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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!
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
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
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.
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).
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.
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Moderation has worked well for slashdot. I see a bright future for it in the Napster network.
Paul.
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"?
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
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!"
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?
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...
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
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.
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.
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seumas.com
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
"The Internet treats a cuckoo sound as damage and routes around it."
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 I'll name it after myself, whoo!!"
While this idea has merit logistically speaking, legally speaking copyright law is not an opt-in system. Copyrights should be enforced without the copyright holder being required to request it or do anything more than create their original art. That's why there is no copyright registration office, opt-in is not the point of copyright.
Copyrights are not like Trademarks where you must protect them or lose them, copyrights are *rights* inherent to any original work(s) as soon as they are created and are protected by law from that point forward.
In a perfect world, artists and distribution points would be working together and such a solution would be a "win-win" situation, but right now it's all about litigation and the law is on the side of the copyright holder so there is slim chance that they will agree to such an opt-in system where they must dedicate resources, time, and money to gathering MD5 signatures to give to Napster just to make sure their legal rights are protected.
In a perfect world, the kids who created Napster would have thought of this from the get-go and approached the RIAA before their first beta hit the net. But if you know the real roots of Napster and it's creators, you'll realize that being "legal" was never part of any long or short term plans.
"Wow, I'm having a hard time finding illegal MP3's these days, I should write a program that utilizes an IRC type network to share files, like those 'reet DCC-bots in #MP3
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.
... 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.
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Jon E. Erikson
Jon Erikson, IT guru
That may not work - there are dozens of slightly different yet still legit copies of the same song floating around on the napster network - no two mp3 encoders work alike, and other factors like ID3 tags render checksumming useless.
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
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