildly to artists. i heard once that f-ing marc chagall used to make viewers sign non-disclosure agreements. in fact, even though he was passionate about his art, he quit doing it cause so many people kept ripping him off.
artistic ownership is about (get this) *ownership*. intellectuall property rights are about (say it with me) property. metallica is not in this fight because of some kind of potential insult to the dignity and integrity of 'art', they don't even know what the words mean. they are in this fight because of property and ownership -- in short, they are in this fight to make sure that the current manner in which an artist can be paid stays in place. why? because of 'art'? no -- for *exactly* the same selfish reasons which you so debase in your post!
metallica is in this fight because they care about being paid for their art. van gogh died hungry in a mental institution or some shit. i'll take van gogh over these posession-posessed versace-suit poseurs any day of the week. get rid of em, let's get us some artists who aren't in it for the money. the assertion that the quality of music will falter in the absence of copyright protection for recorded music is at best unproven, and in some ways at odds with common sense.
sounds a bit silly and idealistic, i know, but some of my favorite fellow brooklynites, woody guthrie and they might be giants, have provided wonderful examples of how a musician might function and prosper, without a care for what's in it for them.
so, let's call a spade a spade. metallica, as far as this fight goes, are not artists, they are factory workers. they have no integrity -- they sell something of theirs at as high a margin as possible. they are not artists, not insofar as this discussion is concerned.
god is just pretend.
Personally, I like Napster, and I think that this article being posted after all the pro-Napster ones that have run in the past shows how unfocussed and two-faced /. can be. /dev/random to MP3 and posting that. This would be better, but why encode it to MP3? Why even store it on your disk?
But besides that, this guy's just using an inefficient method of posting shit.
I read somewhere in this thread that someone's been encoding
If you really want to jam Napster, make a program to search randomly and generate huge lists of songs. Then, have it log in to the server claiming to have all these songs. It doesn't need to do anything if a song is requested - just let the request time out. (Or let it almosttime out, then start sending noise.) This would be so much easier than writing an actual Napster client. It could run in the background be turned down when you want to use your bandwidth. Most importantly, give copies to all yer anti-MP3 musician friends.
You might just discover that there aren't enough big-time anti-MP3 musicians to succeed in causing any damage.
If there are, tho, the process of getting MP3s would be like pulling teeth. If I had to go through 3+ unsuccessful attempts to get a single song every time, I would use Napster a lot less often (I'm already discouraged by its general unreliability).
Ramble on!
foo = bar/*myPtr;
Check out Project Upper/Mute, an all-around awesome compiler fra
Excellent question. My rather blunt response is, there has to be a balance. It's not about stopping the trading of music it's about using the technology to trade in a responsible and considerate manner.
As we have stated over and over again the goal of the cuckoo egg project is two-fold:
1. To push the discussion to a wider audience as the implications of online piracy will eventuallyhave far reaching consequences (as the author of the previous post wisely alludes to)
2. To expose the hypocrisy in the rational that Napster users in defense of their actions.
To beat a dead horse but - There is an endless number of sites where music can be exchanged with the artists consent without paying. Just about any artist can put their music on the web with relative ease.
I'm drifting from the question raised. My view is that the world of Star Trek didn't evolve from a theive's den. Artists (musicians, filmakers, etc)and their audience, the general public need to work together to use technology to bring down the existing corporate structurewhere the few get the most and the rest get the crumbs.
There should be a mutual respect and appreciation for each person's efforts. Well, there I go again into my utopia world - go ahead rip into my ignorant and simplistic dream - at least try to be constructive.
sorry, the coffe machine was broken in the office this morning. it's felt like 7:00 am for the entire morning. but now it's afternoon, so i'm normal again. ::choke:: WILDCAT board. lol
*AHEM*
anyway, AOL was all i had except for the local BBS scene. I BBS'd my life away. any someone brought up a good point that BBSs really were about as underground as you get. Ah the good old days of wardialing to find a place to start, and then playing usurper for days at a time. I check on some old numbers and they still work. kewl. I even saw someone still running a
-Superb0wl
-Superb0wl
It's not that I'm lazy....it's that I just don't care.
Yes, one exists. Here's the link...
http://wilkes1.wilkes.edu/~millartj/debu nk
--
--
The real Raunchola isn't cool enough to have any imposters
Here's a link to an intersting interview with Courteny Love on Salon.com. It really pulls together all of the various arguments related to Napster/Digital Music/Piracy. A very good read.
- Crusadio
... since it looks like this issue will be decided one way or the other in the near future thanks to some sterling work by the RIAA to have Napster stamped out. Whilst this is a pretty sad way of protesting against the fact that Napster is an accessory to theft, at least he's showing that not everybody online has given into to the temptation to defraud musicians, who, even if they do make loads of money, still don't deserve to be stolen from.
Sure we need to have a model for online music, it's a given that at some point the net will become the dominant medium for distributing music, but Napster won't ever be it thanks to it's free for all attitude to copyrights and artists rights. A fairer system will require a central body such as the RIAA to ensure that violations are taken care of - online or offline, this is going to be a constant.
So, the need for a body such as the RIAA isn't going to change, but the need for Napster is as fleeting as any other fad. Expect it to die shortly after the court rules against it.
---
Jon E. Erikson
Jon Erikson, IT guru
I posted this a few days ago on the message board at http://gnutelladev.wego.com.
---BEGIN GnutellaDev post---
I agree that this is a serious problem, and I have a solution in mind. Unfortunately, it's probably a solution best implemented by GnutellaNG. I'll discuss it here though.
I believe what's needed is a distributed content- and host-verification system based on public-key cryptography signatures and a web-of-trust. (GPG sources could be used for the PK crypto) I don't really have a good response for the privacy concerns about plastering persistent identities all over the content out there...but that's just one of many things that need to be discussed.
For those unfamiliar with the distributed web-of-trust implemented in the original PGP release: the idea is that using public-key crypto (where the encryption key has two halves, a public- and a private- half, which are linked in a very special mathematical way...what you 'do' with one half requires the other half to 'undo') you can place signatures on things -- include a hash of the content, create a message using your private key which can be verified by your public key.
In the PGP world this is used to create a web-of-trust: if you have a key owned by a person you trust (say, your very technical neighbor John) you might trust two things about his key: you might or might not trust that his key will remained owned by him (trusting the identity of the key) and you might or might not trust the integrity of the owner in certifying other keys (trusting the integrity of signatures made by the key). So you could trust the key of a complete sociopath, merely saying that you know the key belongs to him personally...but you don't exactly trust his signatures on other peoples' keys. Or you could trust both the key and the signatures of your neighbor John -- not only do you believe his key belongs to him personally, but you believe that when he puts a signature on some third-party key out there, then that third-party key probably really belongs to that person.
In Gnutella, this could be used to maintain a distributed database of trusted individuals and servers (anonymity will be discussed later) and trusted content. The effect will be that, for a given user, once he's taken the time to tell Gnutella how accurate the songs he downloads are...these songs weren't what their filename claimed they were, while these other songs were accurate and of X quality...he can publish signatures affirming to other users that files with X length and Y CRC really do contain Q content. Another user who trusts his signature can then trust files signed by him.
In the simplest case, this system would consist of a separate database of content signatures. When you get a search result from the servlet you're interested in (which contains a filename, size, and CRC) you do another search (perhaps in another network altogether) to find signatures for that file and public keys to verify the signatures with. Each key represents an individual, and each signature represents a public certification made by that individual about that content. Without a web of trust, all I really get from this is a cryptographically strong way of tying identities to content certifications. I have no idea how trustworthy the identities are.
This simplest case can be easilly attacked -- I'll build onto it soon. Obviously, just as quickly as I can create signatures that certify good content as good and bad content as bad, the 'AIAA' (attacking Industry Artists Association) can create identities and signatures that certify good content as bad and bad content as good. So I've only gained ground if an arbitrary user can learn, either from a web page or IRC or whatever...that signatures made from my key are accurate and signatures made from other keys are always inaccurate. The target audience isn't going to want to find and add their own content certification keys.
A more realistic example would implement a web-of-trust. We now have key signatures as well as content signatures: in the keyring management section of my client, I can investigate the keys I know about, by searching for key signatures for the key in question. My which-keys-can-I-trust problem is still there, but easier to overcome now: if we have a few definitely-trusted keys (like the original authors of Gnutella, or known information freedom advocates), those keys can delegate trust to people by signing their keys. Big deviation from the PGP web of trust model here: in PGP you're merely certifying the ownership of the key when you issue a signature. How much you trust an individual is never published by PGP. In the system being discussed here, you are interested in trust more than identity, so you publish trust information. Trust is published by issuing a key signature certificate out into the network, and it's revoked by issuing a key signature revocation certificate.
A client can verify a given key's trustworthiness by the signature path from the known-and-trusted keys. If a key is signed directly by a known-and-trusted key, it's also pretty well trusted. If a key is signed by someone who is signed by someone who is...eventually signed by a trusted key, trust will be established, but with lower confidence. Most likely, the given key will have many many signatures with a fault-tolerant signature path leading back to the trusted keys. If we suppose that one of the original trusted keys' "trusted lieutenants" (keys signed directly by one of the original trusted keys) were to go bad and start signing AIAA keys and start certifying bad content, the original trusted key owner would revoke the trust granted to that individual. All keys signed by that individual would no-longer benefit from that individual's trust. That doesn't mean they become untrusted...but we should hope they have some trust-granting signatures other than derived from the bad individual...because the bad individual's signature is no-longer meaningful.
This model is more likely to survive attacks. Keys that create bad content signatures simply never get marked as trusted. Keys that were once trusted, but have now began creating bad content signatures and signing other bad keys, have their signatures revoked and are no-longer trusted.
This trust network can be self-starting, also. The client software should be able to catalog all of the content and key signatures made by a key. If a particular client can directly measure the 'decisions' made by a key -- checked that its files really are the way it claims they are, and checked that the other keys signed by this key seem to be trustworthy (ugh, recursion) that client can decide to trust that key (partially or completely), thus making another 'root' of the trust tree. To put it another way, the client could also compare the decisions 'influenced' by a key -- which content signatures would become trusted if that key was trusted -- and compare those content signatures to the overlapping content signatures made by the existing trusted network...the client could measure how trustworthy the key might be.
In practice, it seems silly to require processing several public-key crypto operations and finding and downloading many key certificates and files, to tell whether a given content file is worth downloading or not. However...we don't have to use Gnutella to transfer keys and signatures: I imagine Freenet might be more appropriate for this kind of content. (So yes, besides adding the GPG source to Gnutella, I'm proposing merging Gnutella with Freenet someday, using Freenet for key distribution.) Also, each client will need to keep a keyring, retaining the keys and signatures that pertain to the content it's downloaded and the keys it uses frequently.
Assuming a trust network that fans out quickly, with each influential key signing dozens of other keys instead of two or three, it may only require three or four dips into the distributed keyserver to verify content. The client could verify content in the background...coloring a search result's icon from red to yellow to green as it gets more of the key and certificate material it needs.
The only major concern left is privacy and anonymity. These keys are personal identities: for a key to be effective it must be maintained by one person. However, the key and the identity might not be obviously-related: the network won't expose where a key's signatures are entering the network from, and keyring files must be seized or stolen to confirm that any given identity belongs to a specific computer. In addition to that, these keys can be detached from their identities if the owner destroys his private key. The existing signatures made by that orphaned key still stand and are still meaningful, but nobody can tell what individual once owned that key.
It is probably not illegal to help maintain a web of trust. It's probably illegal to host the content directly, and it might be somewhat illegal to directly publish signatures that confirm that someone else's content is what it claims to be (affirming to the world that you personally downloaded the content and confirmed that it was good). However, it's probably not illegal to sign someone else's key, attributing trust to them. All you're really saying is that you trust them to sign only good content -- and you have no idea whether that content is legal or not.
In the Gnutella interface, this web-of-trust system would probably be seen as a key-management screen, a content-rating screen, and as trust levels displayed next to each search result. In the content-rating screen you could look at the content you have downloaded and rated (good/bad, or several more-specific ratings), and who has signed the content. In the key-management screen you could look at the keys you know about, what content the keys affect, and how your ratings compare with trusted or untrusted keys' ratings. When you get search results, a summary content rating can be displayed next to each search result. The system can calculate ratings either on-demand (right-click -> Investigate) or automatically (i.e. search results returned 50), and can explain and graph those ratings for you (I trusted this file because these people certified the file.)
This file represents a vision for the kinda-distant future...but it will be realized only if people get excited about it and work to implement it. If you personally don't understand part of the discussion presented here, or if I forgot to explain something, or if something doesn't make sense, please post here in the forum and/or email me at gnet-comments@mspencer.net.
Thanks for reading. This idea is *yours* now -- please do your part to help it become reality.
But what would you suggest? Most communities online have faced declining signal-to-noise ratios ever since they got popular. I see a wide range of opinions on /., truly informative and insightful and interesting and funny comments, often thought-provoking discussion, sometimes heated anti-Taco-et-al. comments...and I surf at +1, sometimes 0.
Check out Advogato, or Kuro5hin, or one of the other "Like Slashdot Only [X]" sites that /. inspired, in whole or in part. How would you solve the problem that /. has tried to solve, without some way to note which comments were more interesting than others, and more worth a user's time?
Ceterum censeo Microsoftam esse delendam.
Bombing Napster or putting fake Mp3's up wont stop anyone because anyone could easily listen to the first minute of the song and determine if it was a fake. I always check the song after I start downloading it to check to make sure it sounds ok. Not to mention Napster has nearly 20 million users. Whats the chances that your going to download one of these bogus songs? Not likely. You'll probably be more likely to find a crapping recording of a song before you find a bogus song.
Now I have a broadband connection to the net so its easy for me to wait a minute and check if the song came out ok but I understand that the dial up users out there will have to wait longer. But if your downloading an mp3 for the last 10 minutes wouldnt you want to check if it was ok? Rather then waste the time downloading it only to find it sounds like garbage. (Remember just because its encoded at 192 doesnt mean it's cd quality) Well nuff said..
"Always remember that reality is merely the fuel for traversing the infinite plains of the imagination."
now that it's been posted on slashdot watch all the trolls have fun with it.
"Oops I did it again, F1R5T P0$T(@#&$*(&#!@# HAHA...." etc.
Use your imagination I'm sure someone could come up with much more creative ones.
The record companies are probably going to sue his ass off because of copyright infringement and defamation of character.
They would probably still do it even though he is trying to help them. Thats how stupid the record companies are.
so when this guy wants to discourage drug use, is he going to start selling baggies of sugar and oragano?
wish
---
This is the same thing those morons at stopnapster.com advocate. Simply put, this isn't going to work.
...or...
The fact that the MP3s are the same length as their CD counterpart helps some, but what is going to stop someone from either...
- Playing the song during the download, hearing the annoying sounds, and aborting the download...
- Downloading the entire song, hearing the annoying sounds, deleting the offending file, and then warning others saying "Don't download anything from 'RIAALackey,' the files are corrupted!"
These people are claiming to have fooled some people, and I wouldn't doubt that. But remember, Napster has about 20 million users now. Think you can fool 20 million people? Ain't gonna happen.
--
--
The real Raunchola isn't cool enough to have any imposters
This is also called as a Napster bomb.. but don't those people understand that this thing is not going to last, it is not going to propogate itself and replace the good versions. Yep, somebody will waste time downloading this cuckoo song, but think of how many people are out there with cable? That guy will have to allow a high amount of uploads to prove anything.
Another thing is that he, that person would be the only one on the internet to offer this, nobody else would do that.
Oh, and the guy is going to get banned by Metallica or Dr. Dre pretty soon because they would scan for their songs and will find them on his/her server and will not know that he/she's doing them a favor... Ha-ha.
http://dtum.livejournal.com
Right now, somewhere, someone has the wrong idea. And at this moment, it's these cuckoo's egg people.
I think that this is the most ridiculous form of protest I have read about in a while. It isn't going to stop people from distributing anything. It's merely going to annoy them. Way to go, Cuckoo's Egg! Now you've pissed off a handful of teenagers! Way to thwart the machine!
I simply can't stop laughing about that web page sounding so serious about this.
gitm
- The pen is mightier than the sword, the court is mightier than the pen, and the sword is mightier than the court.
I personally think it would be most effective to put these psuedo-intellectual, wanna-be pundit, newspeak words such as "weblog" "egoboo" and "meme" in a protest.mp3 rather than a cuckoo sound. They're a lot more annoying. *grin*
-OTIt's an amusing attempt, but it won't fix the real issue.
There are easily half a dozen ways for downloaders to counter this, from ignoring the user/machine (a.k.a. the way spam is countered), having a private list of trusted trader parties, or just modifying napster so you can listen as the song is being downloaded. Distrupting third party is extremely difficult and never works over an extended time through spoofing.
What is really needed is a consensus... a moral one first, then later perhaps backed up by laws, over what is the permissable under fair use. So long as you have the the RIAA saying people can't loan CDs to their friends to listen to in cars, and some Napster-kiddies saying artists really should provide music as some sort of charity, we'll just keep arguing this over and over and over (which IMHO is much more annoying than any cookoo cookoo cookoo).
Here's my stab at a centerist moral position: Napster-Rips should be treated like songs on the radio or you hear in music kiosks at CD stores. If you find yourself playing the song for any other purpose than evaluation - go out and buy the rights.
I know there isn't a good technological fix for enforcing this behavior (without getting into some big-brother type thing on the internet), but there doesn't have to be. So long as enough people adopt this kind of behavior (and extremists begin to realize they have), all the other issues will sort themselves out.
You can take my freedom,
You can take my mp3's,
but just don't take my mod files!
mp3's I can take or leave, but DemoStyle is forever, baby! Let's hear it for k-k00l MODs, S3Ms, and XMs!
(I don't know what I'd do without k_sitawe, or kngdmsky/94956...)
All Napster ever has is what everyone else already has; who wants that? Download a mod archive, and see what happens when real musicians and hackers compete for this stuff, not what the radio stations and the record companies try to shove down your throat!
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Thats pretty much the effect this "project" will have, out of the millions upon millions of mp3's on napster, the few dozen these morons spread aren't going to effect anyone. And besides, I love how all these people who never even touched a computer before are suddenly "mp3 savy" and act like Napster is the entire MP3 world. Everyone I know has built their mp3 collections from usenet and IRC.
offtopic, but egoboo is in ESR's hacker dictionary, and it was borrowed (since the communities are very much overlapping) from science fiction fandom, which was fond of making those kinds of abreviations.
SEE ALSO: for instance this link
Check with spinn.net I'm in NM and they got me set up. There are also a number of other local ISPs that have just started offering it here such as thuntek.net. As for these 'eggs'... I'm undesided about it. I don't like the idea of people going out of thier way just to piss some one else off, but I do support making a statement. All in all I say screw it, I'd rather deal with the crap that some folks will toss into the mix then set up a way to lock people or songs out. Once such a thing is in place it /will/ be abussed and you just have to look around at the world to see where that goes. Free speach for every one!... Well.. that person is just cussing so we will block them. Hmm.. they found a way around that so we will log who is who so we can keep the bad people from sidestepping the block. Ok, that person has a problem with 'ethnics' add them to the list. Hay, those people are teaching folks how to make drugs... we can't have that better block them to.
It's just not worth starting the trend, even if it is stopped quickly.
Question reality.
At first, I thought you were being sarcastic about not ever searching for warez. However, you quickly verified your claim, with the revelation that you think the places to get warez are located on the www.
;)
Just on the off chance that your hesitation to "try before you buy" is caused by infinite ad loops, rather than legal issues, allow me to point you to IRC. Undernet and Newnet both have many ratio free warez channels from which to download (of course, i never download... just lurk
----(o)----
Though IANAL, I feel that Boies's argument is based on a logical reading of prior legal precedents--perhaps a slightly out-in-left-field interpretation, but one that can be logically supported. And if it succeeds in depriving the RIAA of its right to enforce its copyrights for having used them in anticompetitive ways (which is looking more and more possible given that the government has been making "antitrust investigatory" noises toward the recording industry lately), the RIAA could lose all its teeth.
We live in interesting times...
--
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
You silly butt! Don't you know that it's wrong to fight net abuse with net abuse? You better behave next time. :)
I assert ownership of all trademarks and copyrights on this page.
% head --bytes=`ls -l /bits/mp3/Metallica-Ain\'t_My_Bitch | perl -ane 'print $F[4]'` /dev/urandom > /napster-share/Metallica-Ain\'t_My_Bitch
Duh.
Jeff
See subject.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
A lot of people have suggested md5 or sha-1 hashes
to identify duplicate songs, and maintain a
cddb-style database. There seem to be a lot of
problems with this approach, although I think it's
better than nothing.
Rather than a cryptographic hash function, have
people considered using an optimized-for-audio
(or optimized for mp3) hash function? Maybe you'd
take a spectral analysis of the music which
eliminated differences due to beginning/ending
whitespace, or minor variations in the recording,
but which could clearly differentiate one song
from another.
This serves not only to deter the "napster
terrorists" who mislabel songs, but also
simplify finding quality music despite incompetent
labeling/id3 tags.
I'm sure there are a lot of signal processing
geniuses, like the guy who wrote cdparanoia/ogg/vorbis, who could come up with
a good "musical hash function".
That's as gay as straight pretzles. Whats better and I know of several UNKNOWN bands that are doing this right now, is to MP3 up songs, name them stuff like Metallica-Master-Live-90-toronton.mp3 and then put them up on Napster.
A friend of mine who's got a band which sounds like TOOL put up 10 songs and named them after that Perfect Circle band (the band with the guy from tool) he said that his cable modem came to a crawl for 2 days, and about 4000 people had downloaded one or more of the songs. He never got any flack from it either... so I'm thinking there's 4000 people out there listening to his stuff and thinking it's the guy from Tool. What tools..
when they ban enctryption only criminals wi$21*J *#JF$%!@#$':
...instead of "Bad", just start replacing the files with Metallica song clips!
Karma: NaN
Hmm... this sounds like a great song! Diablo 2 disc 1.mp3 - size 198000000 megs.
Whats stopping people? Or does it HAVE to be an MP3 file? Im sure those l33t hackers could encode a normal MP3 header in a zip file...
They're trying to get more people involved by teaching us how to lay eggs. The thing is, if there are a bunch of us laying cuckoo eggs, all which look just like rotten little pirate eggs, you can never be sure that you're getting the egg you want. You'll only be able to take them from friends, and that cuts down on your sample size considerably.
--
If you read the web-site, you'll see this also happens to double as a promotional stunt for the guy's wife, Stephanie Fix.
This is a bait and switch tactic folks. Musicians shouldn't have to rename their music to look like popular artists' work to get it out there. It's just unethical.
A checksum could be applied to perhaps the first 10% of each data, not counting mp3 headers and such. Once you download that part, your program caculates the checksum and match it to a checksum from an online database.
Time does not wait.
The Cuckoo(tm) sound is copyrighted intellectual property of Cocoa Puffs and that bird thing. They also have a patent on the process of going "cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs".
The EULA of a box of the cereal contains a limited-terms license whereby the consumer has the right to go "cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs" as long as the box of cereal lasts. Once the last puff is consumed, all rights to the patent are revoked.
Doesn't this hurt you as well, I mean there using part of you bandwidth to download from. Even if you have dsl or a cable modem their still using bandwidth you paid good money for. Kinda seems like a waste of my time and money.
Systems like Napster rely on all files of the particular type wanted by the user, be it songs from the same band or files of type mp3 in general, having reliable descriptive content to search against. On gnutella the content is the filename, hence any file with a keyword is a legitimate hit. On Napster is the desciption embedded in the mp3 and the file attributes (size, name, etc). Faked files will become more and more of a problem on both systems (more quickly on gnutella I suspect) as people abuse the "open" search methods. Perhaps a finger print of sorts that is calculated before download time by the server and sent to client such that a "true" signature indicates a high probability that what the user is downloading is legit is needed. Unfortunately engineering one in such a way that it can't be spoofed won't be easy. Of RIAA could easily prosecute anyone who posts a song with a valid finger print. Damn. Maybe that's not a good answer.
Computer Science is all about trying to find the right wrench to bang in the right screw. -T.Cumbo?
It's certainly better, from a legality standpoint, then the previous idea being touted on the anti-Napster sites of taking the real song and inserting anti-pirating messages in the middle of it. It amused me that they didn't see anything wrong with freely distributing part of a copyrighted song, but were against the distribution of the full song [and they would be violating copyright except if they had direct permission from the appropriate artist].
However, since this method requires the originator to know the *exact* size of the commonly available song dump, doesn't that require them to have downloaded a copy of it, just to make sure it really is the song because they make the "cukoo" facsimilie - or are we to believe the authors of these files would legally have a copy of every song they're creating dummies of [so they can determine what size to make it].
Make a real file sharing network.
Seriously, napster is... of marginal usability? I'll be frank. Napster's protocol is total crap. Its based around single unconnected servers. Now, not only is this not totally decentralized (==bad) but since the napservers arent connected, you dont have access to every file (Yes, there are multiple napservers. (Choose your server with napigator)).
What we really need is a protocol that uses/abuses MD5 (RFC or a less technical overview), so you _know_ your getting the same file. Its not too much to ask to send a couple more bytes just once to know your getting the right song. Way more favorable option than having to backup your file before resuming a download, listening to make sure its the exact same file, et al. Way better
In terms of other options, I'd have to recommend a couple of different things: first off, check out Gnutella which is far superior to napster. Open protocol, truly distributed network. Everything. Second off, I'm gonna throw in a plug for Pie in the Sky, what I'm doing for BitWrench, the company I'm working for. Pie in the Sky (PitS) is the mother of all mp3 programs. When it does come out (end of summer time frame), it will support searching across napster, gnutella, freenet and scour. It will also boast possibly the most intelligent Gnutella router seen, extended protocols for enhanced communication with other PitS servnets and more. Check it.
Alright, enough ranting. Matt
Duh !! ?? !! Pleez.. Its probably the most ineffective and the most sux way to protest anything. Besides making a total fool of yourself, wasting your network time and wasting your own time ... the idea in itself is unimaginably stupid. If i were downloading a song, i'd probably first check if that songs alrite and if somebody was just tryina act smartass by doin somethin like that.. Oh well.. unless you had nothing better to do in life that just download songs and fill up your harddisks, you probably would be better off either tryina hack through the napster server and crash it... or just hold tight to your teddy bear.. Gosh.. is somebody tryina be smart ?
But if enough people did that, it would become too much of a hassle to find the files that actually were metallica songs, so most people wouldn't bother. Thus, this would have the effect of making people stop pirating metallica songs
I'm pretty sure that was the point.
Long signatures suck.
I am not encouraging privacy, but looking at their solution objectively:
The problem with the project is that it is trying to achieve a "virus"-like state. In other words, they only real way it could have an affect is if it spread from person A to person B, and then person C downloaded off person B, D off C etc. This is the affect the creator is ideally trying to achieve. The reason it would not succeed in this affect is that the users (lets say, B) will simply download and listen to the song off person A, and then delete it when it's not what is expected. Preventing the spread of the file to C, D and anybody else.
So there is only ever a very few points of spread, and this number never increases. Chances are, if you search for a song that has been "egged", about 1 in 3000 or even less will happen to find the site this person has set up, and will get the egged song. The rest will succeed in downloading what they were looking for.
2) Solution: create (plugin) a method by which part of the sender's file is read in (not nessesarily the beginning), say 3k, and compared to a trusted db. Of course this could then be used by the RIAA to argue Napster could block known copywritten songs, but...
.02
My
Quux26
My
Quux26
www.crashspace.net
This is avoided by making a plugin (in which case the user is the "editor", not Napster) that takes a part of a song, compares it to a known checksum, and ok's the file.
.02
My
Quux26
My
Quux26
www.crashspace.net
Let's say the first 30 seconds of audio are intact, and the rest of it is garbage. By previewing a random chunk of audio, you've got a better chance of locating the eggs.
Long signatures suck.
This guy is doing the same thing that the Tabloids are doing over at stopnapster.com. Nothing new or original about it. I'm not sure if this guy is in a band, or just a disgruntled musician trying to get a record deal by siding with the RIAA. I guess if you give people something cool, and free - the backlash is inevitable. Jeesh what's the problem? If you don't like free music - don't download it! Some people just aren't content unless they are screwing things up for everyone else. The old "if I can't have it .. noone can" mentality.
;)
It is only a matter of time before "MP3 clubs" start to spring up. Some sort of members-only club where all the people who are sharing are trusted members who have agreed not to 'spam' the MP3s with garbage or advertisements. Similar to the Usenet 'alt.binary' groups that have banned together to create the 'alt.binary.no-spam.groups' where the members actively enforce the rules and ban, or flame members who submit spam. (Not that I hang out there or anything!
No matter what happens, or what laws get passed, or what you put inside of an MP3.. trading WILL continue. And, it will most likely grow. I will continue to rip and trade my music with other people who are as passionate about this as me. Sure, there's always going to be the occasional idiot, or spammer but I don't think that they are going to be able to sabotage the whole MP3 trading Net with a few "bombs" or ads.
Ever try to download warez?
Since it's illegal, of course I never have... but hypothetically, if I had, I would have found that there are so many useless links and sites with infinite loops of pop-up porn ads, that the whole thing is pretty much a pointless waste of time. In fact, I wonder if it's designed that way? Some of the sites were so devoid of content, buried under endless popup windows, that I began to suspect conspiracy by the software industry.
Flooding Napster with static, or setting up sites that disconnect users halfway through any download, or doing anything else that substantially lowers the average quality of Napster would drive away a number of quality users and perpetuate the cycle.
In fact, I suspect that over a short time, this will happen naturally anyway!
- StaticLimit
So don't put an "annoying cukoo sound", but some White Zombie track named "Celine Dion - blah blah unplugged" or a Beethoven Symphony titled "Limp Bizkit - blah blah [rare track]". The choice of the sound you encode/the name you give it is very important, you know ;-P
But if enough people did that, it would become too much of a hassle to find the files that actually were metallica songs, so most people wouldn't bother. Thus, this would have the effect of making people stop pirating metallica songs, so even though they would "have a tough time making a case," this wouldn't be a problem because they wouldn't have a case anymore; they would have gotten what they wanted and you would have given it to them.
The bus came by and I got on
That's when it all began
There was cowboy Neal
At the wheel
Of a bus to never-ever land
I'd rather be lucky than good.
This kind of thing will never work. The problem is not piracy, its that people want to be able to obtain music for a low cost and they want high quality. Give me MP3 files that are encoded well, for a resonable price, and give it to me now, and I'll be the first to replace all the poor downloads I've received over napster with high quality encodings.
People may say that eMusic does this already? But they don't. They don't have the new songs on MP3, which is not viable to combat this problem.
Someone is going to do this right, and get rich. It won't be the RIAA.
and please, let SDMI die already. Its ironic that no one, even its creators know what it is.
mp3411.com.
cUkOo CuKoO cUkOo CuKoO cUkOo CuKoO cUkOo CuKoO cUkOo CuKoO cUkOo CuKoO
| Ceci n'est pas une pipe.
Next slashdot heading after the RIAA employs a few more people like this guy.
"RIAA flips napster the bird."
I understand what this person is attempting to do, but I always believed that simply refusing to take part in something (boycotting/passive resistance) was a better idea than actively interrupting a service. Where do we care to draw the line? If I don't like X's method in the bedroom, I am not about to stand in their bedroom and give them a prod with a sharp stick each time they do something I don't like. Besides the obvious legalities, it would be downright insane. The logical parallel? *g*
This sig is getting longer now. And now it's even longer. And now it's longer still.
> And BTW, yeah, our music IS great.
Well, that's an unfounded assertion, since you require people to pay you to find out now, isn't it?
Here's the rest of my recent correspondence with this person:
Begin forwarded message:
> From: "Tracy Robinson"
>
> John,
> Thank you for input -- we appreciate that you were not rude or abusive,
> which is why I'm taking the time to respond to you individually.
>
> I saw your post on slashdot so you can go there for a more complete reply.
> The basic gist is this: Except for the cassette issue, NONE of those
> examples you cite ever FORCED a musician to participate in the technology
> against his/her will AND musicians who did participate were paid for their
> effort.
No, you are mistaken. In the case of playing recordings on the radio in particular, the plaintiff claimed that the broadcaster was using his work without permission, and the court ruled that since the broadcaster had legally purchased the record, the broadcaster was entitled to play it on the air. It took new legislation to require broadcasters to pay royalties for airplay.
> Every new technology that's come along "recently" like cassettes and VHS
> (Betamax) has, in fact, increased piracy.
And also increased the exposure of the material in question, which has resulted in a net increase of sales. We went through the very same thing in my industry (software), and the long and short of it is, piracy is what made Microsoft what it is today: everybody pirated their BASIC interpreter, and when new computer manufacturers started up, they went to Microsoft for a BASIC that ran on their computers.
Another thing you should consider, is that copyright holders went ballistic when video-rental shops first appeared, the usual faulty reasoning being that if people could rent videos, then they'd never buy them. Experience has shown, however, that the rental shops are now the biggest purchasers of pre-recorded video tapes.
>There is no question about that.
> That is why there has been ongoing legislation (DCMA and NET, for example)
> and oversight to ensure that at least MASS piraters are prosecuted. The
> problem with Napster is that it has given a huge number of individuals the
> ability to become mass piraters AND allows them to hide behind aliases,
> nicknames, etc.
Napster is just the first iteration of music-sharing on the net. Get used to it, it's not going away. Gnutella works, and there's no way to clamp down on it. If you come up with a way to piss in the punchbowl (like with spam or mislabeled recordings, etc.) then people will adapt by trading music in a web-of-trust mode, with peer ratings, etc.
If you want to maximize your returns from your line of work, take a lesson from the Grateful Dead. For decades, they *encouraged* people to record their performances, and swap tapes, and the upshot is that for the last decade before Garcia died, they were consistently among the top-grossing rock and roll acts.
> Just because Napster doesn't pirate music directly, they ARE profiting
> vicariously and facilitating the transaction -- there are laws against that.
The devil is in the details: Your music never touches a Napster server, which means that Napster is only pointing out where it is. There's a constitutional amendment (the first) that says that they can do so.
> Did you know that a flea market owner can be held liable if someone in the
> flea market is pirating material and the owner knows about it? There's not
> much difference in this case between the flea market owner and Napster.
There's a great deal of difference. If someone is selling pirated CD's on the street in New York, he's liable. If I mention to someone that I know where there's someone who's giving away a copy of a CD, I'm *not* liable.
> In the case of radio -- you do know that radio stations do pay license fees
> in order to play the music, right?
They do now, sure. You should be taking a page from that experience and look for a blanket royalty system with allotment by statistical sampling, just like ASCAP does.
> If I were a radio station today, and
> Napster is allowed to go on without being forced to somehow pay royalties or
> license fees to artists, I would be outraged -- how is a radio station any
> different?
Radio stations make money on ad revenue. There's no direct payment from the consumer to the radio station. (What's the lesson here? ADAPT!)
> It is, of course, your choice not to listen to our music.
No, that was *your* decision, remember? I don't know you from Adam!
>After all, that's what we're advocating - CHOICE.
>However, I find it somewhat interesting
> that so many people now find the "moral" conviction to boycott our music
I'm not "boycotting" your music. I've NEVER HEARD OF YOU before this, and you've made it abundantly clear that you don't WANT me to hear what you do, unless it's by paying you up front. Sorry, I have more clueful bands to listen to.
> whereas if it is really true that the record industry has been ripping
> artists and consumers off for years, that these same people did not have the
> moral conviction to boycott these obviously evil empires before.
I never said that the RIAA has been ripping anyone off. Nobody has to buy the stuff they sell. My position, is that the RIAA, like its predecessors, is fighting against something that will ultimately benefit musicians and consumers both, just like they always have. What I say is that you and the RIAA are being stupid, not that you're robbing anyone.
>I didn't
> see people boycotting concerts or the advertisers on MTV or their local
> record stores. In fact, I never heard even an inkling that people were so
> indignant about the issue until it was CONVENIENT for them to use it as a
> justifcation for stealing. It just points out the inherent greediness of
> these people -- they want to have their cake and eat it too.
>
> As I said in my post, the Tabloids are not against the digital distribution
> of music. We were pioneers in using the Net to market our music and
> actually felt that it was going to save us from having to sell our souls to
> a record label in order to get heard. We think that the Napster technology
> is in fact, brilliant -- unfortunately, it also tramples on our rights as
> citizens and artists.
>
> Finally, you can think what you want to about the Tabloids, but at least we
> have the COURAGE of our convictions and put our opinion out in the open
> where EVERYONE could see it, knowing that literally millions of people would
> hate us on principle.
>But, at least we're not cowering before the
> techno-mob or hiding in our basements posting anonymous notes all over the
> 'Net or sending stupid flames to people with whom we disagree.
Neither am I. I haven't used an online pseudonym in the last ten years.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Dude man, that is just fuckin nasty! Don't ever do that again.
I'm gonna go puke now for a while.
Glen
Glen
Track your fuel economy
Essentially any discourse about improvements to Napster is doomed by the simple fact that Napster is not a viable business. Unless it can develop a way to make money off its 'directory service' it will go the way of the dodo. In fact, I would almost be willing to bet that the whole Napster thing would have slowly died if the RIAA didn't get its panties all twisted up and allowed Napster to play the martyred revolutionary which helped attract the attention of attention seeking lawyers. As with all technology improvements, I judge the effectiveness by asking myself if I could imagine my older brothers and sisters using it. With Napster I can't. Now these are the same people who have no problem taping movies off of pay per view and making copies for friends. There isn't a big ethical cloud and sanctimonious behavior about them. But they wouldn't use Napster because, essentially, it isn't convenient and easy. Sure, free music is great, but having to download it (over 56k mind you) is a pain when buying the cd at the mall isn't. For Napster to have been successful, it really needs to tap in that middle of the road crowd. As much as I like my MP3's, even I couldn't be persuaded to pay money to have the ability to use Napster. It is a poor business model (was there a model?) and natural selection would have kept it in the fringes.
This is not the way to build a lasting empire.
I'll assume that the cuckoo-guy is just doing this to copyrighted materials that shouldn't legally be available for free on Napster (it's tough to defend his actions otherwise).
That said... Your point is correct - sending out an endless stream of cuckoos rather than an expected Metallica song would be harmful to Napster's userbase. So, they could use their right-to-terminate clause to off this user.
However, by doing so, they implicitly are TAKING AN INTEREST in the content of what is being transmitted. That interest is certainly not clear-cut, but it does weigh in substantially on the overall scales of justice.
Their legal argument for avoiding trouble with the RIAA is that they are simply a conduit for information, with no interest or responsibility for what specifically is being exchanged. By invoking their right-to-terminate clause in this case, they would jeopardize that position.
Slashdot is entertaining like pro wrestling is entertaining
Not true... one of the original articles about our "project" was written by a guy who downloaded an egg file about a week after we had pulled it from our Napster machines. I still can search Napster and find eggs that we stopped using, so people ARE leaving the song files on their hard drives.
"We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers." Carl Sagan
Thats a good idea, but there is still the problem of actually 'Trusting the Users' not to spam people they dont like, for what ever reason. It would be quite a big project for the programers at napster to do, and then there is the problem of people not wanting to get the new software, so there perfectley valid files do not get used. There is always a lamer somewhere...(Like those idiots that write "1st Post" Whenever a new headline comes out on /. )
I just noticed this obvious statement.
They claim to be doing this because his wife is a musician and they're tired of people ripping musicians off? So the solution they're using is to label chunks of her music as the music of other extremely popular groups, instead of reaching out to her own audience via 'similar music'? Why? If they labeled it as similar artists to herself, then they would be sticking it to the people they claim to be most against -- those stealing her music! Duh!
So obviously, this isn't about making those bad Napster users learn a lesson -- it's about getting her sounds out under the guise of more popular music! Again, DUH!
---
seumas.com
So if someone downloads a song they have been looking for, and it turns out to be the wrong song or a low-quality encoding, they can leave negative feedback on the person who served the song. All Napster has to do is publish each person's rating next to the songs they provide
Handy for the record companies trying to figure out which Napster users to concentrate their attention on too.
People are looting. So the store owner puts out his rolex-lookalikes (that he manufactured) out in front, and switches the labels. Noone's sold anything, and the store owner can get the insurance back on the watches he didn't (and possibly couldn't) sell.
-Ben
Now what would be really cool is if someone wrote a napster fakeout client that would stream the first 10 seconds of the song for real, and then place a repeating wav sound of how bad it is to steal mp3 files for the rest of it. That way you wouldn't actually have to have a ton of bogus files on your drive, but could contribute to the piss-off-pirates campaign.
Here's my cut on it from a while back...
The RIAA Doesn't Really Want to Shut Down MP3 Trading OR Napster....
(Conspiracy Theory ON)
The RIAA Doesn't want to ban MP3s, or the distribution of MP3 files.
Really.
Yes, it sure looks like they do, but they really don't. In fact, it might even be in their best interests to have the widest possible distribution of MP3s possible. (Stay with me on this one.)
For the moment, let us assume the following facts:
So, where does this lead us? (Finally)
Argument) If the Recording industry REALLY wanted to stop MP3 distribution, or to stop people from using Napster, they could EASILY, and CHEAPLY flood the Napster/Gnutella distribution channels with BOGUS MP3s, and at a cost CHEAPER than what they are spending on lawyers. We have proven that it is VERY cheap to install Napster or Gnutella. How hard would it be for each recording company to make CDs with Butchered versions of popular songs that are the right length, bit rate, etc., but are in reality the first 15 seconds of a song, followed by a lecture on theft. (Or dead air, or a Billy Graham sermon, or....)
1000 New Gnutella/Napster sites with bogus MP3 files would VERY quickly discourage people from using either MP3 distribution channel, since who knows what you might wind up spending 5-30 minutes downloading (Especially if you only check the first 10-30 seconds of the MP3 file for legitimacy.)
SO: The RIAA Doesn't Really Want to Shut Down MP3 Trading OR Napster....
As to the questions of WHY they don't really want to shut it down, I leave as an exercise for the reader.
(Conspiracy theory OFF)
LongTail SSH Brute Force analysis tool is here!
Has anyone thought that perhaps Napster will kill Napster? The software is still version 2 beta 6, resumeing is impossible, modem users find the service horribly frustraiting, and although the search facilites are the best ever anywhere, usually if your ISP modem-kicks you after 2 hours and you reconnect there is no guarantee that those files will still be there. Yeah you can use napigator to remain on the same server but it is hardly the same thing. Little things like this will make disgruntled users seek other systems, inless they get sorted. And they hardly will. And anyway if Napster goes then maybe we could be left in peace. IRC is still there, @locator will always work, ppl will make their own file sharing systems. Maybe running Napster as a company was a awful mistake in the first place.
--AndroidFearSatan