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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
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.
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
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