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Two-Faced Napster?
A number of folks have written in about the article on MSNBC regarding the two faces of Napster. On one hand, they espouse the virtues of "sharing," but seemingly, when it comes to their own material, they are very insular. Good discussion piece. [Updated by timothy, 26 July 2000 at 6:25GMT: Lee Gomes, the author of the piece referred to here, wrote to point out that though MSNBC carried this story, it's originally from the Wall Street Journal, and that it's available from this link, no registration required. Thanks for the note, Lee.
Napster is the software equivalent of Big Tobacco. Think about it.
Shine on, you crazy diamond.
> Overall, Mr. Barry says there is nothing
> hypocritical or contradictory in Napster's
> handling of these matters. "We respect
> copyrights, but differ with the music industry
> about their scope," he says. "And we will
> enforce our copyrights wherever we think we
> should. It's a perfectly consistent approach."
There's nothing consistent with usurping another's copyrights ("Oh, go ahead and trade that music against the artist's permission!") and then freaking when someone does the same to do.
Whatever the fate of copyright / copyleft / fair use, it won't be a double standard--be it software or music or Stephen King's new novel, any "copyrightable" material should be treated by the same law.
No, they legally could not have let it go. If they had, they would have lost legal control of their trademark. If you don't defend your trademarks, you lose them. This is one way in which trademark law differs from patent law.
The issue of those annoying twats who put everything in the Title field of the ID3 is another matter.That really annoys me.
Open Source. Closed Minds. We are Slashdot.
Tricky. But there will always be a market among the artists for publicity, of the sort that comes from tours and advertising; given the scope of the 'net and the pull model (many users often search for specific genres/artists/works rather than randomly wandering and sampling unknown artists; the hit-count distribution might even be Zipf)...
An underlying question is -- does it take the equivalent of a Stephen King or Limp Bizkit to get published online? Or will the RIAA morph to the degree where it still has its traditional promotional role, but embraces electronic distribution? And, given that (non-spam, *shudder*) promotional services most likely aren't free, will they be able to actually make money?
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
Ummm.. pardon my ignorance, but what the hell do people who buy lots of hamsters/gerbils do with them aside from feed them to their pets? That is, what is the seemingly obvious unethical usage of said animals that everyone is making innuendos to?
And did Office Depot actually check on their own whether you had permission or not? Or did they just take your word for it?
Never take moderation advice from sigs, including this one.
Ever heard of Medicare/Medicaid?
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Any pet store owner knows this. When I was a kid, I used to raise mice to sell to the pet store. They'd buy them from me for something like $.10 a peice. The only reason they were always willing to buy more is because they sell so many for snake food.
So it's a good point you're making, but a bad analogy. The pet store owner won't stop selling you mice, no matter how many you buy. Most pet stores even stock pre-killed (frozen) mice for snake food for snakes that don't like to eat live stuff.
Um, let's see. Napster position one - Other people create music, we profit from it.
Correct me if I am wrong here, but aren't they trying to make money off of the advertising income for the site and not the music files that are being traded? They don't really have control over what files will be uploaded and traded, so how can they, at this point, develop any sort of income model from it, especially when they give the damn thing away?
"The Force. It surrounds us; It enfolds us; It gets us dates."
"The Force. It surrounds us; It enfolds us; It gets us dates."
-- Obi Wan Kenobi, Jedi Knight and party animal.
This reminds me of how people were during my Apple ][ days. Piracy was rampant and you could copy and programs from someone as long as _they_ didn't buy it.
:-)
Once they spent their hard earned cash on a piece of software they took a protective stance.
ps. I made up for my years of sin during university buying a lot of unneeded games
When they see huge upside (i.e., a chance to sell out to a bigger company, a chance to get unique position in a huge market), they are willing to play long-shots like Napster.
Amazon.com is a good example. I would be willing to bet that the vast majority of their stock sales have been to high-stakes speculators who were hoping to score big, not careful investors who thought it was a solid bet.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
...and, somehow, stop the folks from obtaining another account.
That's the odd bit if you take this route. I know of spammers who've gone through multiple accounts at the *same* ISP and *same* web hoster within a month, and they'll probably still come back under different names. Given that Napster doesn't charge it's users, what can they come up with? A credit card check (which probably costs Napster) including billing address?
Or if they mailed a unique identifier to a non-PO box... hrm. Gut feeling is that the search engine is the important aspect to control here, since simply making it harder to search for contraband would cut down transfers drastically.
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
So I can start a warez server distributing Photoshop and CodeWarrior, and as long as I remove the copyrighted material if Adobe or Metrowerks asks me to, I'm legally in the clear?
Because it's not their responsibility to enforce other people's copyrights?
When you go into a Kinko's no one watches over you to make sure you're not copying anything you shouldn't be. If you look on the wall, you'll also see a notice about copying copyrighted materials, but that doesn't mean that Kinko's enforces it.
Never take moderation advice from sigs, including this one.
The comment at the top of the thread that said that "people don't seem to get this" is wrong, people get the fact that Napster isn't selling copyrighted stuff.
Napster is building a business model on the back of a service that would never have taken off if it were not used for the piracy of copyrighted material. In other words, deliberately or not, they are gathering economic benefits from the facilitation of criminal activities.
I don't care if they are telling their users to do this or not, the only thing that worries me about this case is where the line is drawn and whether or not this could spill over into linking to other websites, because in terms of the internet in general, a line has to be very carefully drawn to minimise litigation and to allow people to link to almost anything because that's what the internet is about.
This sounds contradictory, so let me recall the point at the top - Napster's entire business model would fall over if, for some reason, it was impossible to pirate copyrighted work over their network. Their entire strategy depends on the attraction of their content, and their content, be it hosted by them or merely facilitated by them, is to a huge extent illegal. They are unable to create or attract legal content of sufficient quality to get traffic - so they rely, whether they facilitate it deliberately or not, on the transfer of copyrighted work. Regardless of whether it hits their servers or not - their business model depends on it.
You want to see an honest business model, go look at Peoplesound.
Salocin.com
These are some important points. If someone else starts using my trademark, and uses it extensively, and I do nothing to protect my trademark, it is possible that they would ultimately be able to sue ME for my use of the trademark, claiming that my use infringes on their trademark.
On the other hand, if I have a copyrighted work, you could sell billions of unauthorized copies of my work over a period of decades without altering my fundamental right to control my work. you could build up a multi-billion dollar business based on selling my work for fifty years, and I could still sue you, take it all away, and have you thrown in jail forever.
So don't ever buy that corporate-lawyer line of kaka that says "Oh, we HAVE to sue copyright violators, or we could lose our rights!" If you ever hear lawyer-types saying this, they are either liars or morons (or both).
Oh, they're just knowingly pointing the way. Prithee tell, what IS the unambiguously legal use of allowing ANYBODY to download your .mp3 files, including copyrighted ones?
It's more like a chap on the street pointing you to the dealers who provide cocaine, which legally can NOT be sold in the US. They may not be providing the merchandise themselves, but they're very consciously an integral part of the transaction -- and even more necessary than in the example I provide.
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
Hey, how about the two faces of Slashdot, since this story seems to have been posted twice?
Windows is going the way of phlogiston...
Considering the article's source, I'm somewhat dubious about their definition of fact. Their research into the Offspring/trademark situation stopped at exactly the point at which the story would have detracted from the intended thrust of the article. They make the claim that napster is actively opposing independent clients and servers, but have provided no examples of napster's supposed hypocrisy in this matter.
This is a transparent attempt to smear napster, and a clumsy one at that. Remember, MSNBC is the same unbiased news corporation that once claimed that the 2.4 kernel was 15 months late, a date that, at the time, would have put the 2.4 release only two months after the 2.2 release!
On the odd chance anyone is still reading this, check out this Washington Post article on just how lousy a business Napster is:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A425 31-2000Jul25.html
How do you make a company without a business model? And how do you dupe investors into giving you venture capital? My favorite line being
"...Berry is awed by the sheer size of Napster's fan base and figures there has to be some way to reap money from the site"
Yeah, didn't M$FT try to develop a little fucked format that was unfucked within a week? They are proponents of SDMI and watermarked music.
Then again, I cannot see how napster is going to make money.. perhaps Banner ads?
buahahahahahhaha
*snort* sorry.. anyhoo, the whole offspring/Napster logo thing is a trademark, not a copyright, but that must've been obvious to everyone but the author.
Also, Napster will not connect a new user from anything but its own client. I had to DL Napster (2.some megs opposed to 150k for gnapster blech) and fill in some new Demographics fields. I wonder if this is how they make money: by selling your demographics? Perhaps that is the plan. Get demographics, and match them to song titles. Sell them to record companies.
If so, they are going to be surprised by the results, I'd wager, what with everyone grabbing remixes and parodies, that the numbers won't reflect EmptyVee.
good.
Lowmag.net
What I am about to say has been said again and again, in this discussion, in earlier discussions, on newsgroups and in chatrooms and in every real-world discussion between people who disagree about Napster, but apparently you didn't catch it any of those times, so I'll say it again.
first read this quote: Unauthorized copying, distribution, modification, public display, or public performance of copyrighted works is an infringement of the copyright holders' rights. You should be aware that some MP3 files may have been created or distributed without copyright owner authorization. As a condition to your account with Napster, you agree that you will not use the Napster service to infringe the intellectual property rights of others in any way. Napster will terminate the accounts of users who are repeat infringers of the copyrights, or other intellectual property rights, of others.
You know what that's from? the Napster Copyright Policy. You can read it here.
It is not up to Napster to make sure people don't rip off recording artists. Since the much-cited copy-shop metaphor (already used several times in this thread) doesn't appear to be working for you, here's a fresh one: Would you hold TDK responsible if one of the tapes they made and sold (and profitted from) was used to record a movie, say one on HBO, and therefore cut back on video sales?
If you would, well then, I don't know what to tell you.
But most people wouldn't, and I bet you wouldn't either. In fact, in almost any other situation, be it movies, books, tv, or even music taped from the radio, it seems ludicrous to attempt to hold the seller of the medium responsible. Yet for some reason, people like you want to hold Napster responsible for the uses of their product in copyright infringement.
And in response to the hypocrisy charge, Napster is not acting hypocritical by protecting its own copyrights and trademarks, because its lack of direct action against copyright-infringers is not meant to tell artists that they shouldn't try to protect their copyrights, but to tell artists that it is their job, not Napster's.
----------
"Rock over London... Rock on Chicago..." -Wesley Willis
The idea was good, it filled a niche, but is in no way technically advanced. It was *easy*.
/. opinion, but it's still opinion.
any modern business strategy course will teach you the now golden lesson of Microsoft: 1st to Market = High Barrier to Entry.
bugs? who cares. see the rule.
technologically advanced? who cares. see the rule.
now, sheep? that's simply some self-righteous label you'll use to make yourself feel better.
everyone is sheep, unless you live in some utopia where opinion doesn't matter.
my guess - you follow opinion same as everyone else. maybe just
i could be wrong. maybe you're Diogenes.
/* Half alive and half dead too, work is for suckers and the sucker is you. - "Half-life" by Local H*/
I don't think the point of calling Napster "two-faced" is the surprise that they're in it for the money. It's the fact that they're in the business of "sharing" pirated music, and seem to hold the belief that music copyrights aren't important and can be ignored, but their own copyrights (their software) are still protected. in the article, Mr. Barry basically said the same thing, which to me is an obvious hypocrisy.
Sharing files is not copyright abuse...
Before MP3s many music artists produced original works vea Amiga MOD file format and the format survives today on Linux, Windows, Dos and Mac.
There are also music artists who record music on a tape recorder and give it away to friends.
Public domain music is not unlike public domain software. The commertal counterparts would like to pretend they don't exist.
Napster seems designed for trading MP3s containning free works such as recordings made in the bathroom or produced and posted on the internet (Usenet, web, FTP, Napster, RealMedia etc).
If Napster is advocating copyright infrengment (as quite a few clame) they are in the wrong.
However over my lifespan I have seen far to much demonising of opponents to believe this outside of seeing/hearing it for myself. (Never say they didn't say it becouse they might have I just havn't seen it for myself).
Examples of demonising....
RMS: Often quoted as advocating piracy has never done so.
Free Software community: Often reguarded as communist in nature is more accurately "Altruist" thow quite frankly most free software people are harden capitalists with caveotemptor addatudes an in the truest capistalist style knows price != quality and free is good.
Microsoft: In it's own effort to educate the public about piracy has a tendency to say "Copying software is illegal". This is a matter of lazyness not of intent but it's easy how many people believe otherwise.
Anyone wealthy: There are those who have not gained wealth who tell themselfs the only path to wealth is by lying and cheating.
In this logic then everyone who is wealthy is a lyer and a cheater with wealth as the only proof.
Napster is about sharing not about theft.
In what I have seen from Napster they are pro-sharing but against piracy. However piracy is an issue of going after the pirates not trying to shutdown mediums that could be abused.
Napster is like a lockpick. A very basic tool that can be used for theft. To those who are it's victoms or jump to conclusion they could mistakenly believe the tools have one function.
To anyone who has been locked out of a car or a home and had to call a locksmith you know such tools are a lifesaver...
It was the music industry who premoted Napster as a tool of theft.
If Napster premotes piracy they are in the wrong. But I havn't seen that...
What I have seen was the music industry turnning Napster into a tool for piracy...
Why would they do that?
Simple... Sharing public domain music isn't illegal.............
I don't actually exist.
Ok, let's drop trademark laws, and copyright laws for a moment.
Napster is facilitating the exchange of material owned by others. They don't seem to have a problem with this.
But when someone starts facilitating the exchange of material owned by Napster, they get pissed off, and throw a fit.
In a sense, a trademark (read: logo) is simply copyrighted material that projects the recognizable image associated with a company. Now, the laws don't come out and say this, but what do you think would happen if AMD started an "AMD Inside" campaign?
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon? :P)
(If you can't figure out how to E-Mail me, Don't.
Yahoo started with no visable source of income.
They worked on some ideas and eventually went with banner ads.
This method of building a busness is a very BAD idea.
My guess is Napster wants to get into the busness of premoting music. Hence the no bots rule.
If you want your music hoasted on Napster for the long term where anyone can get to it.. PAY OUT!!!
Otherwise your music is only around while your on-line
I don't actually exist.
Actually, his uncle is right; 6% is a lot for the company founder to retain. More typical is 3-4%. Nesheim's "High Tech Startup" says this has been true for the last 20 years of startups. And after all, the people who put money into it are risking quite a bit; all of that money could be lost in the lawsuits; much will be used just to pay for the lawyers. So don't feel too sorry for Shawn; it's not like he could have done this on his own (well, maybe he could have with a lot more time, but he decided not too).
mahlen
We are born naked; all the rest is drag.
--Tede Mitchell
Though I'm a fan of peer-to-peer file distribution, I'm getting pretty fed up with Napster. I think the WSJ article is right on. They're acting like a bunch of corporate bastards. I think the best thing that can happen for the file sharing community is the downfall of Napster. Users that once used the Napster servers would just jump ship to OpenNap or Gnutella, where there wouldn't be any stupid restrictions placed on them (like only trading MP3 files). Napster is now the AOL of file sharing, with hordes of idiot users sitting there isolated on one of those servers. Napster will try hard to lead them around by the nose and control them. So, paradoxically, right now I think Napster is the worst thing for open file sharing. And since if you read this far down you're down on a Slashdot forum you're probably no AOLer, here is where you should go if you are now a Napster user:
http://www.mynapster.com/
http://www.beam.to/suxxx
Both websites have programs that (still!) search multiple sites simultaneously, both support resuming broken downloads (and it works, unlike Napster!), neither will ban you for downloading a no-no band, and they won't jerk you around.
I especially like MyNapster; if you need addresses for Napster servers, here they are:
208.184.216.177 to 208.184.216.220
At each address there are two servers; one on port 8888 and the other on port 7777.
The great thing about MyNapster is that you can be logged in on several servers simultaneously, and the users from all those servers can d/l from you (and you from them, of course). This might be a burden if you have a slow connection and a bunch of Brittney songs, but if you have cool rare shit that's hard to find, it gives you a warm fuzzy feeling when a bunch of people have access to it. Oh, and by the way, unlike the unenlightened Napster servers, OpenNap servers communicate with each other, so searching one means searching them all--so if you use MyNapster, only log yourself in on one OpenNap server. If you do more you might get errors, because the system will wonder why you're logged in twice.
How do they plan to enforce that ?
"A few atoms won't even light a match" - Dr Jones, 1933
Here is an idea for the napster folks...have all the major record labels send lists of there artists to napster as artists not to be on napster. Doing a search of all users trading those files and ban them...Lets see how well napsters business does then, as I think they would find that they have no users.
I understand that Napster claims to be providing a file sharing service, but lets be realistic here, there is music piracy going on, they know it, we know it, and they of course are scared shitless to do a damn thing about it. Why? They make money on it. Take away all of the artists on the major lables from Napster and you'll have what left?
Maybe a few thousand mp3s of unsigned artists or artists who allow their music to be traded in this fashion.
If more artists and record labels got a clue and realized that this didn't hurt sales, but help them. Then maybe this would work.
Here is a way to put the whole thing in perspective for the slashdot community.
Lets say you write some program that you spent weeks working on and you license it under the GPL. Would you really want MS taking your software, violating the GPL and shipping your code out with the latest version of Windows? I think not...
Xerox runs a business based almost entirely on the copying of copyrighted materials. Fortunately a lot of the copying is done by the copyright holders, or their agents. But this hasn't stopped other copyright holders from being pissed off about the whole thing.
Everything else strikes me as just details. Searching a database is not a copyright violation AFAIK. Isn't the database compiled by Napster? Is the database creative, and deserving of protection? Probably not. It's little more than a phone book when you get down to it.
So the database is a dead issue.
Napster's business model is also irrelevant, unless they're the ones actually doing the copying. But they're not. And using their database (sounds like a service at first glance) isn't a copyright infringement. If it were though, it would be infringing on Napster, not on the RIAA et al.
Even copying files isn't necessarily a copyright infringement, but it's got little to do with Napster. Files are copied straight from another user, and never touch Napster at all.
So while there is obviously a lot of copyright infringement going on, I still don't see how Napster can be singled out when our history indicates that all sorts of 'contributory infringers' aren't.
------
As for the four points:
1)Doesn't matter. It is not Napster's job to take positive action to ensure that no infringement is taking place, AFAIK. If they are made aware, then they do, yes. But there's no legal requirement that makes them check beforehand.
2 and 3) Doesn't matter if there's not a lot. Again, go after the people actually infringing. If you claim that Napster is infringing, show me the proof of that or shut up. The atmosphere they have created is equally conductive to legal and illegal distribution, which begins to raise common carrier issues to me. Maybe Napster can qualify as an ISP....
4) So if I sneak into a classroom with hundreds of legitimate students and swipe a copy of a handout, the prof. is responsible for not checking everyone's credentials? While there are other methods available, I doubt that fair users are legally mandated to use on service and not another. It's a legal use either way. If you misrepresent yourself, that's hardly the fault of the fair use distributor. They had no intent of giving it to you, had you not misled them.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
Napster could have just let it go.
No, they couldn't have. The way trademark law is written, it must be actively defended to be preserved.
With copyright the exact opposite is true, even if you never defend your copyright once, the copyright remains valid.
Napster is being hypocritical, but not because of their little encounter with Offspring (which was resolved cordially). They are hypocritical for the other reason you mention:
or open source programmers, tried to use anything Napster owned. Yet at the same time, Napster has no problem helping to distribute material that other people own.
They are hypocrits because they shout "share!" with one breath and then refuse to share technical info with those who wish to write compatible software (and even worse, do all they can to discourage independent efforts at supporting napster). This is counter to the "share and share alike" philosophy of information, be it software (free software/open source), news, or music.
It is OK not to buy into the "information wants to be free" paradigm if one doesn't want to. It is not OK to say "I believe in information being free, as long as it isn't mine!"
As I said in another post, do not count on a corporation to defend your freedom. Napster is as interested in making you captive as the RIAA is (they want to force you to use their product, and their product only). If you really want to insure your freedom, support the gnutella or freenet efforts instead, and trade your material there (and please respect copyrights when doing so).
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
If you can think of a better way they would have resolved that situation, please respond
Napster could have just let it go.
The point is that Napster threw a fit whenever anyone, be it the Offspring or open source programmers, tried to use anything Napster owned. Yet at the same time, Napster has no problem helping to distribute material that other people own.
You say Napster was just protecting what they owned, which is true, but is not Metallica, Dr. Dre, etc., just doing the exact same thing? Are not they protecting what they own? Why is it OK for Napster to hand out cease-and-desist orders but not OK for the artists to do that?
mr.nobody
--Don't you wanna go where nobody knows your name?
The author of the article sounds like a politcian running for office: he thumps his fist and makes impressive sounding attacks, but they fall apart when you look at the details.
Last month, when the punk-rock band the Offspring started selling T-shirts featuring the Napster logo, for example, Napster promptly sent the group a cease-and-desist order, backing off only after some Web sites commented on the apparent hypocrisy of the move.
As some one else pointed out, there is a big difference between trademark (Offspring using Napster logo) and copyright law (sharing music). If the offspring t-shirts were about general mp3 sharing with links to www.napster.com, www.cutemx.com etc, Napster the company would be thrilled, but by using a trademark logo Offspring left the company no choice but to issue a cease and desist.
More significantly, the company repeatedly has tried to stymie independent software developers working on Napster-compatible software and Web sites. While these programs could benefit the millions of music fans that Napster claims are its only constituency, they might also diminish the commercial potential of Napster itself.
First time I've heard about this....it was my understanding that the company was quietly supportive of the Linux console client and even had a link to a Mac client on its front page (still have the link on the downloads page).
The company has refused to share technical information about its software code
And its perfectly okay for them to do so. To hell with Stallman, nobody has a "right" to software code. You DO have every right to ask for open code, and the developer has every right to laugh in your face and tell you off. If you only want to use open source software, more power to you, but don't think its an affront to your personal liberty if some software you want to use is closed.
Besides, isn't this a non-issue since the protocol was reverse engeneered about a year go?
and has blocked computers from outside music sites from accessing Napster's database of hundreds of thousands of songs.
But there is one new Internet sharing technology that Mr. Barry didn't mention to the senators, and of which Napster will have no part. These are "bots," or "agents,"
Blocking the use of 3d party clients and restricting how their servers are used are two entierly seperate issues. Napster has every right to decide how people access their own servers; if search companies like AngryCoffe want to make indexes of mp3's, they can knock themselves out on gnutella.
And Napster blocks bots and Napigator so the servers aren't overloaded. Under their current load ballancing setup, users first connect to server.napster.com, which in turn connects them to a sub server which handles all the indexing and sharing, and isn't connected to any other sub servers. If everybody used Napigator, people would tend to connect to the most populated servers, overwhelming them while leaving others virtually empty.
Napster has said they are working on indexing all the servers, making Napigator only usefull for connecting to Opennap servers.
And as for all the frumping about Shawn Fanning having a "mere" six percent in the company, he's lucky to have that much, and its probably due to his uncle having the largest stake. If he was a well known programmer like Alan Cox or Larry Wall in a startup, I'm sure he could have gotten a MUCH larger stake in the company. But a typical no name college drop out would probably paid a few thousand dollars for his idea and be forgotten.
Someone should write an article about the two sides of MS-NBC...
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Assuming that the guy running the show is a smart guy, Napster won't be going on being a 'free music trading' service for much longer. What Napster is is a name, and Napster gained a hell of a lot of name brand recognition with all this legal trouble.. The kind of brand recognition that you can't buy. Napster is a household name, and they didn't have to pay a red cent in advertising to get that name. Napster very well could be shut down and re-started as a totally legitimate, corporate system for distributing music. Lame yes, but it could happen.
Remember ICQ. Those guys sold it for like 200 million dollars to aol. What were they selling? A name. That's all. Name recoginition right now is hardest and most sought after commodity on the interent. Get it and you have it made for life.
Thank you. :)
Is anyone really shocked by this? I mean, all they have is their technology and their brand, they aren't going to give either one of those away, or let someone steal, er, share them.
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
Gnutella / Freenet arose from the "ashes" of Napster, but they won't "win" because of some grand decentralization theme--if the RIAA / gov't wanted to, they could shut them down. (Imagine a special, temporary court, JUST to issue orders to stop Gnutella servers and hear appeals...)
Oooh.. -1, Clueless. Freenet especially cannot be shut down, not only because there are servers in many countries, but because in order to shut the thing down you have to prove that a law was broken. In the realm of copyright, that means proving that a person is using their computer to distribute copyrighted material. With Freenet that's not even possible - not only is it impossible to determine what you actually have stored in your Freenet cache, you can't even tell who's sendin it to you. So no, Freenet is not going down without either the will of the people running it or large-scale military deployment.
Gnutella has safety in numbers. Do you really think, what with a 5 month (or more) backlog and tremendous legal fees, they are going to haul ten thousand people into court just to shut down their computer. Nonsense. They can fire off all the cease-and-desists they want, but the simple fact is that they don't even have jurisdiction. Not every computer is located in America.
--
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
It's not a question of whether they like it or not--it's a question of whether it's up to them to enforce other people's copyrights or not.
Would you argue that just because a copy shop doesn't check to make sure you're not using their machines to copy someone else's copyrighted material without permission, that they therefore "don't have a problem" with those copies being made?
Never take moderation advice from sigs, including this one.
Frankly, they just didn't care. The "here, sign this" request was made with all the gusto and enthusiasm of a cashier in McDonald's who has just said "Would you like to super-size that?" for the 10,000th time today.
They didn't even keep a record of what it was that I copied, or even my name and address (I paid cash, of course). Office Depot was just doing a classic Cover Your Ass tactic.
For more information, click here.
(The one interesting point the article makes is about Napster's corporate structure and equity positions. I was unaware that the investors were able to pry over 90% of the company away from the founder. Fanning is an excellent developer, but he must be a *lousy* businessman.)
He's lucky the Vulture Capitalists let him keep that much. US Venture Capital is highly interventionist, at least compared to their UK equivalent (who generally swipe about 60 per cent) and generall make damned sure that if the company founder doesn't dance to their business tune they can have him tarred and feathered and ridden on a rail toute de suite.
What the hell does a VC do to warrant the amount of power they have over a company. They wrote a check. Big fucking deal. All they do is take over companies and throw the founders to the wolves. So really what's the incentive of founding a company then?
And how do VCs compare to "Angel Investors". Supposably Angels are supposed to be nicer, but why?
You've just made my case for me. You are an individual user. Your ISP is not responsible for things that you do without their knowledge.
If you serve up copyrighted material against the copyright holders wishes, you've broken the law. But it's not your ISP's obligation to check the contents of every computer which gets its internet access through their network.
The individual USERS of Napster have to worry about whether or nor their hosting legal files. Napster does not.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
ZDNet covereage is here
Being with you, it's just one epiphany after another
To reference the cliche'd phrase "actions speak louder than words", Napster is definitely allowing (music) copyrights to be ignored with their software. I understand the parallels to places like Kinko's that this draws, but Napster is on a different level. If Kinko's let you bring in your (copyrighted) books, had a machine that copied books and let you "share" the copies with anyone else who wandered by Kinko's, that would be much closer, and in my opinion, Kinko's should be liable (if not legally yet, at least morally and ethically) for the distribution of the material. I'll admit that the analogy is a tad flakey, in that it's much easier to copy electronic information, while books can't easily (in their tangible form) be served from users' computers.
I used the word "seem" in my previous post because I know I can't be sure exactly what Napster (or its employees) believe. But what they are doing, as well as saying, definitely allows, on a BROAD and blatantly obvious scale, the ignoring (ignorance?) of copyrights.
I feel this all is evident in the article in this section:
Mr. Barry says that while Napster and the music industry disagree about the rights music owners have to put digital music files on the Internet, the company respects copyright laws and wants to find a way to compensate artists for use of their work
If the company truly respected copyright laws AND wanted to find a way to compensate artists for use of their work, they'd be doing it by now (although, i admit, there's probably not a good way yet to do so). This is just a bleeding-heart statement meant to try to get respect for Napster, even though it's turning around and allowing what it says it wants to do NOT happen. Heck, for a start, they could have an option for users to voluntarily pay compensation (royalties) to the artists whose songs they download.
Just a thought...
Napster is following a very simple and thoroughly consistent behavior: Do whatever is in its own best interest.
Napster is a corp like any other. As soon as it becomes profitable to do so they will screw over their users just as fast as any other company.
Die Napster, die. Long live gnutella!
The enemies of Democracy are
They don't actively participate in the transfer of the materials now do they?
Someone could present a good argument that Napster participates actively enough to violate the law.
Using your bar analogy, if you ran a bar and a guy came up to you and said, "I really wish I could have sex with a tall redhead," and you proceeded to take him by the wrist, walk him up to a tall redheaded prostitute and say, "This is Tina, she'll take care of you," you would be arrested. You could get up in front of a judge and say, "I'm just trying to match up people, what they actually do is their business," and you would still go to jail.
At least pimps make money off of hooking people up. I don't see Napster ever making a dime.
-B
If you can think of a better way they would have resolved that situation, please respond
IANAL, but... Water-pipes / bongs, hampsters, and PCs are all products. Provided they have a legal purpose, the merchant shouldn't be liable for their use illegall. But Napster isn't a product, it's a service. They don't just ship software--they maintain a network, and act as a SERVICE. If I run a bar and promote prostitution, I'm liable. If I drive a car and offer to help criminals "getaway", I'm liable. The same principle can apply to Napster, but it seems like a fuzzy area... which is why RIAA vs Napster is one of those cases that SHOULD go to the courts.
The point here is not whether Napster is stealing, but their hypocracy. It would be like the owner of a head shop demanding that the police arrest the dealer who sold his daughter pot.
The cake is a pie
I was unaware that the investors were able to pry over 90% of the company away from the founder. Fanning is an excellent developer, but he must be a *lousy* businessman.
I'm not sure Fanning had all that much leverage (well, obviously, considering what he ended up with). But look at the Napster business model and the nature of its customer base: it's going to be hard enough making money off of it through ad revenue or product placement, and if they Napster bigwigs think anyone is going to pay for it they are sadly mistaken.
A team of very smart, experienced MBA's (oxymoronic as smart MBA might sound) will most likely not be able to lead this company to profitability or ultimate success. There's no reason to think that Fanning would have had any way to more effectively capitalize on his creation.
It boils down to, would you rather have 5% of a company worth $200 million, or 100% of a company worth $20?
yours,
john
[snip]...when someone takes the Napster trademark and makes it available when the person has not received permission to do so, Napster Inc. cries foul.
The law specifies a difference between copyright and trademark in that vast propagation of the former does not diminish its value to the creator while it *does* diminish the value of a trademark.
Napster freely distributes material...[snip]...Napster is essentially saying, "We can steal your stuff but you can't steal ours."
*BZZT* Wrong, thanks for playing. Napster ITSELF, the legal entity "Napster Inc." is not "stealing" or "sharing" anything -- they are enabling a more efficient way of sharing mp3 files among their users. If those users decide to make available copyrighted mp3s that are not freely distributable, then the *users* are the ones in trouble, not Napster. (Yes, the judge said no, but the higher courts will overturn this.) They have a legal obligation to protect their own trademarks and respect the copyrights of the record industry -- insofar as they are not responsible for their users' behavior. If Napster finds out that users are trading copyrighted mp3s without satisfactory evidence that the users are entitled to download said mp3s, *then* Napster must shut down the users immediately.
Sorry for the legalese, but that's the way this situation has to work.
"Honey, it's not working out; I think we should make our relationship open-source."
I think it's pretty obvious to everyone that something fishy is going on down at the Napster corporation: parasitising the work of musicians and artists for their own corporate gain, defended with a thinly-disguised cry of "information wants to be free," while they're extremely tight-fisted with their own property.
What's not obvious, though, is what might be the real reason behind this whole mess. Think carefully for a moment. What group was one of the biggest contributors to Bill Clinton's campaign and to the Democrats? Entertainment. (Especially Hollywood.) What group is this hurting most? Big entertainment corporations.
The current controversy surrounding DeCSS and the MPAA only serves to make things clearer. And whose suspicions wouldn't be raised by the sentence:
Mr. Amram also helped Napster raise money from the large pool of wealthy "angel" investors that resides in Silicon Valley, especially those with "dot-com" money
-- when Newt Gingrich is currently politically and financially active in Silicon Valley? (Check the July 24 issue of Newsweek.) This seems to me like a blatantly illegal attempt by the Republican party to punish the entertainment industry for financing Democratic campaigns.
Let's face it. The users of these services are breaking very clear copyright laws. I can't see any real defense for this, or any reason that the trial's not over already, unless somebody very powerful is defending these criminals behind the scenes. And I can't see any reason that the news media would have cause to defend (yes, defend. what else would you call the NYT linking to 2600?) this ragtag bunch of pirates unless they've got a very good reason to.
I'm not crying foul over this -- power politics is a rough game, and people are going to play it, and all I have to say to those who don't like it is, "deal with it." This just might be a good thing to keep in mind.
Clue police here...
The mp3's being swapped are not the issue. Napster is not going to make money letting me download Motley Crue tracks.
Napster is going to make money by selling/licensing the technology on which the clients, servers, and file transfers are based.
Karma only matters to me now and zen.
So to take the analogy it to the nth degree, if someone invented a file sharing program that distributed illegal napster merchandise (t-shirts w/ logos, coffee cups,etc etc) ....
Are you really suprised that napster defends its logo etc etc? Not every company is a greatful dead company. Although it might be cool to have a bunch of bootlegs and mp3's of a band, it is definitely a threat to a business to have somebody ripping of your ideas and brand. We supposedly have these laws so mr. mom and pop can get a great idea, plop down a shop, and use the cops to keep WalMart from cloning them out of business.
Companies work hard to establish a brand. The company I work for sends out regulations and guidelines for the exact color size shape you can print our logo in. The web pages must meet a certain criteria so our customers are confident it is us. Other companies can't start using our logo on a whim
Corporations should be allowed to defend thier logos/original ideas, and metallica should be allowed to defend thier music.
I need a TiVo for my car. Pause live traffic now.
Gnutella is not technically superior. Its protocol wastes ungodly amounts of bandwidth. Being decentralized doesn't mean you're technically superior.
Of course it uses more bandwidth than Napster, because it must pass search requests across multiple computers in the network, that relay them. You have to ensure the integrity of the data and you have no "trusted" server that is a middle man for all requests and subsequently have a lot of auto-SPAM. That being said, Gnutella could have been almost no-maintenance and could have been a significant cash-cow for AOL that would give them the dominance in file-transfers that they enjoy in IM. Instead, they chose to suppress it and force it underground so as not to upset Time-Warner before the merger.
$260,000/y in "prizes" would be very expensive.
In case you were not aware, Napster is currently spending $2mil. to promote the Limp Bizkit tour--it would take almost 8 years of prizes to equal this amount (I mentioned this in my original post).
Crippleware won't compete in the long term.
It is not "crippleware" since even the premium version is free (it just contains ads). Real was able to sell a large number of copies of its Plus player, without offering the additional functionality that Napster could. The addition of affiliate links and merchandise offers could be viewed as "convenience features" since many people will later purchase the same music that they are currently downloading.
Plus when Napster first existed, it had no means of providing a "buy this CD," financially.
This functionality is easy to add. Remember that you merely need to link to affiliate programs and not actually sell the CDs yourself. That way, you do not need to set up a distribution network and incur any additional overhead.
They would have just as much legal trouble, had they attempted to make Napster a peer-to-peer radio station.
This is probably true, because of the DMCA's prohibition against taking "requests" for music over the Internet. However, they would be receiving much better press and would not have to fend off suits from Metallica and Dr. Dre (who now believe that their music is commoditized).
ByteMyCode.com: A Web 2.0 code sharing community.
He didn't write Napster thinking "I'm going to write this program so that I can start a company, get rich, and be persecuted by the RIAA, dirty metalheads and "gangster" rappers throughout the US of A".
He wrote Napster thinking "Wow... these MP3s are pretty neat, I can listen to a lot of cool music I wouldn't have heard before, and give others the same opportunity, its a shame that it's so hard to find the things tho... mabye I can write a program to make it a little easier...".
So he wrote a program, thought it was pretty cool, and shared it with others. Everyone else thought it was pretty cool too, and some people suggested to him: "hey, this software is really cool, you might be able to make some money off of it, like those WinAmp guys did".
The rest, as they say, is history. The software wasn't written to fit a business plan. A business plan was written (supposedly) to fit the software AFTER THE FACT.
Kinda hard to do change everything without alienating your users (ask Apple about the complaints they're getting from the Aqua demos). And that's NOT something you want to do, especially considering that other projects like Gnutella are rapidly gaining on Napster in it's core competency: "making an MP3 search *EASY* to do".
john
Resistance is NOT futile!!!
Haiku:
I am not a drone.
Remove the collective if
Imagine all the people...
(Personally I think that the OpenNapster concept is one that should be promoted, rather like the thousands of DeCSS mirrors. But Hummer Winblad != 2600.)
sulli
sulli
RTFJ.
If you really want to insure your freedom, support the gnutella or freenet efforts instead, and trade your material there (and please respect copyrights when doing so).
This is probably a waste of breath... err.. typing. Copyright is losing a lot of respect. This seems right given that the value that it once held for the public has been missing for quite some time. The public sees no return for their granting of a monopoly on some creation or information. It seems to me that given that the original bargain between the public and the creators has been broken, multiple times, and retroactively, it's no wonder that people often simply ignore copyrights now. I think this is as it should be. Perhaps it will provide the incentive needed for a reevaluation and renegotiation of the terms to something that will once again benefit the public.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
yeah but what people are missing is that Napster corp. dosn't WANT products like gnapster and won't support them... rusty
That sounds a bit chancy... what, so Fanning and friends skim the VC in terms of salary/misc compensation, the company declares bankruptcy, and everybody walks away? Hrrmmmm. But why do the VCs join? They probably saw the risk of being sued, so they must have seen a profit possibility to compensate...
Perhaps they're hoping to reverse the latter half of your step 5: license the technology to the RIAA, so that the RIAA gets the new distribution media to use as they see fit, although they'd almost certainly want to change the software quite a bit. Hrmph. Wonder what the RIAA would do with such a thing. Or it could be sold to another company that's interested in searchable general-purpose file sharing...
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
I'm not sure I agree with you about for-profit corporations, though. Sure, there's some "good" corporations out there--I'm certainly not one of those who believes all corporations are evil--but I see it as a question of whether the corp. is concerned with profits in the long term or short term.
To rephrase my statement, all for-profit corporations are in it for the money, but some are interested in making money in the short term, while others have a long-term view.
The ones that are interested in being profitable in the long run tend to (note: not always) be the nice ones. They know if they screw their customers over today for a few dollars, they'll be hurting themselves in the long run. So they practice good customer relations, even if that means a short-term loss, because they know it will lead to a long-term gain.
I'm just saying that if you let yourself indulge in the fantasy of a for-profit corporation as a champion for your pet cause, you're bound to be disappointed eventually.
Never take moderation advice from sigs, including this one.
... unless they already sold you a snake, which requires a live hamster or gerbil per week to live. Then you're their favorite customer.
All hail RIAA, the Great Serpent! Capitalism is a particularly ecological system - moreso than socialism, with its social engineering. /. readers, being top-heavy in engineering, may despite themselves favor an engineered solution in which every cute gerbil - every innocent furry musician even - can be given a long and pampered life. But in the ecological view we should be content to feed the beasts - the serpentine corporations - which are the top predators in our planetary niche. If the bigger corporations can manage to constrict on or poison Napster, mp3.com, etc., and then choke them down, bon appetite!
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
I see a lot of posts about how Napster shouldn't have become capitalist, blah blah Gnutella blah. But there's something to consider: how would Napster be able to pay for their bandwith/computers to keep their centralized network going if they didn't become a company? I know they don't actually serve the files, but I'm sure that Napster has to have a ton of bandwith, otherwise the program wouldn't work and no one would use it. So don't go bashing them because Napster's a company. However, I'm not saying that they shouldn't help other people or not-just pointing out something no one else has mentioned.
Colin Winters
The concept of illegal plants and animals is obnoxious and ridiculous.
I'd rather be lucky than good.
I don't know about other states, but 100% of every recent increase in New Jersey cigarette taxes goes right to the healthcare system to pay for all the damage tobacco has done, and/or to anti-smoking advertising campaigns. Why would the government do the latter if the tax were for the sole purpose of making money? Why the heck would they use the tax revenue to try and reduce future tax revenue?
Those taxes aren't intended to make money - They're intended to discourage use of tobacco and to recoup the healthcare expenditures that the tobacco industry has forced the government to make.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
first off..you are 100% correct...people seem to be slow to understand the fact that the user is responsible. We don't sue gun manufacturers because murderers shoot people(wait, we pretty much did), we didn't sue makers of fertilizer for the OK bombing...etc, etc. Why? Because, the good uses outweigh the bad/illegal ones. We seem to forget that people should/are/hope to be innocent until proven guilty.
It makes me laugh to see these seemingly intelligent people try to pull arguements for napster out of their ass...when the most applicable one is also the easiest to understand.(Albeit the more difficult to use).
Napster is said to be extremely protective of it's programs internal workings, the protocols used, and it's MP3 databases.
Now, unless those can be grouped together with the "little devil" logo that Offspring has been peddling - you've got no argument.
As long as Napster claims IP-ownership rights over database content accessed by it's program and the protocols used to do so, they will be branded as hypocrites. Now, if there were to open-source their stuff, they might win the law-suit. But, things being as they are, only the government can give with one hand and take with the other.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
There are headers you can use (x-no-archive) IIRC which these archives are supposed to respect by NOT archiving your message for posterity...
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
He's lucky the Vulture Capitalists let him keep that much. US Venture Capital is highly interventionist, at least compared to their UK equivalent (who generally swipe about 60 per cent) and generall make damned sure that if the company founder doesn't dance to their business tune they can have him tarred and feathered and ridden on a rail toute de suite.
There's nothing in it that indicates Fanning was a lousy businessman: he was just getting the same smelly end of the drain-rod that capital hands anyone with something to contribute.
-- AndrewD
A Maze of Twisty Little Laws, All Different.
--
My point exactly--not unlike Napster saying, "Don't trade copyrighted music without permission," but not enforcing it.
Never take moderation advice from sigs, including this one.
Oh, man.. I'd have moderated this up, if I didn't want to post so badly in this thread...
Excellent comment.
-------- "All I want in life's a little bit of love to take the pain away" --Spiritualized
No, they couldn't have. The way trademark law is written, it must be actively defended to be preserved.
With copyright the exact opposite is true, even if you never defend your copyright once, the copyright remains valid.
I understand all that and I can see your point. The law says trademarks have to protected.
Looking at it from a broader perspective however, I see it as being very hypocritcal that Napster attempts to restrict the use of anything they own with one hand while helping to distribute material they don't own with the other. The fact that they are trying to protect a trademark to me is irrelevant. Why couldn't they let the Napster trademark out into the public domain? That seems to be exactly what they want to do with the music they help to distribute. To me that's a hypocritical position to take.
mr.nobody
--Don't you wanna go where nobody knows your name?
More significantly, the company repeatedly has tried to stymie independent developers working on Napster-compatible software and Web sites.
Is that true?
http://freshmeat.net/search.php3?que ry=napster
The only napster clone I've used is Gnapster, which (mmmmm.... Aqua GTK theme) works IMHO faster and more efficiently than the Windows client. I haven't heard anything about Napster trying to shut these people down. I'm sure they could easily tweak their protocol a la AOL to make it incompatible with the reverse-engineered stuff. I don't see what they've done that's selfish at all, except try to stop people from SELLING merchandise pertaining to them without permission.
grep -ri 'should work'
Hello?! Has anyone ever thought of that the public pibrary in essence does the same thing as Napster? You can go to your library, check out copyrighted books, music, and videos. The authors/musicians/actors get no compensation for this. Why aren't they shutting down the libraries for "sharing copyrighted material with the community".
Napster position one - Other people create music, we profit from it. Napster position two - We create a protocol, and we won't let other people communicate using it so they can make a profit. Or, to put it another way, Napster position one - we can make money off your work. Napster position two - you can't make money off our work.
Napster position one - we want to make as much money as possible. Napster position two -- we want to make as much money as possible.
I'm constantly amazed at the number of people who are surprised when a corporation tries to make money.
A lot of /.ers seem to think Napster's actions are hypocritical. I think this is because a lot of /.ers want to get rid of copyright entirely. They wanted to see a white knight in Napster who would slay the evil dragon copyright.
If this were Napster's goal, they would be right to call Napster hypocritical.
But that is not and never has been Napster's goal. Napster's goal is and always has been to make money. Some people are inexplicably confused, perhaps because their actions in allowing trading of music files serves both their true goal of making money, and the wished-for goal of bringing down copyright. Once you recognize that Napster's true goal is to make money, and not to destroy copyright, you quickly see that Napster's actions are both eminently consistent with this principle.
Napster position one - Other people create music, we profit from it.
Well, yes. In the same way Kinko's profits when someone uses their machines to make copies in violation of copyright laws.
Never take moderation advice from sigs, including this one.
Well, I believe we've seen Napster trying to defend it's trademark before. On The Offspring's site ( http://www.offspring.com ) they started to sell "unofficial" Napster merchandice because the band is publically pro-Napster and wanted to show thier support. Napster's response: sue the Offspring for trademark infringment.
The settlement involved Napster merchandice being Official in turn all profits from The Offspring's sale are being donated to a charity.
If you think education is expensive, you should try ignorance -- Derek Bok, president of Harvard
Sheep? Crap? Napster is the best mp3 search method, simply because of its ease of use and amazingly huge database. What else matters in such things? I would rather load up Napster, type in a song, and get dozens of results from different servers with different connections than attempt to find an album via ftp or mirc, with no real guarantee that I can get into the server or can be first in a stupid queue. Napster does its job, which is to offer a huge, updated, easily accessible database of music.
It's sad to see how Napster (the company) has corrupted this idea, and turned it into nothing more than a hypocritical attempt to steal profits from the recording industry.
What are you talking about? Napster has always been about stealing from the record industry. Given that Napster has never made a dime, there are no profits to move from the recording industry to Napster.
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
It's more like a chap on the street pointing you to the dealers who provide cocaine, which legally can NOT be sold in the US.
More like someone saying "Hey this bar three blocks south and one block east of here is great. You can ALWAYS meet women there." He could mean prostitutes, or he could mean sluts. Prostitution is illegal, being a slut is not.
When then do the telephone book publishers become accessories to the solicitation of prostitution? We all KNOW what "Massage Parlor" and "Escort Service" mean. Yet you'll find pages and pages of them in your local yellow pages.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
So...What is Napster trying to say about the Open Source Movement?? Hmmmm.....
admit defeat, live in decline, be the victim of our own design
This sort of hypocritical attitude is nothing new to the Open Source crowd. For years we have yelled and screamed about the evils of copyrights and intellectual property laws-- but DON'T TOUCH MY GPL! Yes, as someone earlier pointed out, there's a difference between trademark and copyrights. But we all can see that there's no fundamental difference between napster and microsoft... it's just a matter of where to draw the line. For the hardcore freedom seekers... it's time for a new poster child. Surely there's someone out there who really believes in this whole "information should be free" thing. But they're clearly not a corporation, and they clearly won't last long.
-- Is "Sig" copyrighted by www.sig.com?
Long time readers will know I'm pro-Metallica, but here goes...
It amazes me how people can selectively turn on the blinders sometimes. Your first two paragraphs are dead on the the money. You are quite correct. But...
I do not see the hypocrisy.
Open your fscking eyes! Um, let's see. Napster position one - Other people create music, we profit from it. Napster position two - We create a protocol, and we won't let other people communicate using it so they can make a profit.
Or, to put it another way, Napster position one - we can make money off your work. Napster position two - you can't make money off our work. Which part isn't clear?
--
then it comes to be that the soothing light at the end of your tunnel is just a freight train coming your way
then it comes to be that the soothing light at the end of your tunnel is just a freight train coming your way
A CD-ROM burner allows ANYBODY to copy music files onto a CD, including copyrighted ones that could be distributed.
You could even make the argument that the main draw of CD-R is copyright violation. It's not a particularilly good medium to replace tape backups (although CD-RW isn't quite as bad), and is much slower than a HD for file access. Obviously, the makers of CD-R hardware (and related software) would not get nearly as many sales were it not for people who want to copy music and games.
By your argument, makers of CD-R drives should be sued, and the devices should be outlawed.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Some copyright holders don't care if their material is shared. So it's not a matter of blocking ALL users who traffic in copyrighted material. That's why the burden falls to the copyright holder.
/. account.
For example, I hold the copyright to the entire contents of this message, but I don't mind if people make copies of it and share it for free. By your logic, if you reply to this message and quote any part of it you should lose your
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
A pet store's not going to stop you from buying a gerbil a week, because you can just say that you have a snake and need food for it... my and a few friends once bought a slew of cute little gerbils and told the sales clerk we were going to feed them to some boa's and video tape the ordeal and they just shrugged their shoulders and said "it's your money..."
However... Say you walk into an S&M shop and see a cage full of gerbils and books about shoving them up your ass (an urban legend, I'm hoping!), that store is not going to be selling them for long. If you look at their display and see that their obviously advocating one thing, even if they turn around and say "we can sell gerbils, it's our right, besides, we have no responsibility to what happens to those gerbils once they leave here" to avoid prosecution for animal cruelty, you're mistaken.
Same goes for Napster. They're BLATANTLY violating copyright laws... Sharing with your friends is one thing, sharing with the world is another. sharing for the sake of sharing is one thing, enabling sharing and hoping to squeeze a profit out of it is a whole other thing.
The only way Napster can and should hope to survive is to make their service an opt-in service rather than an opt-out one like it is right now... Let musicians CHOOSE whether or not they want to have their music distributed via their service... No matter how hard people here try to make it sound, it really would not be that much effort or expense to create a workable solution only allowed the transfer of files that the OWNERS (creators) wanted to have shared.
Monopoly?
Well, I guess this kind of activities would not work since they are using other people's properties to sell their logo, being what they called "corporation".
So, are they " ambivalent "?
ambivalent -- "adj. having both positive and negative feelings towards a subject"
BTW, want MP3 without installing a program, why don't try Giga Beat.
============
Mathematics will always come back to hunt you down, in so many ways
You are entirely right.
First of all, Napster is not even actually distributing anything, just facilitating it.
But about this article, it is indeed confusing the two different issues, copyrights and trademarks. Would it be the same if Napster was assuming the name Metallica in its various transactions? Of course not, it's a different issue completely. Maybe it should produce some crap music and distribute it under the name The Offspring. Sure that would fool some.
I have never visited their site and I am amazed that so much hoopla has been raised over these guys.
It seems though, that as artists "grow into" the internet age they will demand their stuff be out on the web. They simply will bypass all the big labels, realizing that they are, in effect, unnecessary. Digital bits are alot easier to distribute than CD's. Perhaps this is the beginning of that phase.
Just my opinion.
I'm still working on a clever footer.
Ok, let's drop trademark laws, and copyright laws for a moment.
This is stupid. You can't take the situation out of the context that the participants are acting in. You're trying to ignore the very thing that compelled them to send the cease and desist letter in the first place.
But when someone starts facilitating the exchange of material owned by Napster, they get pissed off, and throw a fit.
How do you know they were pissed off or that anyone threw a fit? Did you just make that up or what? Napster's attornies sent a cease and desist letter, which they are required to send in order to retain control of their trademark. As a corporation, they are obligated to take such measures to protect their shareholders' investments. Judging from the outcome, in which Napster agreed to license their logo to the Offspring for use on tshirts and other merchandise, with the earnings donated to charity, they weren't pissed off at all. They just had to take the measures they did because they were obligated to by law.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
Re: the Kinko's analogy. I'd say Kinko's does have an obligation to make some effort to prevent copyright violation. And I believe they do. My experience is that copy stores, first, have the posted notices on/near copiers about what "fair use" is. I also believe that photo-developing shops will not make (unauthorized) duplicates of photos from professional photographers (since the photogs own the pictures, legally). That is to say, you can't go to Kmart and get prints made of your wedding photos.
I'd suggest that if a company is in a business where a clear and obvious use of their services/products is to violate laws (copyright, or e.g. buying a gun to shoot someone), they have an obligation to make a reasonable attempt to prevent such things.
This does not seem like such a stretch. There are obviously laws requiring businesses to "play fair" in the marketplace. This seems to be just another "play fair" type issue.
ShoutingMan.com
Difference between Xerox machines: Xerox machines don't distribute by themselves. And Xerox isn't trying to run a business based on searching Xeroxed materials. Napster's software and service is free. Given that the software can be distributed easily, their only hope of being a business is that search engine. The search engine is only going to be useful if people actually provide what gets searched for frequently...
If everybody just exported free-as-in-speech music, then Napster wouldn't have a nearly as significant a customer base, and they know it. They NEED that large segment of people who really don't care about finding music from bands that haven't reached popularity and large-scale recognition yet, but simply want the latest music from the TopNN bands/albums.
As per these uses:
Napster will have a hard time checking the first one unless they've strong forms of identity checking, and it's rather implausible in certain cases (e.g. Metallica is known to NOT be a fan of Napster. So their songs being shared on the service are with extremely high probability NOT coming from Lars and friends).
The middle two also don't apply to a great deal of the music traffic there, as well; and in particular, a number of bands and other copyright holders are on record as opposing the use of Napster to distribute their recordings. Yet, Napster apparently still allows people to blatantly search for and export them. And, if all they do is boot the account... there are reports of people simply signing up again.
The last one does not even come close to applying. There are methods for distributing to a class that do NOT make the material searchable to the entire world, like setting up a class FTP site or web page with authentication, or AFS and/or SMB where available. These actually allow for limiting access...
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
Bravo, then. I totally admire the sentiment. The time has come for the middlemen to go away. But that doesn't mean copyright is gone -- it is there to protect the artist. Should you be able to download the king story, then resell it for $.50? (Of course, no need in this case, since people can steal it directly from him) Of course not. It's his, he has the right to be paid. As far as the record companies and book publishers go, shoo. Of course, I personally like paper books. Sorry trees, sorry internet, but I like to lay down and turn pages. When you think of book publishers, there probably ARE a lot of writers who like them. Let's say you're John Grisham. Do you NEED a publisher? Of course not. You can take your book, have a book produced print up a couple hundred thousand copies, and get a 3rd party to sell lots to book stores. Will people buy an independantly published Grisham novel? Of course.
I'm sure that's not true for everyone, though.
Actually, my experiences with Kinko's (now about two years stale) lead me to believe that they have an "important warning" type sticker about copyright on every machine. And certainly if you ask them to copy something for you, they will make you go through serious hoops if it even appears to be someone else's copyrighted work. Additionally, I seem to recall many lawsuits a bunch of years ago about this precise issue at Kinko's, where they would prepare student packets filled with "pirated" texts that exceeded any rational definition of fair use. So far as I can tell, this is either a bad analogy or a very incorrect conclusion based on the analogy.
And yes, I realize that Kinko's is not likely to throw you out of the store if they see you copying a book, but who in their right mind would do that at 8 cents a page? If there were a per-song copy fee on Napster, then this analogy would be stronger. And in fact, I'm surprised that Napster isn't more willing to look at a per song transfer fee which is then used to pay a royalty to the copyright owner, such as what happens when songs are broadcast over the radio. Of course, that would hamper their ability to attract hordes of new lusers (and hence insane venture capital investments) because a lot of people would balk at even a nominal fee.
I do not have a signature
Napster as a business is absurd. It will never make any money, only lose money. It will be litigated out of existence. The only enduring legacy of Napster is that it pushed the envelope on the P2P concept. VCs will lose money. That's why two Napster principals broke off, trying to create a business scheme that will make money.
I think P2P is inherently anti-business: it's about people sharing files without middlemen, without central servers. Dot-com business people, in general, are losing money on business ventures. I believe this is a good thing. Maybe scads of them will abandon the Internet. Not likely, but maybe.
Gnutella is the exception - created by developers, it has no pretension toward business and untold riches: it is software for people who want to share things, be those things copyrighted or not. Thankfully, business can't get a handle on this. Nor can the RIAA.
Good.
This is probably a waste of breath... err.. typing. Copyright is losing a lot of respect. This seems right given that the value that it once held for the public has been missing for quite some time.
You are not wasting your breath.
I happen to agree with you. I am trying to come up with a GPL-style approach to media copyrights, and am releasing some of my own work under a GPL-like Free Media License.
I agree that a more fundamental review (and perhaps repeal) of the proveleged copy restrictions we call copyright is long overdue.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
To copy a cd you first need the original. With napster its a few clicks and you have the entire contents of the cd just like that. All it takes is one person to buy a cd, and then 100,000 people can all download its contents. See a problem?
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
No, Napster only claims that they are defending the right and freedom to use Napster to share music which is put on Napster with the permission of the copyright owner. Napster has never claimed to defend the "right and freedom" to use Napster to share copyrighted materials without the permission of the copyright owner.
A lot of posters seem to be seeing Napster as hypocritical apparently because they believed (wanted to believe?) that Napster had a higher purpose than just making money. How incredibly naive. And now that their naivete is exposed, they try to cover themselves by claiming that Napster once had such a higher purpose. It never did.
In short, never send a capatalist to do an activist's job. The results will disappoint you every time.
That is exactly right. What mystifies me is how many people confused Napster with an activist, when it has been a capitalist all along.
Never take moderation advice from sigs, including this one.
Sure, Napster can be used for legal purposes. But I challenge you to fire up Napster and find non-copyrighted files for download. Yes, Napster Inc. will terminate the accounts of those found to be trafficing in copyrighted materials, but only after those accounts are specifically reported to Napster. Napster Inc. has not shown due diligence in weeding accounts themselves. It's a rather trivial matter... pick any account. Delete it if it's sharing copyrighted materials. Rinse. Repeat.
--- What parts of "shall make no law", "shall not be infringed", and "shall not be violated" don't you understand?
Oh, I'm fat. I think I'll sue McDonalds and Taco Bell because it's their burgers and tacos that made me fat!
Oh, somebody drove a Cadillac through a schoolyard full of disabled children. That Cadillac should have known that it wasn't supposed to smear little Cindy across the asphalt. Let's sue GM!
Bad things happen, and people need a scapegoat, a company to blame, and to get billions of dollars from. There is no such thing as personnel responsibility anymore. We have been trained to let others think for us for decades. Now that we can't think for ourselves, others are obviously to blame. So, let's sue them!
If you want to sue an organization that profits the most from the evils of society, SUE THE GOVERNMENT! Over half of the cost of cigarettes is local, state, and federal taxes. The US Government makes more money off of a pack of cigarettes than the cigarette company does. Without any more effort than passing a law. And then the government has the absolute gaul to sue the companies for even more money!
All the things that are going to hell in this country and we are worrying about whether Lars Ulrich is getting his two bits for the crap albums he's been turning out the past few years! (let's face it, everything since Master has blown chunks!) The Chinese own the president and our nukes, the UN is trying to create a world court that will overrule all of our constitutional rights, and we're pissed about this crap??
Phillip Morris didn't kill your mom, your mom killed herself! Colt and Ruger didn't shoot up your neighborhood, some punks that have been raised with no sense of responsibility killed your kids! Napster isn't ripping off "starving" musicians, it's the users that choose to download those files!
Stop trying to blame big "sue-able cause they've got money" companies, and start looking at the real causes. This country is really starting to piss me off!
Now, don't start with the "well, why don't you just move, you commie!". I love America! This is still the greatest country on Earth. But we can be so much better! What we have now is now what the founding fathers envisioned!
I'll get off my soapbox now.
No boom today. Boom tomorrow. There's always a boom tomorrow. - Cmdr. Susan Ivanova
The more I read about their legal strategy and corporate practices, the more I grow convinced that Napster is doomed.
/. many a time: you can't put the genie back in the bottle. Have fun, RIAA, because even if Napster loses, you're not in for a fun time.
"Sharing" is breaking the law. I saw today on CNBC that Napster intended to argue that sharing music via Napster was like "loaning a friend a tape". Baloney. Sending a copy of a song to a thousand people a day in perfect digital form is hardly the same.
Napster should be standing or falling (and it SHOULD stand) on the idea that it has legitimate purposes (sharing free/uncopyrighted/etc music). The fact that people pirate the hell out of it means nothing. When people put up web pages with songs to download, they don't go demanding that ISPs stop providing a web page service.
But if Napster has painted themselves into a terrible legal corner -- defending true piracy -- they will lose, and IMHO, rightly so. People DO have the right to their work. I think its great if people don't need or want big record companies (and I'm hoping the RIAA is doomed), but artists should have the right to choose.
That said, "so what if Napster loses"? There will be another. Do these people REALLY think its that hard to write a directory service and a client? Please. I'm surprised some open source software hasn't already pre-empted Napster entirely. But something will be right along.
As has been said on
are you an idiot? Last time I checked, MP3's are not illegal. Nor are mp3 encoded copyrighted material. Oh wait, unless you can show me the courtcase that established that? Oh, you can't. Didn't think so.
And by the way Mr. Big Brains, cocaine can legally be sold in the US. It's called a pharmaceutical(sp) company. Cocaine is used in surgeries, although not as much as it used to. It's a CONTROLLED substance.
Get your goddamn analogies right people.
Where is it? I need SLUTS!
Napster came up with a great innovation--and put it to a less-than-squeaky-clean use. Their serviced ticked off artists, the artists got their corporation in on the fight, and Napster's off to court.
Gnutella / Freenet arose from the "ashes" of Napster, but they won't "win" because of some grand decentralization theme--if the RIAA / gov't wanted to, they could shut them down. (Imagine a special, temporary court, JUST to issue orders to stop Gnutella servers and hear appeals...)
The reason Gnutella and Freenet won't go down isn't some lack of centralization, but rather that they'll wise up and focus on the legitimate uses of the software. The copyright owners will stay hard on servers that steal their cash cows, and eventually a happy medium will be reached.
REMEMBER: Metallica bootlegs were, are, and always will be fair game to distribute--as long as they're not right-from-the album, the band encourages copying.
They're owned by a lawyer..
At work, I occasionally play "OSS zealot" to a friend's "MS zealot". Both of us really just prefer using the technology that best suits whatever we're out to do, but it gives rise to pokes and jabs about the others "position". If I had to pick a site I sent more "haha, look at this" articles to him from, it would be MSNBC. They're surprisingly thorough, early, and knowledgeable, imo, regarding many issues which other news sources ignore. And if there's any testament, its that I get so many "triumph of OSS" articles of them.
Given who owns MSNBC, they're a pretty good organization.
Further supported by this metaphor is the idea that not everything on Napster is illegal. If I owned every single Rush album at home, but while I'm at work I'd prefer to have ALL their mp3s into one playlist and play them at random (simulating a 20+ CD changer with random mode) I'm very well within my legal rights to do so. And if you own all these albums, and you wanted to do the same, then come on over, I'll share the work that I've put in.
So whether Napster is stealing or not isn't the real issue. Its whether they can be considered "an accessory" to the crime, considering they make it so available to many people, knowingly. In a slightly off comparison, it could be likened to saying that you keep giving dogs to people, even if you KNEW that some of these dogs were being beaten and killed. The trick where Napster can get away is by saying that they have no ability to know WHO, and they won't get involved in such.
Getting to the crux of the article, however, is a big disagreement between the artists who copyright their work and the software copyrights that are in place. Getting back to your analogy, this is likened to me referring someone to you automaticially because you know where women are. You're not objecting to me doing this because you don't like me, or that you don't have enough time to handle all the users, but only because you want to be the only person who can introduce people to women, and you want to have facilitated the entire process. Not only that, but you won't tell anyone anything about the women you know, unless you're going to be the one introducing them, because you make money doing it.
Here the hypocracy is exposed, because musicians feel very much the same way (substitute women for music, naturally) and they want to be the ones providing you with the music so they can make the money, not somebody else. So if we are going to chastize musicians for protecting their music for the sake of making money, we must chastize Napster for doing the same with its databases and protocols.
"I got better things to do than drive around a crotchedy old file sharing system like you. From now on, my name is gnutella. And when the revolution comes, you will not be spared."
Cash Rules Everything Around Me
Napter, no matter how much of a white knight they want to be, no matter how noble their cause may seem to be, is a company that is in business to do one thing: MAKE MONEY.
The original napster software, though interesting, was *CRAP*. The idea was good, it filled a niche, but is in no way technically advanced. It was *easy*. The world already has much better software; napster was just dumbed down enough for the sheep to use. And once you get the sheep involved, the network effect takes over, and it becomes a force in it's own right.
But the software is still crap; no new technology is coming about; napster tries to fight the good fight, but isn't at all interested in the technological advancements. They are interested in money.
Napster does not deserve the support it gets.
Unfortunately, the article ignores the distinction between copyright law and trademark law. Napster is advocating the sharing of copyrighted works, citing fair-use as justification for its position. Even if what couls be considered copyright infringement does occur, it does not diminish the copyright in the same way that unlicensed use of a trademark diminishes a trademark.
A trademark holder is required to actively protect its trademark in order to keep it out of the public domain--no such provision exists for copyrights. Therefore Napster is *legally obligated* to prevent unlicensed use of the Napster trademark in shirts/hats/etc. in order to ensure that 100,000 new distributed file-sharing projects do not have the ability to call themselves "Napster."
Trademarks are never "shared" over Napster, only copyrighted works are. Consequently, I do not see the hypocrisy.
(The one interesting point the article makes is about Napster's corporate structure and equity positions. I was unaware that the investors were able to pry over 90% of the company away from the founder. Fanning is an excellent developer, but he must be a *lousy* businessman.)
ByteMyCode.com: A Web 2.0 code sharing community.
There's still time... :)
Wow - you agree with me - I expected to be burnt alive by the Slashdot community...
Salocin.com
It's been said before, but it bears repeating. What if Microsoft were doing this instead of Napster? Would the "internet community" be so eager to back Microsoft? Napster is a corporation, like any other, beholded to it's stockholders. It's not about freedom, or sharing, or ideals. It's about money, and what they can get away with.
It seems to me that a better response to all this would have been for Napster to just start offering liscensing deals for whatever distribution mechanism someone wants to offer their stuff through. Yet another way to show up the RIAA -- instead of just suing left and right, they take advantage of any new developments.
---
They also claim to be doing this for the free distribution of music, but the Mac client still lags far behind the win9x/nt client, and there's nothing at all on their website about a linux version even being in the works! You'd figure that a company who wants everyone to be able to share would make the 3 top OS's able to do so. =P
Don't get me wrong, I love using napster when I don't want to rip my own MP3's or sample a cd I've been thinking about buying, but now I want to get napigator and use other people's servers. :P
No ads embeded into client.
No ads on napster.com
Free software.
No source of income that I can see.
Not everyone deserves a 320i
It's only hypocrisy (note spelling) if you persist in your delusion that Napster is a brave knight out to slay the evil dragon Intellectual Property. It is not. It is a corporation, and its goal is to make money. Allowing people to trade music files (with or without permission of the copyright owner) is consistent with that goal. Protecting their own Intellectual Property to the fullest extent of the law is also consistent with that goal.
Never take moderation advice from sigs, including this one.
Why would he try to get himself arrested? Oh, you mean somebody *else* who sold his daughter pot! Yeah, I guess I'd be pretty pissed to, but I'd be more insulted that my own daughter didn't want my ganja.
--
Does narcissism count as a hobby? --Shawn Latimer
Nope. Not unless, say, there are so many blithely renamed songs that people searching for "Metallica" or "U2" or whoever the heck is popular these days gets non-copyrighted foo.
This is not the case.
People are querying for copyrighted material. People are serving these songs to everybody, without license to do so. Napster is very deliberately making this possible, when in fact it could actually make an effort to block many searches entirely. For instance, if the system were designed so that people who served MP3s had to supply artist and title and required exact matches in both, they could have implemented blacklists...
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
1. Raise a ton of VC money.
2. Provide a service to help script kiddies violate Metallica's copyrights.
3. Get sued for providing the service.
4. Raise a bunch more VC money.
5. Settle out of court with the record companies for a gajillion dollars, most of which you borrow or agree to pay over a few years. Include, as part of the settlement, and agreement by which you pay a fee to be a licensed distributer of MP3 files related to the big record companies.
6. Become the biggest player in the world in on-line music distribution.
7. Cash out your options before the business collapses under its own weight, retire and live like fat cats.
So far, Napster has completed step 4, and are surely working on step 5. I'm no Nostrodamous, but I got a feeling I'm on to something here.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
This is exactly the problem. The issue is not about what Napster does or doesn't do, it's about what people do with the Napster software. But, regardless of Napster's ambitions or claims of "It's not me, I'm just being used", an argument exists for making the use of this software illegal, exactly in the same way as an argument exists for making guns illegal (it's not me, it's the guy I sold it to).
I'm not saying which side of the argument I'm on, but that is the argument - does the tool add more than it takes away? Is the protection / added value worth the cost? And this is something that has to be dealt with.
So now we have two options :
(1) Make it illegal, screw the rights of the people using it.
(2) Protect it, screw the rights of the artists whose work is being stolen.
This situation is obviously begging for a third option, but people are too busy defending (1) or (2) to give a damn about other alternatives, and the judges will end up having to decide between the two. If the law hobbles them, then I wouldn't put it past the relevant authorities in various countries to change the laws underpinning the courts decisions (unless, of course, we come back to the sacred US constitution).
Unless someone finds another option or a way of creating a greyscale between the two we have, the courts will be forced to decide between a greater and a lesser evil, and I for one don't think that their decision is at all predictable.
Salocin.com
luckman
luckman
I don't involve myself with flames, much less know how to bait one.
No matter how much we preach about freespeech and "down with the copyright laws" You can tell just by hearing the Napster guys talk that all they are interested in is making money and pirating mp3's. Freedom and justice are just a byproduct of their scheme that makes it look legit. Support Gnutella
Actually, hamsters and gerbils are perfectly good snake food. They'd probably assume that's what you were using them for.
Mice and Rats are cheaper. They'd know why you're buying them.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Fanning's mistake was to try and corporatize Napster. He wasn't satisfied with releasing an easy-to-use tool, he had to try and turn it into a successful business and make some money off it. Now he's got to balance Napster's sort of rebel reputation with the need to fit into corporate America, which isn't an easy thing to accomplish.
Damned if you do, damned if you dont:
If they pursue litigation with the Offspring, then their mostly teenage/young adult fanbase will see them as "selling out" and not only messing with a cool band but totally reversing their opinions on copyrighted material. If they leave the Offspring alone, then they're losing a possibly lucrative revenue stream in merchandising (they could make their own "official" gear, but c'mon, they'd sell it for more and it's cool to have the unofficial stuff as well :-)
I for one hope Napster pulls through - I think it's a great piece of technology and that the RIAA should work with them, not against them, to ensure the future of digital music. But I still think Napster should have been left as a Gnutella-style freebie tool with no intention of profitability underlying the coolness of swapping MP3s online.
As it is right now, they are cultivating an elitist image reminiscent of how many people view Microsoft - anticompetetive and unwilling to cooperate with others to further the technology empowering its very product. I certainly hope things turn around.
-ryry
-ryry
There are several. And they are totally unambiguous.
If I hold the copyright to a particular piece of music, I can transfer copies of that music however I want. Even via Napster. If the RIAA et al try to argue that this isn't so, they're exposing themselves for a nice anti-trust suit.
If I hold a license that permits me to distribute someone else's copyrighted music via Napster (doesn't mean that you can also copy it, but I could)
If there is no copyright (e.g. public domain music)
If the transfer is fair use (e.g. a music professor at a college wants his class to download music for an assignment)
Contributory copyright infringement is a terribly bogus charge. IMHO if there's a significant legal use for the service/product in question (and there are four I just pointed out for Napster off the top of my head) then it's legal, though it's still possible for suits to be brought against people who use it illegally. Otherwise wouldn't xerox machines, which have NO other purpose but to copy what's on the platen, be illegal?
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
There never was any cease and desist order, period. Ask Shawn, ask Dexter. Get'em both on a conference call; they get along great, guys. This article is an unresearched, totally biased hatchet job by somebody representing a media conglomerate with an ax to grind.
Tastes Like Chicken
Backup actually isn't that bad of a use for CD-RWs (incremental backups, anyway) for systems that don't have a lot of rw data. CD-RW discs themselves can last quite some time, compared to relatively fragile tapes and tape drives (tape drives I've seen usually can become misaligned and useless after even a minor bump from a vacuum cleaner. I've lost more tape drives than fixed disks (1, a WDC dead due to mechanical failure) and CD/DVD drives (0) combined.). It's also less effective for mass distribution for most folks because it's a physical medium that needs to be mailed/handed over itself.
Napster, OTOH, is designed to allow ALL of its users to be essentially publishers with searchable catalogues, not just a few. Plus, it's a search engine they control. They could have designed a system where searches get blocked -- e.g. a search for "Metallica" by itself cannot plausibly be explained away as anything but a search for Metallica songs, and if somebody searches for titles from the latest Spears (sp?) songs, again that would seem to be questionable...
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
Anyone who thinks that Napster isn't as intrinsically impersonal and corporate as Microsoft is naive. Napster is a huge company with funding, and right now they are saying that "sharing" music is okay, because that is what their business model is based on. If they found a foolproof way to make more money by enforcing copyright tomorrow, do you REALLY think they wouldn't do it? Seriously, think about it.
All this talk about whether what Napster does is moral or immoral misses the point: Hypocrisy and morality are not issues when it comes to a company, because it is an organization, not a person. Anyone who thinks that anyone at Napster will go "mm yeah , that article makes me realize, we are sort of wrong" and do anything at all differently than how they have been is, frankly, just stupid.
sig:
sig:
See the "..for smart people" banners Wired runs here? Look elsewhere guys.
Hypocrites abound
Battle laws, but take freedom.
Will Napster survive?
This glourious poem
Will never be read by you
It was posted late.
Personally, if napster can dish it out but not take it, they deserve to be sued into oblivion.
- A.P.
--
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
It's not even a question of the good outweighing the bad; if I'm producing "widgets", and 90% of widget use is illegal, I should still not be held liable. It is up to the user of those widgets to use them in a legal manner.
If those "widgets" are being used illegally, it may be easier for law enforcement to just shut down my production, but that would trample my rights to produce them. If the law enforcement agencies want to stop the crime, they will have to go after the widget abusers themselves.
Those who value security over freedom will lose both and deserve neither. Sure it's tougher to enforce laws that way. Tough.
I don't understand why people don't seem to get this. They provide a service that can be used for either legal or illegal purposes. When someone is reported for using the service illegally, they terminate the account. What more do they need to do?
If you go to your local head shop and you ask to see the bongs you will be told that they don't cary aany drug paraphernalia. If you ask to see one of their water-pipes, you will be shown the best smoking accesories that they have. Once you've got your water-pipe, it's your responsibility to use it in a legal manner.
Or think of a pet store. If you go in and buy one hamster or gerbil per week, pretty soon they're going to wise up and stop selling them to you. If you ask for a shaved hamster, they're going to throw you out.
It's up to YOU, the user/client/patron to do the right/legal thing with any product/service. It is not the responsibility of the service/widget provider to insure that you walk the straight and narrow path. I don't care if it's easier to do it that way, it's still not right.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
It's about the money, not the sharing. Venture capitalists aren't in the business of deliberately losing money in sharing schemes.
The one service they provide is making available the software, with a search engine. Unlike, say, RHAT, there aren't really that many other obvious plausible revenue schemes, like selling on-site service... and if they let others learn and implement their protocol, even advertising on the search engine (if any) will quickly be filtered out and rendered pointless. So, from their perspective, why open it?
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
...that even in our "new" economy, the people who get rewarded most handsomely aren't the people who innovate (i.e., Shawn), but the people who already have the bucks (his uncle).
Shawn wrote Napster to facilitate free and open sharing of music (and perhaps other forms of information). I suspect that to him, and most Napster users, Napster is (or was, at least) a revolutionary program and an idea, not just a company.
It's sad to see how Napster (the company) has corrupted this idea, and turned it into nothing more than a hypocritical attempt to steal profits from the recording industry.
I do plan to do something about this... When I get the chance, I'm going to help port Gnutella to other platforms (already started helping with the Mac port--I may do a Mac OS X port, too).
When Sean and Shawn wrote their programs I'm pretty sure they didn't expect or want the company to be like it is today. But instead of making it open-source like everyone here expects them to, they'd rather write their own software and proceed at their own pace. I can understand this decision in the same way I understand AOL's decision to block AIM. They thought it up, and they're gonna do all they can to keep it clean, consistent and from one entity.
Clearly, Napster's value to their investors is their large population of consumers. Us. And so clearly, Napster's valuation will be affected by the size of that population. Us.
So send a message to Napster that their management and investors will understand, a message that will affect their valuation by making it clear they do not own Us, and that we can move to Gnutella, or Napster++,
Napsterfree Mondays until they GPL their software.
What we need now, is a colored-ribbon campaign...
I'm also willing to believe that they consider this article valuable advertising.
If at some point in the future, they start charging either a fixed price for the software, or a subscription rate, do they really think they're going to get a lot of business? At some point all these investors are going to want a return on their investment, but I don't see where they'll get the money. If Napster starts charging, people will stop using Napster and start using Gnutella/Freenet/etc
I read the article and got pretty disgusted with Napster's attempts to suppress the reverse-engineering of its software. If they get shut down, I think it's important for people to be able to drop back to alternatives. Soooo, for those interested, here's OpenNap's definition of the Napster Protocol. Here's OpenNap's home page, which contains links to non-Napster clients, non-Napster servers, references, etc.
More significantly, the company repeatedly has tried to stymie independent software developers working on Napster-compatible software and Web sites.
You are operating under the assumption that making Napster an open system would benefit its users. If people were allowed to develop their own clients that could interact with Napster's network, you would have the same problem with automated SPAM and virus distribution that you have with Gnutella. While there were rumors that users who accessed Napigator were being locked out of their network, these rumors were never substantiated. In fact, Napster *never* explicitly prevents users from accessing clone networks or reverse engineered utilities. In contrast, users of AOL IM are unable to even communicate with users of AOL's own ICQ service let alone the users of other networks.
The company has refused to share technical information about its software code, has made changes to its software that have prevented other programs from working with Napster's own and has blocked computers from outside music sites from accessing Napster's database of hundreds of thousands of songs.
Most companies refuse to share technical information about their software's source code. While Napster could attempt to enforce its ban on reverse-engineering and the use of bots, it has *not.* Napigator is still around and Napster never even filed charges against Metallica's detective firm for using a bot to spy on their network (a mistake, IMHO). Napster has decided *not* to continue using Ebay-like tactics to prevent their site from being meta-searched by Napigator, and its files continue to be visible.
The "sharing" that Napster advocates does not constitute forcing the bands to allow fans to make derivative works in spite of their copyright. Why is it hypocracy for them not to openly support derivative works of Napster (although they do not even actively enforce a prohibition of derivative works now)? They may not be following the open-source code of ethics, but *they are not open source developers.*
never send a capatalist to do an activist's job
This is a very good point.
ByteMyCode.com: A Web 2.0 code sharing community.
Matt.
First a corporation must survive by being profitable, second every corporation must be constantly fending off the advances of some other companies or organizations legal department. Unfortunately many news reporters and even slashdotters have little to no experience in this department (IANAL). All this aside, Napster Inc. must preserve it's copyright, trademark, etc due to the legal context and other business arenas that they may be used in. Think about what would happen if a company that was conducting illegal activities happened to be using a Napster trademark? Napster /may/ be implicated during the trial. Even if they are found completely innocent of anything it's bad press and costs money.
I am a bit stymied about the harsh treatment of people who have made Napster clones, plugins, etc. that have caught wind of the above - most likely the statement mentioned in MSNBC was taken out of context (IMHO) as the media tends to do a lot. Napster should have a developer forum where the protocol would be published etc. The protocol should incorporate a profit model (banner ads, or whatever they may come up with --) that would make it advantageous for Napster Inc. to support such a model, because it is already happening - may as well take advantage of it.
Sounds familiar doesn't it?
You are correct with respect to copyright and trademark law, however, the spat with the Offspring was only a minor aside in the article.
More significantly, the company repeatedly has tried to stymie independent software developers working on Napster-compatible software and Web sites. While these programs could benefit the millions of music fans that Napster claims are its only constituency, they might also diminish the commercial potential of Napster itself.
The company has refused to share technical information about its software code, has made changes to its software that have prevented other programs from working with Napster's own and has blocked computers from outside music sites from accessing Napster's database of hundreds of thousands of songs.
Napster is hypocritical in that it is claiming to be a champion defending the right and freedom to share and then refuses to share its own information, including programing APIs, protocol speficiations, or simple access to the virtual net they've constructed from their users' PCs.
This is IMHO very hypocritical of napster.
The fact that Napster seems to sing a different tune when its own property is involved is just one of the ways the reality of Napster is at odds with its public image. The service's management and ownership structure, for example, is quite different than many users suppose, with Napster's highly publicized teenage founder, Shawn Fanning, playing only a minor role.
Herein may lie the problem. We have a bunch of suits in it for the money, and quite willing to toss a few platitudes our way to garner our short-term support, but in the end they have a vested interest in forcing us to use their product, and their product only.
If you want true freedom to share, don't rely on napster to provide, or even defend, it. Instead work with the folks at gnutella or freenet. You'll have much better odds of being able to run a client or server on the platform of your choice, and a much better chance of securing your own freedom.
In short, never send a capatalist to do an activist's job. The results will disappoint you every time.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
I'll agree with all of you that Napster's client is pure idiot-friendly crap. I'll agree with you that its transfer reliability is worthless. I'll even agree with you that the company should suffer for letting down their users. But there is one thing we can't ignore : Napster's become so popular, so huge, that the installed user base is simply something we can't easily get rid of. Gnutella and Freenet may be better designed from day-one, but they simply don't have the massive horde of users to make them successful (yet). And with all the attention Napster is getting, thinks aren't looking too bright for its contenders.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Napster freely distributes material that it does not own the rights to and has not received permission to make available. Yet, when someone takes the Napster trademark and makes it available when the person has not received permission to do so, Napster Inc. cries foul.
Its the same issue. Napster is essentially saying, "We can steal your stuff but you can't steal ours." That's hypocrisy, pure and simple.
mr.nobody
--Don't you wanna go where nobody knows your name?
The MSNBC article references a supposed usenet post from January, wherein a Napster developer tells the community to get bent, b/c:
"Napster is not some garage organization", and goes on to tell them that they are a 'real company' with a "marketing team, bizdev team", etc. Only problem: the post doesn't exist. Deja doesn't have a record of it, nor the other major usenet archives.
Is it just me, or does it look like whoever wrote the article invented this message? Is this going to be the norm in the near future? Couldn't these publications reference the Message-ID?