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Napster Shut Down Until Trial
tealover noted thatMSNBC has headline saying that Napster has been shut down by the judge. As of this writing, its still up, and the Napster MOTD is telling us to expect an announcement in a couple of hours. More when we got it.
here is a zdnet story. I've attached the MOTD below.
Update: 07/27 12:40 AM by CT : this washington post story reports that the injunction will go in effect PM friday. Boycotts against the RIAA are being discussed.
This is the motd you get when you connect to napster as of 8:02 eastern:
You have probably heard in the news about the recording industry's lawsuit against Napster. The RIAA has asked a federal judge to shut Napster down, and an important hearing will be held at 2:00 p.m. PDT Wednesday, July 26 at the U.S. District Court in San Francisco.
Wednesday at 7:00 p.m. PDT we will give the Napster community a brief update of what happened in the courtroom via a live webcast that you can view at www.napster.com.
Your analogy is so poor (like moste analogies on legal cases on Slashdot), it's a bit like that elephant I once met, who had trouble cooking pasta because he could'nt get into the shop to buy the water to boil. "You don't need to buy the water!" I told him, "Just get it from the tap", tapping him in the back. "The problem is," he replied, "my paws are too big, I can't operate the tap. As a matter of fact, I can't even get into my own appartment, so I have to sleep in the lobby".
First off, I've seen many good points pointed out by many people about the current Napster situation, but for some reason, there's always some annoying joe that has to argue some small insiginificant point just to waste time.
Here's The facts:
1.Napvigator/openNap, etc. has the same content or more than the standard Napster servers.
2. Napster and Napster's service is LEGAL. i.e. technically, they are completely legitamite. What is trying to be proved by the RIAA is that the current legalese that protects Napster(i.e. no illegal links on the Napster server) is killing the music industry.
Napster may be shut down. Grr...
3.Most people, if offered something they want for free, will take it. If you're morally against this, go join the FBI to do internet crackdowns, but sorry, you can't get in because a. YOU DIDN'T GO TO LAW SCHOOL b. YOU THINK YOU KNOW SOMETHING ABOUT THE LAW CUZ YOU READ NEWSWEEK c. YOU'RE JUST A COMMUNITY COLLEGE REJECT/LIBERAL ARTS (that failed to do well on the LSAT) MAJOR!
4. Coders will always react faster than lawyers and old senators like Orin Hatch who thought IP address meant Intellectual Property Address (in which the the president of Napster politely corrected him)
5. There are smart people that happen to be fast coders that love free music that will share music via encryption, if it comes down to it, and they don't care about your AOL-this-is-wrong-go-to-Church opinion.
6. People's demands for free music cannot be stopped, once they've tasted Napster, do you think they're just going to give up? hell no.
For now, there are alt-Napsters.
If necessary, there will be encrypt-Napsters.
There will be enhanced Gnutellas.
Information or media of any kind can NEVER be contained. Information WANTS to be free. It lives on without us, because it is the power of ideas, content, or music (that inspires ideas, feelings, etc.) that pushes each new generation to latch on without anyone pushing them.
To all the moral preachers: Shut-up, no one really cares about your opinion, you DONT count, sorry.
To all the complainers: There's nothing to worry about. They can't control the net.
To all the uber-coders (im not talking about your city college breed..): Code on and shut everyone up...
The one who coded Napster made everyone stop for a while, then everyone talks about it... Dont just talk about it, code it!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
.... go. code!
Are you 18 or over and a US citizen? Then register to vote!
Not in this day and age. Vote with you're dollar. It's a little more affective. Don't like the RIAA? Don't buy their shit.
Yeah, I know.. "Oh, but what about the artists.." Boo hoo. Let's say there are 1000 popular RIAA musicians and 1,000,000 non-RIAA musicians out there. Who decides which artist gets rewarded for their blood sweat and tears -- you don't really think *you* do, huh? It's certainly not talent. The record company's job is to make their bands popular, regardless of artistic talent. Radio play, TV and movie product placement, MTV.. it's all there to make you want the band. When you buy a major label piece of music, you're not rewarding the artist, you're rewarding the record company!
If you really care about supporting an artist, give some money to a non-RIAA musician.
Or in other words, let's make Metallica and all the others actually work for a living, instead of riding on record-company hype induced popularity.
_______
2B1ASK1
Well, I can think of a few extra reasons why people is so interested in Napster. For instance, think for a moment about the Latin American market (or European, whatever). The other day I went to MixUp, which is like the largest record store in Mexico City, to get myself the Prodigy's DirtChamber Ssessions. They wanted me to pay more than $30 US dollars for the CD. WTF? I downloaded it entirely using Napster. So, it's not that I don't WANT to pay for the music but that I CAN'T even if I wanted to, and when I can the price is just absurd. There was just one copy of Moby's Play, and the latest by Lo-Fidelity All Stars, William Orbit or Fatboy Slim just wasn't there. And this store is supposed to be the most avant-garde, we-have-it-all-we're-better-than-Tower-Records record store. Come on! Using Napster the last six months, I've known so many artists that you wouldn't even imagine. So, I've read a lot of complaints like Where are micropayments? Why can't I buy just the songs I like? etc etc. But in the rest of the world outside the US, the problem is different and bigger: where are the fabulous distribution mechanism that the record industry puts in place in exchange for the money we pay for CDs? It's a joke, it doesn't exist! Oh, and before you say, dude, stop moaning you can get that on Amazon (or whatever) and have them send it to your home, try explaining that to the guys at customs that charged me almost 45% of the cost of 4 CDs I ordered the other day.
Well, that was just my extra reason for using Napster.
"All the things one has forgotten scream for help in dreams". Elias Canetti
Two observations:
...
...
Firstly
Whether or not the recording industry shuts down Napster, it has already lost - Gnutella, OpenNAP and a lot of other software is already out there; and is unstoppable. If they are closed down, someone will write something new. If that's closed down, then cryptography will come into play. It'll continue to be an arms race for both sides - what a waste of time and energy when that time and energy could be concentrated in the real issue: the music!
Shouldn't it be assumed from now on that the technologies exist to allow just about any material to be made available and unremovable on the net - music, software, etc ? Just look at Gnutella, Freedom and other technologies. In previous 'undergrounds', there were always problems of anonymity, being connected and other issues that the internet has 'solved' - the small, fragmented free information trade in the real world has now become a major force of activity in the connected digital world.
As for SDMI initiatives ? Who is going to buy SDMI players when they can buy MP3/open players ? And surely the market is open enough so that it is impossible to neutralise MP3/open players ?
Secondly
This seems like a repeat of the past. Remember microcomputer software ? You could always buy games and other titles off the shelves - but there was always an underground trade. No matter what technical protection the industry could come up with, the underground could remove it; and there was always an underground network to distribute cracked wares. Now with music, the underground network is actually a mass global pool of connected individuals across the net. The internet has made the fragmented underground into a mass movement. And I don't mean underground in a negative sense.
There will always be the technologically illiterate or those disconnected from the underground that cannot access underground distribution; and perhaps they may have to buy off the shelf. So is the music industry going to try and prop itself up on the small minority ? How do the artists feel knowing that they are being supported by sucking off a minority of their fans ?
The music and software industries have always had to factor in piracy as an everpresent activity - their choice is whether to reject it, or to try and accept it and turn it to their benefit by altering their business models and means of distribution.
Perhaps they should embrace some sort of model for free distribution of music, but -- as John Perry Barlow writes -- make their money off the live performances and events. In global world where travel is cheap and easy, the popular acts could easy command performances around the world.
Free distribution would be like an open market - it would just 'be there', and communities would form, and acts would become popular, and then the popular acts can move into live performances, or they mercandise, or whatever else is the standard norm in this age of 'leverage your core'.
Like we already know: the internet destroys the middle man, and the music industry is the middle man. The new middle man is the internet, and is increasingy the technologies and communities around which the producers and consumers rotate. The middle man is technology, not people.
-- Matthew - matthew.gream@pobox.com, http://matthewgream.net
Yes, some copyright laws are a good thing. The kind of copyright laws which shutdown companies for distributing a work without the artists permission. This is why copyright laws were created. These laws were not created to alow the companies to tel fans what they can do with copies of the music.
I suspect that Thoreau would agree that individuals are a totally diffrent story. Individuals should be able to do what they damn well please under "fair use."
Actually, I would carry this individual vs. company distinction so far as to prevent artists which use a lot of samples from incorperating or selling their work to a label, i.e. the label of their company could be sued, but the artist could not be sued.
This may sound like a strange interpretation of the law, but it's the interpretation which will protect atists and fan, i.e. the importent people.
Anywho, the current laws a very bad, so we should break them without directly doing physical harm to another person (i.e. copying their shit is fine).. I think it's pretty safe to say Thoreau would agree with that statment.
BTW> Americans realy do not put enough force behind their breaking of the laws. Thoreau really accomplished things during his day by breaking the law. It would be nice to see more Thoreau type activism today, i.e. a million people giving away pot in D.C. once a year to protest the War on Drugs, people writing easy to use crypto to fuck up the NSA, people writing manefestos about how it's immoral to not pirate all your music, etc.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
I live in Montana. In Montana if Jesus ran as democrat he would lose. For the last eight years the Republicans have controlled the state legislature and the governorship. In the same eight years the economy of Montana has nosedived along with wages, employment, capital etc. while the the rest of the states boomed. In addition to that there have been several well published debacles regarding privatization and deregulation of state controlled function all of which cost the taxpayers of Montana a TON of money.
In this election the clueless, idiot, voters of Montana will once again re-elect the same bunch of incompetent know nothing ranchers, farmers and real estate salesmen to the legislature.
This represents for me a real chance to vote my conciense and go for Ralph Nader (the only candidate even aware of the implications of the IP stuggle).
War is necrophilia.
Perhaps you should reconsider the idea that 'we' are a single coherant group. Many of us have differing opinions, and are capable of thinking for ourselves rather than jumping on whichever trendy boycott is en vogue any given month.
Slashdot: Liberals, Conservatives, Libertarians, Socialists, Atheists, Christians, etc. We are diverse - don't pigeonhole people into holes they don't fit in.
- Jeff A. Campbell
- VelociNews (http://www.velocinews.com)
- Jeff
The transcript follows. The only thing that I've edited out is a couple of uhms and ahs.
Sean:
Hank Berry: Sean: Thanks.Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
I hate the RIAA and loathe their actions as much as the next guy, but seriously...are they even worth spending energy on? Waging wars and protests against them is like fighting the retarded kid in the corner because he keeps calling you names. Best leave them to their own ignorance and move on. We all know the free trade of .mp3 will continue via any number of non-centralized solutions. It grows bigger, better, and more diverse every day. I myself spent thousands of dollars purchasing LPs in the day, then thousands more on cassettes, and finally god knows how much accumulating 3000 or so CDs, so do I feel guilty that I've downloaded a thousand or so CDs free of charge in the last year? not a bit. I sincerely doubt that anyone has gone hungry with that temporary lack of revenue. But I do feel the need to support the artists I truly enjoy so that they may continue to make the music I love. What I do is this--say I've downloaded and burned a CD from artist X, and let's say I listen to it all of the time and get much enjoyment from it. I simply get on the web, find a mailing address for the band/artist via a fan club or something (NOT their record label address!)...make out a check for $5, or however much I feel is right and send it away. Included is a form letter stating that I received their CD via .mp3 trading and just want to show my appreciation. I also encourage them to disassociate themselves from the recording labels and the RIAA, who practice monopolistic tactics and secure one-sided contracts that only the harshest pimps would be proud of. With this case the RIAA has begun the process of alienting the fan base, us. It's not about Napster, it's about us finding a way to cut them out of the deal altogether. They are primarily distributors of music and their distribution is no longer needed. The old method has become wasteful and obsolete. So let's find ways to keep the artists alive and happy, so that they not need to ever sign a 'contract'. Without signed artists there are no labels, and hence no RIAA. We started this so-called 'music revolution' and now we must show that we have the intelligence to see it through. thanks.
Actually - the recording industry is helping to destroy itself.
Napster is based on a flawed centralised model, whereas Gnutella is based on a more advanced distributed model. Napster contains more of the old world ideal than the new world ideal, compared to Gnutella.
This means that by shutting down Napster, the industry helping to destroy the old world and forcing users to move to something like Gnutella which is more aligned with the new world. If everyone stayed with Napster, then they would stay with a kind of flawed implementation of the future.
Am I right or wrong ?
-- Matthew - matthew.gream@pobox.com, http://matthewgream.net
Really good point, i too wonder, why the recording industry continues to handle this case so inexpertly. Instead of setting their lawyers too it they could have made much better use of the money by buying into napster and seeing this as an investment into music distribution over the internet, a thing that will come anyway. Why break something that already works and then create it anew. The threat of legal action would have been a good bargaining chip and i think napsters management would have prefered to come to some status quo with the music industry on peaceful terms.
By dragging napster to the court the music industry can only loose, even if they win their case and shut down napster they will have won over a (then) worthless business, a business they will want to enter themselves in the near future but are not ready to (the 'association' in RIAA says it all, after they shut down napster they'll need at least two years to reinvent it on their own terms so nobody feels shortchanged).
The music industry could have had some good PR (hey look, we're giving away [rights for] music for free) and would have got into control to the point where they could choose which music is swappable and which isn't and begin to install themselves as the major partner for fileswapping slowly changing the bazaar into a shopfront with some leased space for free goodies in front of it to attract more customers and apart from that they'd had a new tool to promote new music.
What they're doing at the moment is in stark contrast to their own longterm interests: they're blocking napster, thereby making the people switch to more and different services, especially decentralized services which will be much harder to track down. If i have a problem i prefer it in plain view in one place rather than hidden and scattered literally all over the globe. To stress the aforementined bazaar-analogy a little more, they did a police raid on it and made the people carry the trade to their own homes.
What i don't understand is, why the music industry, that occupies so many PR people and marketdroids to create their own spin of trends, didn't ask some of them how to handle this best. Maybe they would have had to accept a new player on the market, but now they're just setting back their prospects of ever getting a grip on the situation, meanwhile making bad PR for themselves.
"By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing... kill yourself." -- Bill Hicks
"Mr. Valenti, aren't you the person who compared owning a VCR with being the Boston Strangler?"
If they just did that, what would happen to public perception of the MP3 issue?
My mantra for life these days is "don't reward stupidity". It's getting to the point where I believe that the best response to some of the more idiotic things being said should be met with a couple seconds of silence, then an outburst of hearty laughter, as if the person were making a joke. Part of the reason that these things get as far as they do is that we've become so worried about offending idiots that we permit the outflow to seep in.
I'm not saying that Valenti can't make a point, or that there can't be any merit in what the RIAA has claimed (although personally, I side with Napster - let the RIAA go after the *individuals* misusing the service), but if they want people to take them seriously, they should find a better mouthpiece and they should think about what they want to say before they say it.
Then again, if you look how the media is relating the sequence of events, I think it proves my point entirely... :-)
Pulling Napster out of the picture this late in the game is not going to have the effect they want. The river will merely find a new path, and this time the path won't be a single set of servers, or one company that people are dependant upon for MP3s. This time the water will flow in many directions, over many very distributed and varying forms of trading that we've been building all this time. Ayup. We'll go back to 40 million different channels of distribution. IRC; unreliable, spammy, cable-modem crushing gnutella; local bbs's, baby, because you know how cool zmodem and procomm are. Face it, pal, Napster had *75 million* users. Do you think they got them because those users all COULD learn how to use mirc, dcc, and read how to download a file through the massive spam from #mp3cafe? Or do you think its because its mp3's for dummies? Last weekend I helped my friend's brother download some music with Napster. He could hardly figure IT out--he wasnt going to get the songs that stopped at "Getting info...", because hey, they were getting the info for 2 hours. Is this person going to learn how to use irc? Have these kinds of people ever heard of gnutella? Do you think the vast majority of those 75 million users, all just too pissed off at those evil RIAA bastards (the geeks all say so), all sit down, spend 30 hours learning how to efficiently find mp3's on the other alternatives? Or are they going to say "15 bucks for a CD is worth less to me than the time I will spend learning how to do this mp3 bullshit." Face it man, breaking up Napster doesnt let online music hit the masses, it just sends it back to the internet-educated elite, the few who can take the time to scour 45 ftp servers with too many users logged on, to sit on IRC and wait for queue slot #423,232,887,133 to come up for the latest from N'Sync. Know what? Most people just dont care enough. Why do you want this "river" (What's up with that analogy, anyway? INFORMATION WANTS TO BE FREE LIKE WATER!) to be split into 40 streams anyway? A centralized server was A GOOD THING. A simple, easy to use, interface, with everyone's mp3's in one, single pool. A single point of failure, because you know the mission-critical mp3 downloads will be really screwed then. I dont want to go boating down 40 streams before I find the species of trout I want to fish for, I want to get on the big river and fish for it. Paddle back up your mp3 river into reality.
SO making music is only worth doing if you're young? If you're old and can't tour don't bother, because you don't deserve to get paid, because you're old???
The Beatles can't tour any more since Lennon is dead, but surely the other three deserve money for the recordings? How will these be funded?
you DO realize that the beatles are some of the richest men in the UK don't you. Your argument here is moot because you assume that the remaining Beatles deserve money for work they did 30 years ago. I do not.
Okay, what about a band like the Monks? They made one album in the 60s that sold basically no copies. Then, just recently they have been rediscovered and their music is being bought and used in commercials. Do they deserve any money? Or because the music didn't sell immediately, they're just screwed?
Maybe i write a really good shell script for my company. Maybe i code a bit of C that is still being used by my company. 20 years from now does my company owe me a royalty if they're still using that script?
If you retain copyrights on the script, then yes. If you retain copyright on it, you can sell it to a different company and make more money off of it. If the company retains copyright on the script, then they can still sell it and make money from it. OR they can use it for free, because they own it. When you give away or sell your rights to something, then no, you don't get anything else for it. The person who owns it gets to make money from it. I don't really see how this has anything to do with anything, but hey, I answered it anyway.
"Information wants to be expensive" - Stewart Brand, the same guy who said "Information wants to be free"
"Musicians, who are professionally competent in composing music, performing music, and producing music, should ditch their real skills, and go into the t-shirt business?"
It's rather disingenuous of you to quote the original poster out of context so you can build a straw man out of him. You missed the two most important words of his sentence -- "or something".
These are creative individuals, are they not? And by building a following, they are cultivating a lucrative resource -- an audience. Or, put another way, a market. Suggesting that the only way they can exploit that market is to deal through middle men who take 90% of their profits is absurd. Suggesting that the only way to profit from that market is by selling their music per-unit is as absurd as suggesting they are only allowed to sell t-shirts.
One example: a musician named Momus didn't have enough money to produce a CD, so he offered to write a song about anyone who sent him $1000. 35 people took him up on it, enough for him to publish his CD.
Now take the CD out of the equation -- suppose he just asked $1000 a song, and distributed the music online at virtually no cost to him. He's just made $35,000; not the kind of money Metallica is used to, apparently, but enough to live on, and that's with just one revenue stream.
What if he toured, and was constantly putting live recordings on his website for download at micropayment prices? It's more convenient to get them there, because there's always new stuff that collectors don't have yet, and an insignificant price-tag -- say, .25 -- is unnoticeable. But if 100 people download the song, he's made $25 personally, just for rolling tape at a concert. (For which he was paid to perform, BTW.)
Oh, yeah, and if he wanted, he could sell t-shirts, too.
Classical musicians don't have this option; then again, with a minute handful of exceptions, they aren't living directly off recording revenue anyway; they're getting paid for live performances, and indirectly through recording revenue. (The symphonies and such are, however, analogous to artists from a branding standpoint, and can be treated similarly. Perhaps the Boston Symphony needs to release its next Mahler symphony performance direct to the public, online, for five dollars. Perhaps live audio of performances can be had for two bucks a stream.)
I hope this whets your imagination -- the 20th-century masters of marketing (the RIAA among them) have shown us that if you have the attention of a lot of people, you can make money off it. The artists don't need the record companies to exploit that market anymore, and it is in the best interests of all but the very richest -- the carrot-bands that the labels dangle in front of others' eyes to keep them in line -- to cultivate that audience/market directly, and make a decent living off it.
phil
However, each radio can only receive a limited number of channels, depending on what is broadcast in your area. Each of these channels has a format, and limited amount of time it can broadcast, and with the same song being broadcast multiple times, it's a very competative market for songs to find broadcast time.
Contrast this to the internet, where there is no competition for making songs available. If you have created a mp3, then you can get an account on mp3.com and upload it. No-one will say "that's no good", no-one will say "We don't play punk", no-one, except the potential listener, will play the latest Britany Spears song instead of yours.
Video rental stores succeed because they give the customer the choice. Radio does not, the Internet does.
There are many old books which are out of print. The publisher has no intention of reprinting them, but they will be in copyright for decades to come. If a second company thought that it could make money by scanning these books and created e-books, they could not do this under copyright law, even if the original company had no intention of doing it. I think it's obvious that it would be good if the second company would be allowd to write to the publisher, and the publisher would have to either have to do the same thing that the e-publisher was intending to do, or grant a royalty free license for the intended use.
I'm going on a couple of presumptions here:
- Most artists don't make much money off of records. With the exception of a few really lucky bands, they make most of their money off of touring -- which is supported by record sales (more accurately -- by having their music distributed)
- I'm going to accept Napster's claim that people who download music are ultimately going to buy more than those who don't. If true, then this means that disallowing RIAA music on Napster will ultimately hurt the RIAA companies in the long run.
- If bands can become well known without the confines of RIAA contracts they will probably be happy to do so.
- Note of history: about 10 years ago some big label(s) (Polygram comes to mind) attempted to force radio stations to pay them for every play of their music. (I know that this occurred in Canada, I'm not sure if the US was involved as well). Campus radio stations balked, and responded by simply refusing to play anything from the offending labels,
Technical boycott: Get a list from RIAA of all of their music titles and artists. Build filters that deny users the ability to share RIAA music listed in the database. Make sure to get both famous and non-famous RIAA artists. Be agressive about it.The labels first tried to say that they'd allow free play of small (up and coming) bands, and then finally buckled. Despite their attempts to suck radio stations dry, they needed the airplay that they were asking to get paid for.
It would be best if the list were PD.
This will leave small artists with two choices: RIAA distribution or Napster distribution. My expectation is that this will start to bleed the RIAA companies of their 'farm' bands. If things go well, these companies will see the writing on the wall and start some serious negotiations on this matter.
The hard part in this is that the list would need to be controlled by Napster and should also cut off small RIAA bands. It'll be bad. It'll hurt for a while, but I think that -- in the end -- it would do us all some good.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
Dude, I seriously love this one, it cracks me up. Legal advice straight from the offices of the prestigious (bubble-pipe smoking) lawyer Nelson Muntz, Esq. It's as if, what, there's some sort of Heisenberg uncertainty principle embodied in copyright law? I wonder what maroon on what BBS originally came up with this.
"Five second rule. That cookie just touched the ground. That cookie is still good!"
Napster Inc has just released the following news: In order to resolve the problems and issues of mp3 file sharing and copyright violation, napster has decided that the best move is.. to move to Sealand! Said the spokesman of the soon to be founded Data Haven, "It's good to see such a high profile company taking advantage of our no holds barred data network that we will be providing on [insert date here]." Napster founder Fanning has been heard to say, "Heheheh, just gotta keep us out of jail until this baby flys, and were outa here, so long suckers!" Napster is also rumored to be considering supplying its own "official" merchandise at the same time with the logo imblazoned on the front and the words "Fuck metallica, fuck The Offspring, and Fuck You!" on the back. Projected sales figures are not yet currently available. Why do they say road works when it doesn't?
Lemure, wtf! Don't you mean Lemur?
that's bullshit. Do you think my sister got a degree in vocal performance because that's where the money is? Hell no. She did it for the same reasons that, when i go home, i pick up my guitar and play. Sometimes they're songs i wrote, sometimes they're not, it doesn't matter. My sister and i both play/sing because it's in our hearts. Musical creation is a part of us, without it, we are incomplete. I don't have the illusion that i will ever become famous, or make a single dollar off of anything that i have written. And if you ask any REAL musician whether or not they'd still be playing if all music were free...and they'd give you a resounding "hell yeah!"
The good ones don't play to make money, they play to play. Music is not a means to an end. It is an end unto itself.
So what your saying is that if you want to make a living doing what you love (ie music) then your not a "REAL" msuician? Ask your sister if she would have gotten a degree in vocal performance if it was guaranteed that she would not be able to make money doing it. Chances are she would have gotten a degree in something and did music as a hobby. People wouldn't stop creating music completely if they couldn't make money doing it, but they wouldn't be able to put as much time and effort into it, because they need money to live. People can make a decent amounf of their living performing and recording right now (even if they are a small band who barely gets by). But if music is free, they can't spend as music time performing and recording, because that is time that they make no money at all. Music will never go away completely, but it insane tot hink it will stay the same no matter what happens.
"Information wants to be expensive" - Stewart Brand, the same guy who said "Information wants to be free"
How do you propose a program tells if a file is legal or illegal?
Someone can program anything you can write an algorythm for, but until you have that algorythm, it's not going to be written.
National Public Radio's show Morning Edition has been following the trial in a series of articles. The account has been reasonably balanced and fairly thorough. If you want to point your non-geek relatives to a site that will give them the background on this, these stories are a good place to start. The first one, aired yesterday, can be found here (Napster Legal Dispute). Another one was aired this morning and has not been put on their web site yet.
The net will not be what we demand, but what we make it. Build it well.
Actually, OpenNap is the name of an open source Napster Protocol *Server*
Many (all?) of these servers run OpenNap, and some of them have opennap in the name like opennap.cx and opennap.squidcafe.com
bitchx.dimension6.com seems to be one of the bigger ones
If you run Helix Gnome like me, you already have gnapster installed, and can choose from a number of OpenNap servers.
Some of these servers are just as large as the official napster servers.
If I'm not mistaken, Napster is not like an IRC network: the servers are not interlinked.
If you are on one you don't see mp3s from those connected to a different server. There are many official napster servers that the client connects to.
What does all this mean you say?
It means that if you have a program that will let you access other servers, you should be able to get as diverse a collection of music as before, as well as the ability to try another server when you don't see what you are looking for.
You nicely listed all the Napster clones but there are the pre-Napster software like IRC, newsgroups, Hotline, ftp sites, websites, and then we have CuteMX. You can even get in a big ol' chatroom and trade each others ICQ or AIM handle and transfer files that way. "The Man" might be after one avenue of trading software that increases revenue for the RIAA but He can't shut them all down. If you squash one voice, ten more will rise in its place.
but Napster doesn't allow searches by genre or "show me more bands like these". Yes, you can "hot list" someones Napster directory and browse all their mp3s, but the files still have no description or genre info.
Which is a better way for Chris Johnson to share his music: post his songs to a lonely Napster directory or post about his songs on some community web site for like-minded techno fans and musicians? Geeks read Slashdot as fanatically as music fans read their community sites!
cpeterso
Freenet, or a system much like it, is the only acceptable longterm answer to such attacks on the rights of us, the user community. Fair use. Fair Use. Repeat that over and over again. Fair use is being attacked - the correct response is for us to use technology to enshrine Fair use as a basic right.
--
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Even if they did, they wouldn't find them. I just did a search for his name, several of his song titles and a couple of the album titles. Found nothing of his.
However, search for 'Chris Johnson' on Google and his stuff is the fifth thing in the list. What do you suppose is a better marketing tool?
--
"I have a good idea why it's hard to verify programs. They're usually wrong." --Manuel Blum, FOCS 94
Actually, the problem is mostly with people who post as "Anonymous Coward." Set your threshold to a higher value, and the problem diminishes.
- AC
I don't know, is this "shocking" amount of shelf space equal to more or less than the amount of shelf space dedicated to all the Kid Rock, Britney Spears, and other music CDs? The Best Buy here has a huge music space, and one can only assume it moves. And media goes for plenty of other purposes than pirating music -- I have a CD writer and plenty of CDRs - I use it for backups. I've only burned one audio CD on it so far, and that's a mix of stuff I already own.
Google == search engine
Napster == pirate MP3s
With Napster gone, there will not be as much of an organized "enemy" to fight. It will just be a giant game of Whack-A-Mole for the RIAA. Gnutella et. al. are far more frightening to them, and there is nothing they can do to stop them.
It's only this arrogant geek-centric view of the world that makes us think that "getting the technology" is so important. You can explain the relevant points of information in five minutes, and even that isn't the fundamental issue.
One side believes that if you buy a Britney Spears CD, you should be able to make copies of it and put it up on Napster. The other side does not. That is the issue, quit obscuring it with whining about "you don't understand the technology."
-cwk.
Get him recalled.
Don't vote for him in the next election.
Write him a letter and express these concerns.
Next election, write the candidates and express your distaste for these tactics. Ask them directly what their thoughts are on these same issues.
Additionally, just because a representative indicates he is for or against something does not mean that's the stance he will continue to take throughout his term. If his constituents voted him into office, that doesn't mean that the constituents, as a whole, agree with 100% of what the representative supports. A good congressmen also listens to what his constituents want. Sometimes that may mean he has to go against his own desires.
1. No one knows the name of your unknown garage band. Therefore, no one will search for your songs on Napster.
That's odd. I found Chris's music by accident while searching for random artists that I'd not heard of on Napster. Did a search for "fire techno" and found one of his songs. I have since paid for a good number of songs on MP3.com by Chris (I highly recommend that you check out his tunes). Think about how a search works for god's sake.
2. The lawsuit against Napster does not prevent you from publishing your band's songs on your own web site. Your band's web site is arguably a better way to publish your mp3s than Napster.
A very arguable point. The best way to get people interested in your music is by getting them to listen to the music. This is one thing Napster was great at. No jerking around with ugly web pages or FTP sites, odd formats, pay for play schemes, etc. You find a song, you know you can listen to it (frequently minus the first and last 10 seconds, but close enough).
A web page is great after a person knows of your band, but not a way to gain new fans, unless you want the easily impressed superficial "KEWL T-SHIRT" people. No, Napster will be a great loss to those of us musicians who used it to disseminate our music.
IRC is still centralized to a point. Let's say I started up an IRC network specifically devoted to music swapping. Sure, people could chat and such, but 99% of the traffic would just be requests and file transfers. If I got 20 million users and the public mindshare of Napster, you bet your ass I would be shut down.
Now as for IRC channels, there's little the RIAA could do. They could get an injunction to stop #mp3z on IRC network X, but there's nothing to stop the displaced traders from moving to #!!!!!!!riaasucks-downloadmp3z on network X or #mp3z on network Y.
For more information, click here.
1. No one knows the name of your unknown garage band. Therefore, no one will search for your songs on Napster.
I know the name of his unknown garage band. It's called CHRIS JOHNSON. He's a one-man band. I went to his web page, and I liked it so much I bought his album. It was really easy.
By the way, thanks for dismissing him the same way the music industry does. You helped get his point across.
P.S. if you actually use Napster's client to browse the napster network, then sure, you can't browse, only search. But who actually does that? Not me...
--
What happens when you outlaw guns
Here is a link passed on to me by a friend. It is essentially a petition against the RIAA.
Here is the URL: Boycott the RIAA
Please show your support. Thanks!
Titus Barik
Because music was meant to be performed live, and i am willing to support bands that i enjoy listening to in that fashion.
Do you realize how incredibly arrogant that statement is? It's not up to you decide how music should be enjoyed by everyone else. Music is intended to be listened to.
Recorded music allows me to listen to the Venice Philharmonic Orchestra without travelling to Venice. Maybe you enjoy listen to any third rate musicians live, but I would far rather listen to good recorded music than bad live music.
And if you ask any REAL musician whether or not they'd still be playing if all music were free...and they'd give you a resounding "hell yeah!"
Again, it's not about what you think anyone should be doing. It's about artists having control of their creations, and allowing them to choose how they want to distribute their music.
--
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Yes Jesus would work end Welfare and throw the sick off of healthcare. He would fight against clean air and water.
War is necrophilia.
Now obviously, there were ftp and irc and web searches and the like, before those. But my point is, napster could not be the "motivation" for all other programs/services to exist. But I will agree however, that where others failed, napster brought mp3 piracy to attention of the general public, and the mass "market."
---
I am the dot in slashdot.org
I am sick and tired of people comparing the VCR (a playback and recording device) with Napster (a sharing device). They are two completely different things.
:)
The MP3 format itself is not illegal. The RIAA is not going after companies like RealNetworks, MusicMatch, and Xing that create software to encode MP3's. The fact that MP3's exist is not the issue here. The fact that Napster exists to facilitate the trade of MP3's is the issue.
Let's try this: I set up a little flea market where everyone sits at a table with piles of videotapes, an infinite supply of blank tapes, and a tape copier. I sit in the center, with no tapes or copier of my own. When you arrive, you don't have to pay anything, but you just give me a list of the tapes that you're bringing. Then, when I open it up to the public, someone comes up to me and asks who has a copy of, say, "Terminator 2." I give that person a list of several tables where they can get a copy of "Terminator 2," he goes to one of them, and he gets his copy of the movie.
Well, then the MPAA steps in once my flea market gets to be the size of Giants Stadium, and 99.99% of the copies made are of copyrighted films. "But wait!" I say. "I'm not encouraging the people to break the law, in fact some people here are copying independent films that the directors WANT to be copied!" The MPAA will not care about that statistically insignificant amount of people, and will dutifully shut me down.
In fact, we have a few places where this analogy works out for computer software. They're called MarketPro computer shows.
For more information, click here.
Voting is NOT a simple solution. It might keep Napster alive for a while, but it doesn't address the complex MORAL, ETHICAL, and ECONOMIC questions which Napster and similar music trading/piracy enablers raise.
One of the great advantages of Napster (and Gnutella) is that you're accessing a single, common community. With dozens of alternate napster networks cropping up, that community is going to be splintered into many different ones. And people will have to search, possibly, many of the different servers before they find one that's got what they're loking for.
Wouldn't a better approach be some kind of client that combines the best of Napster and Gnutella? Connects to a list of servers, downloads a list of alternative server-list-servers (in case the current server list gets shut down), and talks to one of those servers? Then that one server could farm the request out to the other servers it knows about. Sort of like gnutella at the core, napster at the leaves.
Is there any effort in place now that will bring all these alternatives into a seamless whole, either like I suggest above or in some other way? Or a Napigator-like interface that will search multiple servers at once for me?
Why do I say the word "average" so much? Because it seems to me that your comments go towards the fortunate few
No, not all people have the "entitlement" attitude. But look at some of the posts on this thread, particularly the one from the guy who thought the industry owed him something because of his big $$ educational investment. My point is that the industry owes him nothing. It's up to him to prove that he's useful to someone.
I'm not saying that someone coming out of college shouldn't have the goal of getting the big salary -- through excellence. My beef is with thinking they deserve a big salary for no legitimate reason.
And then you know the rest of the story, since I bet you are on your 60's or 70's.
Actually, I'm 35. I dropped out of college mid-term to get the big software engineering salary. I've owned several companies and have made a lot of money. You seem to think I'm some old fogey who is jealous of "those young whipper-snappers who've got it so durn easy, not like in my day when we had move 2 ton computers and we we're glad to have the work!"
Believe me, I am the last person to begrudge someone money if they can get it. I don't even begrudge them money if they're incompetent and don't deserve it. It's the attitude that they are not willing to earn what they get in life; that they are expecting to have everything handed to them by people who work and are talented (such as, say, musicians).
We are not looking forward to 3% yearly increases. Just because you had no choice, does not mean we don't have either.
If you can get stock options, then more power to you. But there are a lot of college students right now who are in for a rude awakening in the next few years when the start-up boom dries up, and only people that are truly hard working and smart are going to get them. Again, it's about the attitude that someone is entitled to be an IPO millionaire.
If there are stations on cable TV that have no comercials, why shouldn't we have the same with our internet connections?
Because part of the price of your cable goes to the station, rather than charging for commercials. Web sites do not get a subsidy from your ISP bill.
Something, someone, has to pay the bills. When you demand that a web site be free and without advertising, you are basically saying: "Thank you for this cool web site. However, I demand that you pay for it out of your own pocket, rather than my being slightly inconvenienced by having to download an extra few seconds of data." It's an unbelievably selfish, self-centered attitude.
You are a lost case of senility. Go play checkers or something.
I'll try and find my Alzheimer's medication.
--
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Ask yourself why you are protesting the RIAA? For artists rights? Or because you irresponsibly want your free music? jeez.
Well, actually neither. I dislike RIAA because they want waaay too much control over my life -- specifically, where and how I listen to music. I don't like it.
I have no special feelings for Napster as a company. They did provide a valuable service: they opened the floodgates. RIAA in blind rage is trying to crucify Napster for that, but that's pure revenge -- they cannot turn back the clock. Too many people now know that Internet is where you get your music and trying to tell them otherwise is not going to work. If anything, this will force migration to lawyer-resistant Gnutella-type networks, which is a Good Thing.
There are two main reasons why Napster was so successful (besides providing free music):
(1) Napster is immediate (for broadband people, at least). If my buddy tells me about some great piece of music, I can check it out right away. This is important and a large part of Napster appeal.
(2) Napster is pick-and-choose. People's been bitching about having to buy the whole CD for a single worthwhile song for a loooong time and the recording industry did nothing -- why should they? Napster allows me to assemble collections of exactly what I want and nothing more.
If the recording industry is able to match these two advantages, it might survive. If it insists on blindly lashing out anything that threatens its dominance, it will die. It ain't gonna be pretty and the collateral damage might be significant, but die it will.
Kaa
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
Who wants to use an operating system nobody else uses, ill just go with windows because everyone else uses it, sure there are alternatives, but who wants to use them if nobody else does? BAAAAAAAAAAA! a wise man once said: "Dont blame me, I voted for Kodos"
The full story is right here! :(
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
'Course, now all I can do is shop online....
Which is precisely what Corporate America and its underpaid lackey, the U.S. Government, want.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
So you would rather see people die and suffer than make health care available to everyone? Very compassionate.
This issue hits me on a personal note. My girlfriend, through no fault of her own, does not have health insurance. It costs mega-bucks whenever she needs to see a doctor. I pay for it, of course -- I love her. But it makes me really sad that there are people who can't get health care at all -- and they might not have the benefit of someone who will pay for it for them. And guess what happens when they come to the hospital, pleading for a doctor, begging for their lives? That's right -- they turn them away, because they don't have the cash.
It's sickening.
If you think the music that is out now sucks, imagine what it would be like if this happened. No more full CDs, so the only thing that any music company would be interested in would be hit singles. That really great song that is on the CD, but is too long or too different to become a hit single? For get it, it's gone. Can't be sold. You can do maybe one or 2 songs that won't be radio hits, and hope people actually check them out, but a full album is just become a thing of the past, and that is something I don't want to see. I like the songs that don't get released to the radio, I like B-sides, and I don't want to see them disappear.
"Information wants to be expensive" - Stewart Brand, the same guy who said "Information wants to be free"
I'm glad they can't use the other programs.
It's these "sheep" that are getting everybody into trouble. If they weren't on napster then to this day the press would never have heard of MP3s.
I'm not saying this coverage hasn't done good things. We can now get portable mp3 players and there are a lot more songs available.
I will miss the fact that when I can't find a rare song on irc it will be on napster (I just have to wait longer because no matter they say people on Napster are slow), but I will not miss having to deal with idiots so that I can get a mp3 of Dave Matthews Band playing All Along The Watchtower with the Grateful Dead. How many times have you found a great song only to find that the person offering it: lied about their connection speed (funny story on that one), mislabeled the song - with the wrong artist and song name (I actually downloaded a cool live pearl jam song only to find out that it was some odd spanish song), cancel your download 95% of the way through, didn't compress with a high enough quality causing funny noises, or just cut the end of the song off while recording it? You don't find too many of these problems on IRC (before napster's songs got spread around that is) the only thing you ever had to worry about then was if you lost you internet connection before the download is complete, and that problem is solved with high-bandwidth always-on connections.
the Funny Story I promised:
When I first found out that my sister was using Napster I asked her if she had left the server on (this machine is too old and underpowered for such things). She said "Yes, but dont worry, I didn't let it slow down the computer because I set it to the highest speed." Turns out she had labeled that 28.8 connection as a T1 line. Kind of proves my point though.
Good Riddance.
Devil Ducky
Devil Ducky
MY peers would get out of jury duty.
2. According to the CNN article, two main points of Napster's defense were "gee, we didn't know there was pirating going on," and "sharing is personal use." Both are bogus arguments that either point to a horrible legal strategy or (more probably) a doomed business model.
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
The Entitlement Generation is an attitude that began with the hippies of the 60s, but is going full-force among the GenX crowd. They feel they are entitled to the big salary coming out of college
If they're GenXer's coming out of college now, it's took them quite a while(The last of the genXers were born around '76 I think) I'm of the next generation (Gen Y or whatever the hell else you would like to call it) And Yes, After spending close to $100,000 on my education, plus getting 2 1/2 years of actual co-op time in the computer industry, and spending a couple of thousand dollars to get my Oracle and MCSE, A+, and other certifications, I think that I should get at least 80K+ when I get out of school next year.
I also think that programs like Napster should be able to operate. While I don't use it because I don't have a fast enough connection. I think that programs like this should be available as a distribution channel for artists that aren't big enough/ or don't want to be associated with RIAA.
I happen to be a big fan of techno music. And while I can get mix tapes of all the local DJ's that I want with ease at parties, but it's really hard to get music from out of state DJ's that that either I've seen because they have come to Detroit, or even one's that I've never heard of.
(Speaking as someone who reads the freenet-dev list, not as one of the developers!)
$ cat < /dev/mouse
"When i hum a madonna song, am i infringing her copyrights? "
/.) about the RIAA shaking down Girl Scout camps for royalties for songs they sung around campfires! If I wasn't a lazy bastard, I'd track down the link...
According to the RIAA, Yes. I seem to recall a story several months ago (perhaps right here on
"The axiom 'An honest man has nothing to fear from the police'
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
Not just OpenNap. There is also AlterNap, BOMBnap, DJNap, Doublehirc, EnergyBC, GimmickNap, IndustrialNap, Insomniac, ItalianNap, KinkyNap, MP3Boy, MyNapster, Nakednap, NedBelNap, OzIndexNapsterNetwork, PhrozenNap, PowerNap, ProcrastinatorNap, and PublicAccessUNIXSystemsNapsterServers. If you have any questions, i dont know, i just got all the names off Napigator (a great little util for win32 Napster).
Mark Duell
Read The Fscking Article. =)
t ml
The RIAA said it would post a $5 million bond requested by the judge against any financial losses Napster could suffer from being shut down pending the trial.
http://www.zdne t.com/zdnn/stories/newsbursts/0,7407,2608120,00.h
Pablo Nevares, "the freshmaker".
Pablo Nevares, "the freshmaker".
- 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?"
Now, I think it's fairly clear to everyone, that Napster's success is primarily due to the trading of copyrighted works of artists from major labels. My own downloading has almost exclusively been limited to those groups. The only unsigned artist I've downloaded was Meryn Cadell, and her work was almost impossible to find anyway...
Napster is claiming that they are just another way of sharing files (like ftp). But in practice, it's used for the sharing of copyrighted work.
Because of Napster's centralized model, it would be possible for searches to only return "kosher" songs. They could basically set up a killfile that searches for certain strings, and eliminates those songs from being searched. They could also re-add songs that are deemed ok (for instance if some artist wrote a song "Briteney Spears Sucks" it should not be killed because it contains "Briteney Spears".)
Obviously, people would find ways around it (like spelling songs backwards, and using 3l33t sp34k), but Napster could figure ways around it.
And if some songs would slip through every once in a while, I don't think that the courts would rule against them--as long as they show a good faith effort.
But face it, napster has never tried to block copyrighted songs. And it's not because it's technically impossible, but because they get their bread and butter through illegal activity (committed by others).
Oh, and I'm not saying I'm against free distribution (so people can preview before buying), but that is up to the individual artists and labels until such time as fair use is expanded by congress. I would like to see fair use expanded to say that it's alright to preview music, but the laws don't say that...
I posted a complete list of Servers here. My presonal favorite is mp3.chemlab.org:8888 .
Mark Duell
The best thing about Napster's alternatives is that they are neither strong nor unified. There is nothing to attack.
Not having the sheep around for a while might not hurt either. I'm a little tired of the whole OSS = Intellectual Piracy spin that we've been catching in the media lately.
-cwk.
If Napster is disabled for a week, they might recover. If they're disabled for a month, I don't think it matters past that point, they'll have lost most of their marketshare and mindshare and I doubt they'll ever recover.
:/
That's what I call some DAMN signifigant harm to Napster.. I thought that an injuction was only granted to prevent signifigant harm to one party when it would not signifigantly harm the other party.. Oh well, I guess the law runs different if you're the record industry.. Unless it's settled in a month, Napster is the walking dead.
I give it $100 if they don't settle within a week. They'll have to implement something where any song with a particular word in the title is rejected. And the RIAA gets to choose which words. And if you have a song that has those words in the title well, sorry.
not a lawyer but can you imagine in the M$ case, the judge saying "Whoa, this internet moves so fast and Netscape is such a small fry. We gotta shut M$ down until the case is over."
Yeah right.
every man and every woman is a star
of the corporate idiots.
Contrary to what the man in the solid-gold ferrari (lars) would like you to beleive, artists aren't starving to death from the big bad napster. Limp bizkit has embraced napster, encouraged their fans (like me) to have napster and use napster and go ahead and trade limp MP3's on napster. Limp bizkit got free concert sponsorship by napster, limp got money, limps fans get a free concert, all groups get cash and publicity and are generally happy.
Lars, on the other hand, has rejected napster. He has made derogatory comments toward napster, he has alienated 330,000 of his fans, he got a lot of bad publicity, he loses money from the people who are sick of his actions and refuse to buy metallica CD's.
What all the artists and regular people saying the evils of napster seem to forget is that NAPSTER IS FOR AND BY PEOPLE WHO LOVE MUSIC!
Shawn fanning created it because he needed a better way to find MP3's. Software developers for napster created it because if they hated napster, they wouldn't be working for it. The people with napster are supporting it by having their collection available to everyone else on napster. The so-called "pirates" lars has spoken of don't exist. People who have (had) metallica songs on napster and were booted off weren't snickering while downloading songs and saying "haha look at lars we're stealing from him because we hate him and his band". The people downloading it did so because they liked metallica. If they didn't like metallica, they would have either deleted the songs or never downloaded them in the first place.
None of the people on there are on napster for the sole purpose of spiting, stealing from and angering artists. They are on napster because they enjoy listening to music. Napster users buy more music, as the independent study showed. Is this hurting the RIAA? That the people with this software are buying more music? If anything, more music being bought means more dough for music execs. If the RIAA endorsed napster, we wouldn't have 300,000 alienated fans, we wouldn't have the dumb puppet man, we wouldn't have this lawsuit and we would still have napster.
Why can't we all get along?
Kris
botboy60@hotmail.com
Nerdnetwork.net
Kris
botboy60@hotmail.com
Nerdnetwork.net
Interestingly, Judge Marilyn Patel, who issued this injunction, is the same judge that ruled that source code is speech when Bernstein challenged the encryption export restrictions a few years back. See this EFF press release.
Why should owning previous aging non-digital media grant you the right to perfect copies of new, cleaner media? I mean, that's like expecting Ford to give you a new car for free because you bought one 6 years ago.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
I feel like I have to weigh in on this one.
Those who know me know that I am a supporter of intellectual property rights, but if they are shut down, it's wrong.
Why? Because they are supposed to be innocent until proven guilty.
Eewww... I've done it. I've "joined the other side". Ok, maybe not, but I think you get the idea. If *I* can say "Napster OK, RIAA sucks", this is kind of like Nixon going to China... on a smaller scale.
Hardcore /. Open Source poseurs should take note of course, that I expect constitutional protections to be granted uniformly. That means that I don't think MS should be punished until all their appeals are exhausted either.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Oh, and Napster isn't being shutdown, they're just being asked to not allow the sharing of commercial music... Simple greps will take care of that...
Actually, IIRC, the plaintiffs have stated that they are unable to provide Napster with a comprehensive list of the music they hold copyright to. I don't know if this is still true, but if it is, it seems wrong to force Napster to shutdown in such a roundabout way, since the only way to avoid a shutdown would be to have a comprehensive list of music the plaintiffs hold copyright on.
it makes me think that the old days of requiring property ownership before you can vote weren't such a bad idea.
$20 says your a republican. The rich get richer, the poor get poorer. That's a bullshit way to do things, and i won't give up my mp3's because of the recording gentry. It seems to me that this has been a long time coming. Music should be free. Yes, of course the artists have a right to make a living off their music, that's what they do. So go to their concerts, buy a fscking t-shirt. Do whatever it is that you do to support them. But let's not hear some bullshit schpiel about how Napster is killing the music industry. (fuck, are people still making music now days?) The artists get something on the order of 12 cents for every album that's sold, the rest goes to the label, the A&R guys, and the promoters. Personally, i'd be willing to pay 12 cents a download if the oh so wise author of the fucking thong song decided that's the way he wanted to play it. (Thank you Sisqo you brainless twit)
The point is that napster isn't going to destroy the record industry. If anything, it's making the RIAA and their cohorts richer. (Read: %80 of all napster users go out and BUY CD's of the bands they download).
what sickens me are the people who justify their actions by rationalizations like "music should be about the art, not about money." Well, to those people I say that it's nice of you to make the decision for the artist.
sorry, but that's society's decision in the first place. Maybe i like to dance around in my underwear singing show tunes in the middle of downtown Denver. You think it's up to me to decide if i should be paid for that? I'm sorry bud, but art is art. If people like it, they'll pay for it one way or another. If people want it for free, i've got two choices. Continue to do it because i love doing it, or get a new line of work. I say the same to the bands out there who are so poor and misunderstood by the rest of the general public. Why? Because if a band is just in it for the money anymore, that makes them SELLOUTS - and personally, i'd like to see them broke and homeless.
Now go listen to some Pavement before your brain explodes!
FluX
After 16 years, MTV has finally completed its deevolution into the shiny things network
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
The second wave was a lot more intelligent, people recognizing that Napster isn't really the best example of a responsible musical revolution. I wonder what that says about slashdot readers.
Frankly, I think this decision is a lousy excuse to start protesting the RIAA. Clueful people should have been protesting them beforehand. Even though the RIAA doesn't have the artist's interests at heart, at least their actions against Napster are in line with most artists. Ask yourself why you are protesting the RIAA? For artists rights? Or because you irresponsibly want your free music? jeez.
Napster is a hypocritical company whose actions aren't in line with the rhetoric it spews. I couldn't believe their "Sharing" argument. They'd expect people to believe that a million people swapping cds is the same "in essence" as three friends swapping cds. Please.
This is good for musicians that are trying to protect their investments. Napster has never been a cause, they don't stand for artists' rights, consumers' rights, or anything like that. They has never looked out for any other interests other than accumulating eyeballs, traffic, and bucks.
tune
skkkoooonnnggggkkk ptui
Granted the city itself does have its contingent of ultra-liberal "money BAD, technology BAD, geeks BAD, economic growth BAD, uh... poverty GOOD, urban decay GOOD" folk. But most people seem to be brighter than that.
Besides, it seems that even the ultra-liberal crowd should've sided with Fanning and Co., seeing as Napster's yet to make a profit, whilst metalica rakes in millions, and their masters, billions, each year.
Dissapointing, to say the least.
Well, I, for one, on general principle, will be downloading the entire metallica, dr dre, and m&m catalog's tonite, before Napster goes offline. I wonder if my ex-roommate's anonymising usenet gateway will accept so large a tarball?
john
Resistance is NOT futile!!!
Haiku:
I am not a drone.
Remove the collective if
Imagine all the people...
Try watching or reading the news before complaining. The judge has issued a preliminary injunction against Napster until the case is resolved. They will be shutting down Friday. Notice the time in the quoted article -- 2:00 was when the hearing was. They may have not yet updated their MOTD, but the injunction has been made.
Turn on CNN's Headline News if you have it.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
I don't know about you, but I've been buying lots of used vinyl lately. I upgraded my turntable earlier this summer and have been converting all my vinyl to CD audio. It qualifies under anybody's interpretation of 'Fair Use' to do so, so long as I retain the original vinyl, which I fully intend to do.
I am worried, though, about the erosion of 'fair use' that a lot of boneheaded pirates are accelerating, by calling it 'fair use' to widely distribute rips of their CD collection to total strangers over the net. If it keeps up, 'fair use' may go away altogether. Thanks, guys.
I think that the son of one staff member is using our company dial-up access (kind of) for Napster - I wonder if our Internet traffic use will finally fall to something reasonable...?
In reality, the Napster shutdown is not the worst fallout that could result from this case. Napster is essentially a business that has as its strategy using the trading of copyrighted works as a means to make money for itself. In this sense, Napster is not significantly better than the RIAA in terms of exploitation of other people, though the RIAA companies certainly have exploited more artists and customers in their actions.
The worst of the outcome in this case lies in how digital copyright violators are perceived by the mainstream media (and especially the representatives in DC) after this case is over. The business aspect of Napster has unfortunately been associated with the users of Napster, but in reality (as shown by the earlier articles on the insides of Napster, Inc.) the reasoning and purposes of the two groups of people differs widely.
Napster users could very well being using Gnutella, Freenet, or any other service (including OpenNAP servers) that allows the "piracy" of copyrighted works. The justification of those users would still have the same validity, though, regardless of the service being used. The Napster business group, though, as described above, is essentially planning to exploit the copyrighted works of others to make money. Due to the fact that Napster, Inc. is being sued, though, the users will likely be branded "pirates" and "thieves" along with the company due to the inevitable adoption by the mainstream media of the RIAA's lexicon.
So, in conclusion, I would say that losing Napster is not the bad part of this case. It is the possiblity that users of those services, people who violate digital copyrights but feel that such action is justified in some way, will result from this case with a bad reputaion, unable to be taken seriously since they are perceived simply as criminals, just like those once-famous Napster executives.
SB
www.DigitalRenegades.org -- Are your opinions being unfortunately buried in discussion boards? Submit essays, short bytes, or article responses to be posted concerning why digital copyright violations are widespread and continue to occur.Don't get me wrong, there's nothing wrong with people not knowing about how their computer really works. (Who in here really knows how their car works?) Irregardless of their level of knowledge, it is the masses, the sometimes unwitting people all around us, who drive what happens in this country.
Remember, before all of these sheep got interested in the Internet (and corporations thought they could make money off of it), nobody really cared about the 'net...
This is an outrage! On an issue so new and unique, the fact that this decision can be made by one person when there are MILLIONS of people supportng either side of the issue is just a damn shame! This isn't such a cut-and-dry issue that can be decided so easily. What does this say of our nation? This issue was uncharted territory in the legal world, and one person got to decide based on THEIR WHIM, not based on the outcome of a collective thought process and representation of the people this issue really affects. It goes against everything our legal system was built for. Yeah, maybe napster's days were numbered, as we all know. That's not what bugs me. Who cares if napster is gone? better throughput on the major backbones now. But this represents what is wrong and corrupt with the US legal system. -Mike King
This betrays either a woeful lack of understanding, a blatant bias, or a harmfully-narrow reading of the statute.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
Great. Once again the major labels fuck things up for everyone. There's a lot of music available via Napster that isn't on the major labels. Don't they have a say in this? Where the fuck are the independent labels in all of this? Why shut down Napster instead of having Napster block the music by the major labels?
Everyone loses now. The people promoting their music from major labels. The music that I won't be able to try out otherwise. Who fucking cares if people are downloading Britney Spears songs. They hear that shit on the radio anyway. What about all the music that doesn't make it to the radio? I enjoy searching for songs, then adding people to my hotlist to see what other kind of music they listen to. It's like the Amazon "people that bought this also got this CD" situation but better. I see songs by people I have never even heard of all the time. The best part is that I can hear the whole song and learn about someone new. That's really important to me before I try to hunt down a CD that might not even be carried by Amazon or any other major retailer. Not to mention the amount of money that I am going to have to plunk down before I even get to listen to the whole CD.
What a shame. For both the major labels dominating the whole situation and the smaller labels failing to stand up and be counted.
</rant>
Prevent email address forgery. Publish SPF records for y
This order restrains Napster from enabling the copying of copyrighted works that the plantiffs (ie, the major record labels) have rights to. Granted, it effectively removes a large chunk of the content availble through Napster, but it is different than a shutdown.
How might this be implemented without a shutdown? I am playing a devil's advocate here, as I definitely hoped that Napster could continue in its present form. But, the labels could provide to Napster a list of all song titles that fall under their copyright, and the Napster server could employ pattern matching to prohibit songs with those names from being traded.
Sure, the list would be huge. And one could just rename a file, or intentionally misspell it -- so it would be quite easy to bypass.
But it would hinder searching for them. And, if a user delibrately rename/misspell a filename, the user him/herself, and not Napster, are conciously committing an act to skirt it, so the onus rests on them, and might consitutute that Napster is at least reasonably trying to proactively block unauthorized material from their servers.
There's 10 types of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
Try Audiogalaxy. It's a lot sweeter than Napster and still evolving. Better yet, it has a Linux client and some GPL'd source code!
Ryan Earl
Software Engineer
Ryan Earl
Software Engineer
The RIAA still doesn't get it. All the free and open alternatives to Napster are _still_ going to eat their business models alive. When will the suits realise that it's OUR Internet? Where will this all stop?
OK, Napster is being lead to the headsman's block - and others will follow if we're not careful. If DeCSS is any indication, they'll go after the people WRITING OpenNap, GNUTELLA et. al. under the same shoddy banner. OK, then these people go underground too. How will the man strike back?
If the RIAA and other such don't-kill-our-golden-goose organisations had thier way, you'd only be able to get a one way connection to the Net. That is, you only get back what you request - no serving files, IRC uploads banned and other such restrictions to control the channel and make sure they make money. Don't forget, fellow geeks, that the bandwidth-blood of the Internet is controlled ultimately by the telephone and communications companies - a single point of failure in my book.
I say we come up with a way of usurping any way that the man can try to wrest control back. Anyone figured how to get a respectable data stream across a HAM link? Soup up an AirPort, and distrubute them throughout the world to people willing to help?
OK, so I'm paranoid. I just know that these short sighted business men are trying to find a way to reign in the Net, to make it spout cash and nothing else - no new ideas except for them. The net is our best hope for bringing people of all stripes together, and by doing so make the world a better and safer place for our progeny.
Ech. I'm sounding like Katz - time to shut up.
"Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm." - Anonymous
I've been playing music for more than twenty years, bought all my recording equipment one painful bit at a time (sometimes I have to choose strings over food, dear), spent uncountable hours learning everything from soldering to dual-integrator EQ networks so I could reconstruct that which I wasn't able to afford for gear, and I choose to give my music away, selling only to enthusiastic fans who want to help me get more gear, strings and food ;) which is also my best shot at the most expensive musician cost of all- attention. I rely upon new media such as Napster to provide distribution at no cost to me. I've asked publically for my tunes to be put on Napster by anyone who can spare the time to download them and put 'em up for sharing. I remember having to physically transport cassette tapes around in order for anyone to hear my music, not so many years ago. Now I don't have to pay anything to get my music into someone's hands, thanks to Napster and other services like it, and thanks to mp3. You talk like I ought to be selling individual CDs to every single listener 'to make profit' on my music- like I should want no more mp3, that I should want only purchasable, accountable physical media.
I should have to buy _trucks_ for my distribution because people like you want to prop up the RIAA?
And we don't even need the Napster client to connect to them. Linux users have a big selection. But windows is limited to www.filenavigator.com and www.napster.org.uk ~ Two windows clones that I know of
I have only one thing that I can say to a silly post such as this: precedent. Shutting down Napster is BAD - I'll say it again - BAD! It creates precedent, a means for the money grubbing lawyers to say, "hey look you did this before, it's the same thing now so shut these guys down too!" to any other startup that deals in copyrighted materials. I love napster, and I do use it to reclaim music for cd's I can't find anymore (but still technically own) and yes, to hear new music *before I buy* it (did you read what that idiot Hillary Rosen from the RIAA said, "Clearly, people who are using Napster love music. They're probably our best customers." Duh. Alienate your best customers. It goes to show that the RIAA has no interest in the "customer" except to take their money and run.) So I shall state once again, shutting down napster IS technically illegal, due to the nature of the product, and it WILL create precedent. This will cause other companies and their lawyers to be more aggressive in their approach when dealing with issues such as this. Precedent is bad in this case, when Napster has done to the letter of the law (in the U.S. at least) nothing wrong, but will be found guilty due to the rampant corruption in the US justice system. I mean, the RIAA is known for being a BIG contributor to the govt. in the U.S. so who are they really fooling here? Themselves, in the long run, by believing they can actually win. Shut down napster and another, better, stealthier product will come along and take up the torch and move along. I think to say that shutting down napster is the end all would be foolish. You are right with your reasons above, but these will happen if Napster (by some freak chance) does win this case as well. If they lose, what you say above is possible, but much more difficult to achieve. Oh, and try going to http://freenet.sourceforge.net to see what they offer. It isn't as user friendly, but it opens up a whole new world of opportunities for a more connected internet. It also on a lesser note opens up a new can of worms for the money grubbers to contend with, which is great IMHO.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
Now there's an interesting standard for ethics.
DFL
Never send a human to do a machine's job.
Napster isn't being run by idealistic young teenagers or 20-year-olds. It's being run by a well pedigreed team of middle managers. They're not going to sacrifice themselves or Napster just to make a statement. They're going to settle one way or another. (See my other post for why I claim that.)
Although, I will agree that the RIAA was a little stupid. Napster, because of the aforementioned team of middle-managers was trying to figure out how to safetly join the RIAA fold. How to satisfy the industry while still being able to do their own thing. Now they've lost one way or another. They'll either castrate their service, or go dead. Either way they'll lose their mindshare/marketshare.
And get replaced by services that ARE being run by idealistic young students, and who won't try to be concilatory.
Bzzt. Napster is all about a new model of distribution. "Piracy" to me invokes images of swashbuckling on the high seas. In the sense of copyright it is merely a contrivance meant to paint copyright violation in a bad light.
But what if there are no copyrights? Napster suddenly becomes a new model of distribution (sound familiar?). They are making a business out of piracy only in a world where copyrights are protectable. Unfortunately, the internet has proven that they are increasingly not. Essentially, that is Napster's argument - that the whole entire system is going to undergo a fundamental change, and they are at the forefront of it.
You can go ahead and scribble and rant about piracy all you want, but the fact is it's only illegal as long as the law is on the books. The 20 million upper-middle class, educated white people (you know, the ones that vote) that have signed up with Napster represent a huge chunk of political equity. Some enterprising politician is going to realize this. It would not surprise me if you saw legislation as early as the 107th session extending the AHRA or amending the "fair use" clause to support Internet filesharing. "Piracy", at least in the Napster sense, looks to be an increasingly deprecated term.
--
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
The king is dead, long live the king! (ie. There will always be another!)
I'm afraid not.
Napster has proven itself to be a good faith player with the producers and distributors in the music industry. There will be something similar to what you describe with regard to downloaded music, eventually. But when Napster loses their case, they'll be liquidated and their assets given to the RIAA. The RIAA will probably then rebrand the 'Napster' trademark for what it's worth, to recover legal costs.
I'm trying to think of where they might use the trademark. I'm thinking maybe they'll sell it to Johnson&Johnson. It would make a nice trademark for a hip brand of disposable diapers.
I for one applaud the judge having the guts to drop the hammer on The Entitlement Generation. This proves that the justice system does get it, and is not intimidated by crap like "it's a new world, and you better get on board before you get left behind."
The Entitlement Generation is an attitude that began with the hippies of the 60s, but is going full-force among the GenX crowd. They feel they are entitled to the big salary coming out of college. They feel entitled to free health care. They feel entitled to stock options. They feel entitled to free web sites without any advertising.
And yes -- they feel entitled to the work of recording artists.
I would bet that most of the people outraged by this decision have never created anything of value in their lives, and most likely never will. They will never watch the fruits of their labor ripped off. They are the people who suckle at the teat of society.
What sickens me are the people who justify their actions by rationalizations like "music should be about the art, not about money." Well, to those people I say that it's nice of you to make the decision for the artist.
When I see people with their pseudo-socialistic attitude that they deserve everything for free, it makes me think that the old days of requiring property ownership before you can vote weren't such a bad idea.
--
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
I'm not just being obnoxious. It's important to realize that (shocker) money isn't everything, and there are valid non-economic reasons for doing things. The rights and the harm here only tangentially depend on money... although the vigor with which this is pursued has everything to do with money.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
Without those sheep, there wouldn't be such a large supply of music available. Before Napster, I used USENET to find mp3s and unfortunately never could find much of what I wanted, because largely a few people post what they themselves like. A small number of USENET people take requests for mp3s, and I always felt bad for asking since I'm on an ass-slow connection and can't upload easily.
/. reader, I tried Gnutella when it was available. My conclusion? Why bother using it for mp3s, when using Napster produced more results, and greater chances of finding a high-quality 192kpps or greater version (I may be on a slow connection, but I can't stand crummy low bitrate stuff; I'm half-blind, but my hearing is great...). Plus, there's nothing wrong with ease of use. I will never understand why some people around here are practically *offended* by ease of use. Why use a more complicated system if an easier-to-use one, which saves the user's time and effort for other pursuits, is available? If I wanted files other than mp3s, Gnutella or Freenet is the tool of choice, but for mp3s nothing can beat Napster for both variety and for saving my precious time (until the plug is pulled, at least).
/. are nice down-to-earth people, but some have these Sysadmin=God complexes, and look down on people who appreciate ease of use and such principles. Quite frankly, we have the Mac to thank for making computers popular and sparking interest of the generation which spawned the Net, and cheap x86 boxes with Windows to thank for turning the Net into the common ground of immense possibilities which it is today. While *nix owned the Net on the server side, without those Windows and Mac users the Net would still be a small playground for a few comp sci majors and academics.
Then came Napster, and Napster was good. Type in a song title and artist, and the odds were that it was there. The key was sheer volume of users whose entire collections were available at any given time. Being a faithful
Try getting something terribly specific like "When I Fall" and the other tracks from *Martinis & Bikinis* by Sam Phillips on USENET or Gnutella; not very likely, whereas I pieced it together from Napster after a little nightly diligence. I repeat: those "sheep" you condescendingly talk about are the reason for that, since sheer number provides greater chance for finding the files you want. Please, stop being such elitists, some of you. Most people on
Napster is now belittled by some around here for bringing this sort of file sharing to the masses. Nothing personal, but those few who dislike anything made for the masses ought to stop actingng like such l337 hax0r chillun. There's a difference between the mind-numbing stupidity fostered by AOL, and stuff that's just easy to use as opposed to stuff which actively promotes stupidity. Not everyone is or wants to be a guru, try to understand that and don't belittle something merely because of its ease-of-use or shininess. What is actually bad about what Napster has done (aside from the debate over morality of mp3 trading)?
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws."--Tacitus, *The Annals*
from new.com:
"She also ordered the RIAA to post a $5 million bond to compensate Napster for lost business should Napster eventually prevail in the case. "
IANAL; hell even if I was a lawyer, I wouldn't tell anybody.
"I'm a Genius!"*
*Not an actual Genius
Simple answer to that was that one should have had Metallica in the Artist field, and the other in the Title.
Probably too convenient an answer. To claim Napster is intended to be for unsigned music is hoping for extreme naivety/gullibility in the eyes of the public. The mere fact that mention was made of the analysis of user's query and "selling content" based on this would mean that Napster would *have* to at least passively/tacitly allow such queries, if not explicitly, in order to get the data they're going to be wanting.
So they're kinda stuck, either way I see it. If this "selling content" based on queries is true, there's also the issue of who in the music industry will be willing to deal with them...
Open Source. Closed Minds. We are Slashdot.
Once again, the fallacy of relating a tangible object to an intangible one. One involves the expenditure of physical resources (giving me a new car) while another is dealing entirely with ideas (the sound of something). When you buy a recording, you are being granted a license to listen to it. It should not matter through what medium you listen to the work (just like it doesn't matter what quality of speakers you listen to it through).
Should the water company charge me more if I run the water through a filter so that it tastes better to me? It is a riduclous analogy.
Instead, a more 'correct' analogy would be: I pay John to play a song for me, and he allows me to record it. Should he charge me more depending on the quality of microphone I use?
Or how about: I buy a painting from Jill. Should she change the amount she charges based on the quality of the glasses I view it through?
If I want to upgrade the quality of the recording I am listening to, and can do it without expending any resources on the part of the original seller, why shouldn't I? I already paid for 'it' (the right to listen to the music), I am just improving the experience.
and if you take the amount of money Napster has made, muliply that by the amount of money that everyone using it has paid, take that to the power of the amount of money that everyone using it has made, and throw in $20.
You get $20.
It's not about money. Piracy is about money. It's not about piracy.
It's about control of information. Information is power. It's about power. It's about power.
Who's got the power?
--
+&x
Ok, don't start going into Napster withdrawal syndrome yet ;-) There's an excelent alternative to that: OpenNAP. Its a napster network, free from Napster Corp. And there's plenty of users and music on the OpenNAP network too. The site also lists alternative clients, even for those using Windows. Plus there's gnutella and other alternatives (I have'nt checked them all out yet).
They haven't lost yet. This is just a preliminary injunction; the judge is in effect saying "stop until we get this mess sorted out."
Thirdly, it means all the people downloading MP3 songs can get really pissed off. And then they can send emails to their members of Congress and Senators.
How is this.. feel free to use it if you find it useful.
Dear Congressperson,
I'm not voting for you anymore becuase the court system is making it harder for me to steal music. How dare they! I thought as an tax paying American I had the right to steal as much music as I wanted to. I'm sorry to find out I was wrong. Please do something about this travesty of justice.
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
- I am a musician (see URL link above- please visit it if you haven't already?). A NON-RIAA musician. The RIAA labels are my competition, and crushing, stifling competition they are too, and I have to work really hard to get production values comparable to the majors (or better).
- I had songs on Napster BY REQUEST. I publically asked people to put my songs off mp3.com in their Napster directories, if they could, if they didn't mind taking the trouble to do so. I own my songs AND the mechanical recordings of 'em and I have an absolute right to permit such distribution. It's _my_ say-so, not the RIAAs, not mp3.com's.
- Napster is being shut down anyhow- the RIAA lawyers successfully convinced the judge that _I_ don't exist, just like the RIAA continually tries to convince the listening public that I don't exist, that nobody like me exists.
- So- the judge is taking away a _major_ distribution channel from me, at the request of... my competition.
Who thought _this_ one up? Wait, don't tell me, it might just possibly be the the same trade organisation that taxes the blank tapes I record MY MUSIC on, said taxes again going to my competition. Yes, the same people who arranged that I have to pay money to help the Backstreet Boys out-PR me have now arranged to sabotage a _key_ internet distribution mechanism that could work in my favor- and of course are also suing the 'label' (mp3.com) that I signed with (ever hear Roger McGuinn's take on the mp3.com contract? This is the leader of The Byrds. He loves the mp3.com contract- it's actually _fair_. Quick, kill it before more people realise how brutal standard major label contracts are! Competition must die!)I don't remember agreeing to steadily pay off my biggest, most implacable competition to bury me. Please, Judge Ma'am, stop the music industry, I'd like to get off? Seems that owning my own music, owning my own equipment, recording only my own songs, attempting no samples and expecting no industry PR is not enough for me to be allowed things like non-RIAA distribution channels and the ability to buy tapes at the store to put MY MUSIC on and not pay taxes to my biggest competitors. So please, Judge Ma'am, if you hear of a free market out there somewhere won't you let me know? Apparently me buying all my own gear and recording all my own stuff and trying to put it out there through services like Napster is not permissible. Tell me, is this for my own good? Should I learn to behave? :P
(this is turning into a song- now if only my lungs will hold out to put out a quick single- fighting off chest-cold from hell)
---
/bin/fortune | slashdotsig.sh
There was a discussion on NPR today concerning digital music. An intellectual property lawyer was arguing that MP3s and services like Napster are coming under the same fire that VCR and VHS tapes did back in the 80s(?).
The movie companies and broadcast TV stations, were scared that VCRs would erode their markets. Suddenly, millions of viewers could record their programs and distribute them. How could the broadcasters protect their material?
They couldn't, and even today they cannot.
When Sony, among other companies, was brought to court, the judge ruled against the media companies for a few reasons:
1) The VCR technology had become penetrated the consumer market very deeply. To outlaw a device in common use would anger a huge amount of citizens.
2) If there is a legal use of a technology, like using VCR tapes to store personal videos, or share licensed material, the media cannot be made illegal even if there is an illegal market -- video pirates.
MP3s parallel VCRs so incredibly well. There is a legal market for MP3s, as evidenced by eMusic and MP3.com. These companies have been growing a customer base that isn't going to be happy if unnecesary restrictions are put upon them.
Further, by virtue of the aforementioned companies, MP3s have a legitamite and legal use: the preservation on digital media of home audio recordings.
Content distribution channels like Napster are going to come under fire, but this doesn't spell the end for MP3. This is only the beginning...
Make posters, something along these lines:
NAPSTER is being SHUT DOWN
at midnight on Friday July 28...
FIGHT BACK!
The RIAA can never touch GNUtella!
Download it at HTTP://GNUTELLA.WEGO.COM
Free, Distributed, Open Source, Anonymous!
Replace GNUtella with your sorta-user-friendly distributed-filesharing-system of choice. Post them around your local campus (at night if you want, in order to avoid questions). Be ready to post them again if university officials tear them down.
They will be seen, and they will be seen by the people who matter most. Most colleges and universities have incoming freshmen registering and taking tours now, in addition to summer semester classes.
As to why you should engage in civil disobedience like this, I can never hope to be more persuasive than either of these two great men:
J
(From the ZDNet story):
"Saying there's a strong likelihood that the recording industry will prevail..."
Something tells me the verdict on this one was already decided before it got to trial. Of course, the RIAA doesn't care about the new study that came out that shows that Napster users tend to download more music, or that this is going to hurt independent bands. In fact, it says it in the same article:
"Patel's decision marked a major victory for the U.S. recording industry, which had targeted Napster as a dangerous Internet rival that could short-circuit traditional music sales."
There we have it folks, they consider Napster a rival, which means that its in competition and all they want to do is regain control of their near monopoly (cuz let's face it, there are other labels, but its not like they're easy to find)
As for "traditional music sales", well you can tell that that means the watered down pop-drival, radio friendly bubblegum and gargantuan rock/metal bands (no offense intended to any one who listens to any of those). The RIAA doesn't care that this may help end the careers of the current indie and unsigned bands who may one day become the next Matchbox 20 or Metallica, those are merely possible profits, and not actual profits (which they've yet to definately prove their losing anyways), instead they are suing for possible and future losses. (If the logic here seems confusing, it is... Really this case doesn't make much sense to me either)
Of course, we couldn't expect them to be anything near consistent, after all this is a group that said (from the MSNBC article):
     The recording industry says the Napster case isn't about alienating music lovers, but rather about protecting artists.
     "Clearly, people who are using Napster love music. They're probably our best customers," said Hilary Rosen, president of the RIAA.
Hmmmm.... so Hilary, let me get this straight, you're saying that Napster is causing you to lose money, but the users are your best customers, and you don't want to alienate these customers, but at the same time you are alienating them by cutting off their access to out of print songs & unsigned artists. Well, I guess it makes as much sense as some of your previous logic.
-GreenHell
"I won't mod you down - I feel the need to call you a twit explicitly, rather than by implication."
How can you negotiate with people like this? How can you even have sympathy for them?
--
Spotty Catalog - Lots of stuff I went looking for just wasn't there, and I wasn't looking for rare delta blues, just rock tunes from about 1970 on.
Dubious Sound Quality - About half of the 28 songs I downloaded are lower quality than the cassette copies of LPs we made when I was in college, and I downloaded mostly 160 kbps tracks.
Pokey Slow Downloads - It took me 8 hours to download the 28 songs I did get, and I'm on 768k DSL.
To counter the RIAA's claims, I doubt I'd ever have bought any of the "albums" these songs came from. They're NOT losing money from me, because its money they'd never get from me. They only money they're losing is the money I would have paid if they'd sell me the tracks I want for $.50 each or something. What struck me was that the music industry _used_ to sell loads of 45 RPM records. If you liked a song, you could buy JUST that song and be done with it. I think lots of people wouldn't mind that, but nowadays you can't do that. It's a limited selection of CD singles or buy the whole album, which they prefer because there's so much more margin.
Have you been paying attention to the news lately?
To name a few:
Napster
DeCSS
CPHack
DMCA
Anti-Meth Proliferation Act
Echelon
Carnivore
Freedom in the US is very rapidly vanishing.
Hah! What, you're saying it's unethical to screw the same record companies which have been unethically screwing artists for 50 years? That's your position? Come on. I think you need to make a distinction between murder - the evils of which I don't need to rehash - and reciprocity, which is exactly what these record companies are getting.
I sleep fine with 6000 MP3s on my hard drive, 15-20 queued for download, and thousands uploaded to people across the world. And that's not because I'm amoral - it's because I don't consider it unethical at all.
--
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
I agree Napster must die for free music distribution to reamain free. Remember, Napster could start doing all sorts of nasty things to make money, like placing versions of the songs which include advertising first.
I do not know how long they will be down, but unfortunatly people would not really notice if they are only down for a short period of time and Napster wil come back with just as many users.
We need to maximize the harm done to Napster during this period. College students need to start campus orginiations to help people set up IRC, OpenNAP, napigator, Gnutella, FreeNet, etc. This is an opertunity to move free music distributin out from Napster's shadow that we should not miss.
Fall symester will be starting soon (September here at Rutgers). It would be good to have people posting banners arround campus between now and the end of the first month of school which instructed people in setting up napster alternatives. If we can divert the returning college students then we stand a real chance of preventing Napster from killing free music distribution by selling out to the RIAA.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
Seriously. Email the people at Napster. I'm sure they realize they have a very tough standpoint to get across.
It's bleak for them. Look at it from an uninformed person's perspective. The basis of it is that this is a utility for trading music for free. The uninformed no nothing about unsigned artists, they only think about mainstream, and that's what the RIAA is trying to prove.
The Napster cause could use a lot more people like yourself. Hell, mp3.com should get all of their unsigned artists to join the fight as well. I'm sure there are loads of people with the mp3.com "label" that would be more than willing to fight against the RIAA.
I really wish the RIAA would just die. They will eventually, they can't live forever.
"I would kill everyone in this room for a drop of sweet, tasty beer."
Windows users might find Napigator useful in the intertim. I do not know of a Mac/Linux/BSD alternative, though I suspect that on at least some of the open-source clones, one can manually enter a server that uses the Napster protocol. Here is a list of alternative servers.
yours,
john
At least slashdot has quit linking to Amazon in their book reviews. But they stif use GIFs, as do Red Hat, VA Linux, and even GNOME. The MPAA boycott is a complete joke. The latest spawn of the many-tentacled corporate movie industry was much hyped through out the geek community.
So I'm not expecting much out of this boycott. Sure, a few of us will give up corporate movies and music, but the majority will keep right on eating up all the pop music, movies, and television they can ge their hands on.
For those of you with a backbone, go to independent films, attend live concerts, sell your DVD player, and turn off the TV
before Son of Napster rises and forces the Music industry to die. Maybe this time it will be 40winkster?
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
It exists but the selection is so limited that frankly I coulden't find much of anything I wanted. At least not as far as "popular" music is concerned. I'd love to buy my music that way but unless the major lables unlock their vast libraries completely and make them all as available as they are on CD no thanks.
There are however some great Jazz and classical selections available. And while I do enjoy jazz and classical even there the selection is very limited.
--- Juggle juggle@hitesman.com
there alot more unsigned musicians than signed ones. why not a class action suit against the riaa for restriction of trade. the musicians should detail their experiences of how they didn't get a fair shake with record companies and that alternative distribution didn't exist before napster. now that the riaa has succeeded in shutting napster down, isn't this restriction of trade?
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And Justice for None
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And Justice for None
Well, let's think about what shutting down Napster means to us all.
...
First, it means that Gnutella and other Open Source alternatives will gain mindshare and users. This is good.
Secondly, it means someone won't be driving their fancy car around SF and weaving in and out of traffic. This is also good, although I suppose one could argue against it.
Thirdly, it means all the people downloading MP3 songs can get really pissed off. And then they can send emails to their members of Congress and Senators. And harass the music labels. And look into any unethical business practices that RIAA might be getting involved in.
This is really good
Ya know its funny, I posted this information a while ago when something similar came up. Have any of you people ever bought a compilation CD before? The bootleg ones with all the newest songs on them. If you live in a major urban area where hip-hop and dance are popular, then you've probably seen them, most likely with the name of your local radio station (KTU and Hot97 here in the NYC area).
You wonder about these bootlegs because they contain CD quality cuts on them from material that isn't available commercially ANYWHERE! I should know this becuase I work in a music store. Go into New York city for bootleg versions of all the new radio songs that aren't available as single, go get yourself Jay-Z & Mya, DMX, Creed, Britney Spears, N-sync, whatever, but many of them you can find nowhere in a legal format.
I'm reminded of one very noteworthy song that came out on one of these bootlegs last year fully TWO MONTHS before it was available to the public in any form; radio, video... no one had heard this song or even this artist before. It came out on a dance compilation called KTU radio cuts Volume 3 in early May of '99. The song was called "Genie in a Bottle" and as everyone now knows, it was done by Christina Aguilera. Anyone who follows that stuff knows that her first (and still only) album didn't hit shelves until late July.
You have to wonder, how did this bootlegging company get ahold of an artist's work MONTHS before it came out? Who had the work? Hmmmm... I do believe the record companies had the song, no?
Who else has access to ALL these brand new cuts available elsewhere? This is in all genre's mind you. I'm sure Oklahoma has country bootlegs somewhere. Kind of makes you wonder how the bootlegger's get them if someone VERY high up in the music industry (RIAA?) is the one bootlegging them and selling them blatantly illegaly (as opposed to people D/L'ing one track at a time to hear artists).
Step 1) Free MP3s linked our servers.
Step 3) Make money.
What is step 2?
Note that the contents of the mp3 are technically copyright 2000 napster inc., but I don't think they want to open that can of worms. ;>
Damn! Now how am I gonna replace all these aging vinyl and audio cassettes with a decent digital copy? ..Guess I'll have to move on to some other file-sharing app..
Maybe if I ask the large music companies, they will give me a digital copy of all these old formats I bought - I mean, did I buy the object, or the license? If I bought something on vinyl, should I have to go back out and buy a CD copy?
Whatever..
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Vices - what I lack in originality, I make up for in volume.
Up until now the vast majority of the internet community was able to ignore the court battle - as long as Napster was not actually shut down they could afford not to care. Public opinion is about to make itself known in a big way for the first time, as everyone is deprived of their music source. I'm predicting two things: 1. Napster will never come out of this alive, unless there are so many restrictions imposed on it that it no longer is the Napster we know. 2. The free alternatives are about to get a big boost in user numbers and probably in developer interest. The part I'm afraid of is that they will start censoring traffic at the server level. What I wish they would do is stop selling CDs in the stupid way they have so far. Why are most of us interested in Napster, despite the lower sound quality of MP3? Because we don't want to pay $18+ for one or two songs we like off of an album. If the music industry were to get their act togeather and create a site where you could create your own CD containing ANY 60 minutes of music you wished, from whatever author, I think at least some of the demand for Napster would fade. Certainly a lot of the legitimate use would. Plus, they'd make more money. I think most of us would be willing to pay $3-$4 per song if we knew we were getting songs we liked. Yet I've never heard of them doing that. Is is power, or wanting to maintain an image, or what? If they let us sample songs from such a website, and then let us order a CD of exactly what we want, I think everyone would be better off. But then, that's just me.
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
This is a direct link to the NBC story.
yours,
john
ROFL.. Napster makes a fat whopping zero every month. They make a fat whopping zero every year. And that's just revenues. On the whole they're hemorraghing to the tune of millions of dollars every month.
When was the last time you paid to use Napster?
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I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
While you're at it, why not not shutdown RealMedia, Winamp, Microsoft Media Division (yeah I would love that one) and a slew of other net radios! It's as if people haven't found ways to beat the streaming copy protection of the file which happens to be located in a cached directory on your local PC (for you bootleggers wannabe just go read some of them hackerz sites for this info)
The problem isn't with Napster or GNUtella or any of these other softwares, it's with people out there who are abusing it and RIAA making a giant mountain outta an ants hill (ants hills are smaller than moles hill most of the time take a peek!). I myself download songs using Napster & such but if you really want to hear more music from that artist which you just download, support them by buying some of their albums then you can download more.
The only reason that Napster is getting the heat is because of that Metallica drummer (sorry can't remeber his name right now) who made such a big fuss about it. Don't get me wrong here I like music from Metallica infact I have a few of their albums along with some MP3s from which I can't get their albums
All I'm saying is that RIAA should check around before getting a court injunction on Napster while other softwares with bigger companies (eg Microsoft) get away with similar acts.
In closing I would just like to say is that Recording Industry Ascociations of the World (not just America) take note... music fans are STILL paying your paychecks
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Heh, if you read the article, at the very end, it says:
Several companies have developed such systems, but most users resist paying for something they can get free from Napster, and some of the systems have been invaded by hackers.
What they mean is that a bunch of us coders dressed in fatigues and stormed their corporate headquarters with snurf guns and snurf-proof vests and took hostages, threatening to blow up the building with snurf bombs.
"I would kill everyone in this room for a drop of sweet, tasty beer."
I'm sure someone already posted the napster webcast that happened a short time ago .. I beleive it is still viewable from that link ... also, FYI Wired Magazine has a good 2 page article about the trial today, some interesting reading....
As we all know, Windows file sharing works over the internet, it has search features, it does everything that napster can do! So why not use it? If I understand Windows file sharing corectly, all we'd need to do is setup one large WINS server with everyone's IP address in it. Searching would be easy for even the non-techies, it'd be just like searching for a file right on thier own hard drive! Unix users can use Samba so they're not left out either.
The point I'm getting at here is who created this technology to transfer MP3's (and Movies, etc.)? That's right, Microsoft. Now who is the RIAA gonna sue? Microsoft. But we all know that Microsoft would have the money to defend themselves (if the US government doesn't take it all first!) and they might even win. They'd have to win or Windows would become illegal to use! (Hmm, there's a thought!) The technology is there, right from Microsoft, it may not be good, it may not be secure but the whole reason to use it is because Microsoft has power and MONEY.
They might decide it is in the interest of liberty to sue, and they might give your Class the lawyers.
Its worth a shot. Get out a pen and pad and send a note.
Check out this link Napster Ordered by Judge to Stop Duplicating Copyrighted Music from aol.com.
"Going to war without France is like going deer hunting without your accordion." - Jed Babbin
I have given up all hope for creating change by using words. Whoever said that the pen is mightier than the sword was dreaming. No one cares about constitutions or rights. No one cares about freedom. We have let corporate interests dictate the agenda of the public interest, and they have decided that there is NO public interest. There is only profit. The Free Market was a bad experiment and we need to stop it now before we have nothing left. There is no time left -- they are destroying the planet and our families. They want us to be rich and yet they want us to be slaves. They want to divide us so that we will fight against each other when they know that if we co-operated we might avoid being co-opted.
I have never felt more despair for humanity than I do now. We have given up every ideal and every virtue in the name of Economy. I don't see any hope for the greedy, mean-spirited, selfish despots who are growing fatter by the minute. They are making trillions of dollars and answer to no one. Arguments do not move them. Passion does not move them. Only numbers move them. They are soulless. Trade and commerce do not have to be soulless endeavours. Real entrepreneurs can be very human and forgiving. They can bend the rules for every customer. They can accept responsibility for things over which they have no control. Yes, I said things over which they have no control. Accountability is the buzzword of these Leviathans of commerce. But don't be fooled. They have no accountability whatsoever. They only take responsibility for the things they can "control". This is like leaving the scene of an accident. Hey, I couldn't help hitting that kid when he ran in front of my car -- but that doesn't mean I can just leave the kid there. This is what corporations are doing to our Civilization and to our Earth. They are not people. They don't have feelings and they never get hungry. They don't suffer when someone close to them dies. They are the AI machines that have overpowered their creators. Science fiction fantasies about computers were a mere trifle compared to the voracious, unstoppable, hypnotic hum of the death machines.
The lawmakers and the government are accomplices in this. They don't care about democracy or even about getting re-elected. Your vote means nothing to them. They are just praying that they can keep you busy enough to stop you from thinking about anything. They prattle on about the virtues of industriousness, ingenuity and moral integrity. They are obsessed with motion, activity, incessant, compulsive, blinding, deafening factories that churn out soap, seeds, movies, microchips, cereal, cars, fat-substitutes, abortions, financial "products", software, socks and other distractions. The less time we have to think, the less time we'll have to realize we don't need 90% of the stuff that gets cranked out. We don't have consumer choice. We don't have the choice to live peacefully without the daily infestation of salesmongers, tallymen, and trained chimps dressed in butler suits. These are unstoppable forces because we don't know what they own. We don't know who owns them. We don't know who sits on whose board of directors. These corporate machines have gone too far. This is not freedom or democracy or a Civilization -- this is the War of All Against All, carefully orchestrated by the Invisible Hand-gun of corporate coercion.
We have no alternative. We have no voice. We have no power. We have no government. Our only alternative is to declare War on corporations and fight until there's no one left standing. I don't mean letter writing campaigns. The time for that has come and gone. The letters are screened and sanitized by handlers and PR monkeys. Then they let the lawyers lose. You are food for the maggots. Your family starves while the lawyers eat thick, bloody steaks at the table of the CEO.
Give these sick motherfuckers what they deserve. NOTHING!
I'm not spying, that's why I don't actually know what's going on. All I have are overall company internet traffic figures that jumped rapidly after this guy got dial-in access and when he brought his PC in to be fixed I spotted the Napster client. He has a 10-12 year old son. I only care because traffic above our free quota is now costing us almost the same as the normal monthly fee...
Well, there's still hope. You can use Napigator to switch to one of the "open" Napster servers out there (sorry, its Windows only, although there is probably a way to change the Linux client's server as well, so check out the Napigator server list on the site). I for one plan on using these open servers alot in the coming days as my own peaceful protest/civil disobediance. Good luck Napster!
---- I made the Kessel Run in under 11 parsecs.
is here.
"In a lengthy statemenet, the judge said the recording industry had shown the likelihood to win a trial, while the defendants had failed to prove it had substantial non-infriging uses."
this is the official announcement from napster headquarters. Let's hope they fight the good fight.
keep the music flowing.
--
+&x
"Napster is enjoined from copying or assisting or enabling or contributing to the copy or duplication of all copyrighted songs and musical compostions of which the plaintiffs hold rights," U.S. District Judge Marilyn Hall Patel ordered in a surprise ruling at a hearing in San Francisco federal court.
It's a shame that the RIAA can't embrace this technology rather than denounce it. Napster probably provides more exposure to recording artists than radio play. In fact, is there a difference between recording songs off the radio and downloading an mp3 from the napster network? .ram is here, it's towards the end of the broadcast. Commentary by John Flansburg (sp?) of TMBG.
An interesting take on this whole Napster dilemna on NPR's Marketplace yesterday (July 25th). The
TGL
--- this space intentionally left blank.
What if someone were to just setup a napster server outside of the United States? opennap seems to allow anybody to do this. What about that island near England that's supposed to be a haven to that sort of stuff? I can see it now: Saddam is no longer the ememy! It's those HACKERS that pirate the music. Everybody invade Sealand! It will start World War III. The slashdot article is located here
what will people do once napster is shut down?!?! nobody will be able to get any mp3s! nobody will be able to say "backstreet boys are so gay" in chatrooms anymore! we won't have access to that incredible "discover new artists" service (which is what we all use napster for anyways). well, i guess the moral to this is: if you do illegal things, the government will track you down and take huge drastic measures to insure that the law-breaking STOPS!
...shit
this is like when we had that problem with everybody drinking alcohol. the government stepped in and made drinking illegal, and it solved all our problems. nobody drank, nobody beat their kids and nobody unwound after work. let's hope shutting down napster is equally as successful!
grizzo: totally insecure, but very convenient.
If you win, you could sue to make him pay you for the water during the time you had to give it to him.
All the court is saying is that use of Napster represents a probable violation of RIAA and their artists rights, and that it's continued use is causing immediate harm to RIAA and their artists.
Oh, and Napster isn't being shutdown, they're just being asked to not allow the sharing of commercial music... Simple greps will take care of that...
OK. Fine.
/. norm. A lot of clueless fucks going "yeah! it's shut down!" and a lot of clueless fucks going "this is so wrong!"
I've glanced through the comments so far, and they fit the
Personally, I believe that there is no *right* to make money from an idea, concept, program, series of sounds, etc. And, frankly, the law of the land backs me up. (Go re-read the constitution, idiots.) I've had a number of pious developers try call me on this opinion over the years, but here's the thing: THEY DIDN'T OWN ANYTHING THEY'D EVER WRITTEN PROFESSIONALLY. You make money off of support and maintenance. Period. I get satisfaction from the fact that a very limited number of people can do what I do. I derive continuing income from that same fact. Go ahead. Write the "killer app." The only thing that can support it is a corporation, and that will make it's money from the ongoing fees. Collect your pay and buy a boat, house, Ferrari, whatever. Good for you. If you think you have the right to continue collect in perpituity, you're dreaming.
Bottom line: I can hold a piece of physical property against all comers for a long time. Add my kin into the equation, and we can hold it indefinitely. An idea I cannot hold.
20% of my mp3s, I have legitimate fair use of. 50% are out of publication, and I couldn't go buy the media if tried. 10-15% are whim material, and will probably be deleted in a week or two, unless they end up in the last category: Music that I will buy.
RIAA needs to look at the math.
Regards,
prong
you'd only be able to get a one way connection to the Net
Yep. We're dealing with the broadcast media. Their mindset is completely fixated on serving out the entertainment. (If I may, I'll glob the RIAA in with the MPAA and TV as well for this argument, it fits).
They have always done demographic studies, Nielsen ratings, focus groups.. They have clamored for control, merged and acquired, conglomerated and associated, statistically analysed and strategized every bit of entertainment that they have ever released.
They do not understand. The concept of individual choice is completely, absolutely alien to the people in charge of this thing. They believe in market research, so when some like rap, and some like rock, and others like country while still others like opera... Well, the statistical average of album sales demonstrates a strong corellation that the average consumer buys 1.2 Backstreet Boys and 2.1 Britney Spears albums each week.
[aside] Why do people buy the albums that reinforce these figures? Because they have no choice. It's all they know to be available. It's all they hear on the radio. It's all they hear in the stores. It's all they see on the shelves. Once in a while, some mainstream artist lights a spark in one song, and we buy the album for that ONE song. And over time, we develop a taste for the other tracks on the disc - for the homogenized, cookbook mediocrity. Because we no longer know any better. This is why most people buy WinOS. Lack of awareness that there are alternatives. Yeah, we hear about them, but we don't even know where to look, most of the time. Where's the nearest Strawberries or Sam Goody to where you live? The bright lights point the way. Where's a decent independent music shop? What? Out of business? I wonder why... [/aside]
From their perspective, individual tastes are a statistical anomaly, something that throws off good data and causes special-order album overhead. It's cheaper to send a gross of crap than it is to send 144 individually burned albums. Consumers WILL buy two good tracks on a disc of 15 for $20. They have before. The economies of scale will prevail and money will be made. Here's a PowerPoint slide to show the market research...
At least that's how THEY see it.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
1. No one knows the name of your unknown garage band. Therefore, no one will search for your songs on Napster.
2. The lawsuit against Napster does not prevent you from publishing your band's songs on your own web site. Your band's web site is arguably a better way to publish your mp3s than Napster. You can post band info, tour info, sell t-shirts, link to other bands you like, get fan feedback, and get other music sites to point to YOU! Napster does not allow you to do ANY of these community building functions.
cpeterso
Do you really want to make a difference? Don't just go and vote once. Get all of your friends together and organize. Then you might get a couple hundred votes. A couple hundred votes by a couple hundred cities is a LOT of votes. It's called a "lobby group", and people use them all the time. If you don't have money - the RIAA are a bunch of RAT ASS BASTARDS, so they use money - you can use VOTES.
You get a dozen dedicated guys to haul in a dozen other not-so-dedicated guys who might haul in 3 or 4 guys. Mainly people who wouldn't bother to vote. My mom did this last time because our MP was a bastard (We're in Canada). It worked.
The trick is to take that power and make the weasels you elect dance. You do that by getting each person in your organization to write, the old fashioned way, a letter and mail it, or hand-deliver it. If you mail it registered so they have to sign for it, all the better. BELIEVE ME, your reps will at least give you the time of day. I did this when that CDR tax was being passed; I at least got listened too and a two page letter (not a form letter, either) back.
Laws like this are going to fuck up the economy and technological developments of tomorrow. This ruling will set a precdent that could shut down IRC, shut down USENET, shut down a LOT of things. Think about it and get mobilized.
..don't panic
typically this topic is referred to as prior restraint, not innocent until proven guilty, and while i dont quite remember the court cases dealing with this issue entirely, i think they can pretty much be summarized as follows: prior restraint is generally frowned upon by the united states supreme court, however: it is acceptible if needed to secure another's rights or if its a protection against national security. this decision is where the "clear and present danger" clause is envoked: prior restraint is acceptible if what is being restrained presents a clear and present danger to the national security of the united states (and/or apparently to another party's rights)....i'll look up the actual supreme court case and quote the opinions later, if i need/have time to :)= ===
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If ignorance is bliss, wipe the smile off my face
Mooniacs for iOS and Android
So- the judge is taking away a _major_ distribution channel from me, at the request of... my competition.
I see this post as a call to arms -- not to legislators, but to programmers. The extremist "music should be free" crowd have created programs (e.g. Napster and Gnutella) that don't even attempt to separate artists who want to share their music (e.g. the above poster) from those who don't (e.g. Metallica). By doing this, they have hurt independent artists by:
1. Refusing to separate legal content from illegal content -- and forcing judges (such as this one) to throw out the baby with the bathwater.
2. Flooding music sharing services with illegal bootlegs of major artists, making it even harder for independent artists to be heard.
3. Allowing music sharing services to become synonymous with "stealing," reducing their image as viable distribution methods.
There are a lot of brilliant programmers out there, and hopefully some of you are reading this. For the sake of musicians everywhere who want to be heard: create a music distribution channel that PROTECTS copyrights instead of circumventing them. You can do this; don't sit around waiting for the record companies to do it for you. And if you succeed, there's probably a lot more money (and integrity) in it than there is providing a way for people to steal Pearl Jam tracks over the Net.
Cheers,
IT
Power corrupts. PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.
A guy I know wrote a program that cataloged all the MP3s shared via Windows File Sharing on the campus ResNet and presented a web-based search engine. The nice thing about it was you could download directly through the search engine, even if you were on a platform that didn't support Windows File Sharing.
Of course, having one big server of any kind will get you into Napster-style trouble...
Almost two years ago, when the RIAA sued to keep Diamond from releasing the Rio, the RIAA was granted a temporary injunction preventing Diamond from selling Rios while the trial was on, with the caveat that if the court should find in Diamond's favor, the RIAA would have to compensate Diamond for lost sales during that period.
Well, the RIAA did lose, and had to pay $2 million for postponing the Rio's release by three weeks.
Does anyone know if a similar arrangement is in place here? I'd be curious to know what Napster makes in a month...
Kevin Fox
Kevin Fox
This post is probably going to end up big and fuzzy, and contain lots of little issues for all you copyright nazi's to nitpick me on for days on end. And I know that a preliminary injunction is not a preliminary-injunction-sustained-on-appeal is not a verdict is not a verdict-sustained-on-appeal, and that the end of Napster is not the end of peer-to-peer file sharing; that indeed, nothing this or any judge or government can do can ever erase what Napster has wrought.
/. and Metallica parodies and debates over whether the current record label business model is more like indentured servitude or outright slavery and cover articles of every PHB-oriented PC rag in the biz on how MP3 is revolutionizing...something! (sidebar: copyright law and you)...what will happen on Friday afternoon is that the largest art museum in history will be closed up, maybe for good. And that's sad.
But I'm writing this tonight because I'm genuinely saddened by this ruling--saddened even though I have no doubt it'll be overturned soon, and no doubt it won't really affect anything in the long run. I'm sad because, when you take out all the hype and special reports at ZDNet and Wall Street Journal attack jobs and photos of Lars Ulrich testifying in the Senate Chambers and YRO flamewars at
The largest art museum in history??? That's a new one! But it's true--that's precisely what Napster is: a big place where one can go in, browse, and enjoy a decent portion of the musical art recorded on the planet. If you disagree, then it must be because you don't actually think music is an art form--in which case, well, you either have different tastes from most of humanity or you just haven't come across the music that really speaks to you yet. But rest assured, that music exists, and it's available for your perusal somewhere on Napster.
But...Napster's can't be an art museum! Napster is all about stealing, and pirates, and ripping off artists! See, at an art museum--unlike Napster, ho ho ho!--every time you look at a painting the artist is compensated by... Oh yeah--they're not. Indeed, it's not such a bad analogy after all... But at a museum the artist is the one who *decides* whether *their art* is shared with the public or not! Absolutely wrong. The typical painting available for free public viewing at an art museum is donated by a private donor, who has bought the painting from the artist. The typical recording available for free public listening on Napster is donated by a private donor, who has bought the CD from the artist. The artist has no say in either donation--which is arguably a bad thing. However, what cannot be argued is the fact that the free public sharing is a great benefit for all of society. And furthermore, just as common sense tells you that free public art museums stimulate rather than inhibit public consumption of paintings (and thus help out the oftentimes actually "starving" visual artists), study after study confirms that Napster stimulates public consumption of RIAA music--which, incidently, helps the record labels far more than the artists, although it does help the artists use their piddling royalties (we're talking under 5% of album sales, people) to pay off the hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt they have accrued with the record label.
Yes, the shutting of Napster's doors would be a great public loss indeed. Now, of course, people will argue that Napster is just one of many peer-to-peer file sharing protocols, and that one can always get whatever music recording one wants via an OpenNap server using Napigator, or via Gnutella, Scour, iMesh, Hotline, IRC, FTP, the web... And they're right. But they're missing the point. While Napster may not be clearly the most technologically advanced of the peer-to-peer communities, it has (to my mind, at least) what none of the other options can quite match--a combination of convenience and community building features which make possible a truly new, and in some ways superior, way of getting one's music.
That is, using Napster (on a broadband connection) can sometimes evoke in me that singular experience which harkens back to the halcyon days of the web: surfing. While most of the other methods of getting music off the Internet only help if you know what you're looking for, Napster actually makes if easy (or reasonably easy; it could still stand some improvement, but then again, Mosaic and Netscape 0.9 had some kinks themselves, but in some ways they only added to the charm) to browse the MP3 collections of anyone on the system, searching for new artists and new music that you would have never otherwise heard. Just as a quick drill through the listings on Yahoo! (or a search on altavista once Digital brought it online) used to provide a starting point for my winding surfs across the nascent Web, a search for an artist I like but want to hear more of can provide a point of departure as I look through the shared files of those who already have that artist's music, finding new songs, live recordings, and artists new to me--both similar and entirely different from the one I started out searching for. Yeah, it's a tad cumbersome at the moment to start downloading something I've never heard of, fire up Winamp and stream the incoming song, and decide if I like it and want to look into more of this musician's work; but it often works alright, and it's certainly introduced me to some stuff which, while not quite earth-shattering, has been marginally life-enriching.
Unfortunately, it seems pretty difficult to imagine any for-pay model which could preserve and improve the wonderful surfing aspect of Napster. Or rather, it's not that difficult to imagine; it's just difficult to imagine the industry agreeing to a fair model for distribution--say, the first 3 listens of a particular song are free, then the song costs a cent/minute per listen for another 10 listens, after which point the user owns the song. (Cost for a typical 55 minute album, $5.50--a reasonably fair price, IMO.)
But no, it is difficult to imagine, because music is free now: Napster has made it free. Or really, the Internet made music free, just like it has made newspapers and encyclopedias free (note that you don't see the New York Times or Encyclopedia Britannica suing to shut down the Internet like the RIAA and MPAA are), just like it has made long-distance communications and negotiation buying free, just like it will make movies free, and hopefully (and already has to some degree) make political news and speech in oppressed countries free. Free music is considerably less important than some of these benefits (although arguably more important than others), but that's not the point: the point is that all of them and many others are inherent in what the Internet IS--a medium by which any human being can communicate with any other with no marginal cost.
The RIAA and others can whine all they want, but they won't be able to change the fact that the fundamental nature of the Internet, combined with a good idea some kid at Northeastern University had less than a single year ago, has broken their monopoly on recorded music forever. What they can do, however, is buy unconstitutional laws and gum up the US court system trying to get them enforced, using the power of US law to obtain injunctions against grass-roots Internet art museums left and right. To be fair, I was always a bit squeamish that Napster was desperately trying to think up a way to make money off its service--not because I don't think the service isn't incredibly valuable, but because it's just one of those things which inherently ought to be free, like an art museum. (I know many if not most public art museums aren't free. They should be, though.)
The ironic thing about all this is that a court win for the RIAA will probably be the worst possible outcome for their member labels in the long-run. It will only give the RIAA complacency they cannot afford, drive users to noncorporate peer-to-peer services like Gnutella (try getting an injunction against that!), antagonize the general public (20 million people already use Napster, and according to the RIAA itself, 70 million would have by the end of the year had the case not gone forward--that is, a very very substantial portion of Internet users and society as a whole) and inevitably delay the time when the record labels do what is obviously necessary: digitize their entire catalogs, and sell them, in open, standard, non-access-controlled MP3 format, for a fair price. As it stands now, I doubt I will ever pay an RIAA label again for recorded music, but many Internet users will be less idealistic or more forgiving than me. I would pay a fair fee direct to the artist to download his or her musical art in a heartbeat. (I'd sample it for free off Napster to see that I wanted it first, though.)
But all of that is for the future. Frankly, I've sort of had it with MP3's for a while--the sound quality out a pair of computer speakers isn't horrible, but it's not great either. I've been planning on getting a good stereo for a bit now (at the moment my only CD player is in my computer; dorm life...), and I suppose I'll go ahead with that anyways. Too bad I'll probably have to burn my own CDs. But for now I'll just go on exposing myself to as much music as possible, and mourning the potential end of one of the most incredible uses of the Internet for the betterment of society which has come around so far.
Perhaps Napster will end up like Netscape after all--gone but not forgotten, a company which changed the world for the better but then made the fatal flaw of trying to charge for something it had already made free, its spirit carried on in a community-owned open-source extension of its original promise.
Actually the best IMHO is the open source client TekNap (for Win/Linux) made by luna_jenny and the rest of the OpenNap team, based on the similar BitchX plugin. But for the more GUI inclined, AudioGnome is the way to go.
PsycoticHamster
aka. Trilobyte on OpenNap
This article on CNN states that the shutdown is to occur at 3am EDT on Saturday Morning.
This is most outstanding. With all the reports of Napster actually promoting and improving music sales, this kind of injuction is like a slap in the face of the whole community. I wonder if they realise that they're likely to get a whole bunch of people popping up with their own versions. There are a lot of alternative clients out there for Napster, it won't be hard for someone to engineer an alternate server application.
Suddenly Gnutella (and its clones) looks like it could see a huge rise in popularity. You can't get banned from it, can't be easily traced with it, and you can share everything, not just MP3's. RIAA is going to have a lot more to tackle than just MP3 sharing. Movies, warez, music and anything else you can think of are going to be so much easier to get hold of now.
RIAA needs to stop and listen to what the people are saying instead of forever looking into their wallets. We do buy the legitimate stuff, but we like to know what it is we're getting before we shell out those hard earned dollars.
Making analogies in legal case is like trying to load a gun with corn flakes. Will the gun be able to shoot if you do the latter? Well as you know, according to faithful statistics of NRA, people owning a gun tend to die less of hunger (after all, they can hunt). But would this apply with corn flakes? I don't think so!
Yes but that would involve actually getting off of your butt and doing something. Of course you realize that getting off of your butt and actually doing something would take valuable trolling on slashdot time away. Same goes for picking up a pen and writing your congessmen, talking to a friend, joining a political party, going door to door, or writing a letter to the editor.
/.
Screw getting involved man I'd rather read
War is necrophilia.
Shh. Stop encouraging him to vote. The more stupid people that don't vote increases the weight of my vote proportionally.
Napster really just opened the floodgates. MP3s have been huge for a very long time, and Napster merely made it very easy to distribute and obtain MP3's, increasing everyone's collections. Now that the music trading is so prevelant, do they think that this flow of it will stop? There are amazing numbers of MP3s out there, and people are all too happy to let people dip into their stash for access to someone else's.
Pulling Napster out of the picture this late in the game is not going to have the effect they want. The river will merely find a new path, and this time the path won't be a single set of servers, or one company that people are dependant upon for MP3s. This time the water will flow in many directions, over many very distributed and varying forms of trading that we've been building all this time.
It will be so distributed that they will have no hope of stemming the flow. They may have done much better by riding Napster--- leaving it functioning until they can work a way to encourage Napster to work in their favor. And instead they shoot themselves in the foot. By removing our need to depend on Napster, they're giving up all chance of controlling where and how we get our MP3s.
And now, suppose the Napster CEO comes on the webcast and delivers his rallying cry? Stand up against the monster RIAA that wants to take away your music. Why should we? The RIAA is doing nothing but forcing us to make the next step... leave behind the central, haltable, stoppable location in favor of many other means which are harder to trace and much harder to prevent.
Napster was just a step. By shutting down Napster now, the RIAA is just ensuring that we take the next one.
If the public has its way, that last step will be on the heads of the once immortal recording industry.
Just because you're floating doesn't mean you haven't drowned. - They Might Be Giants, Dark and Metric
The majority of computer users out there are not the saavy people who read /.. The whole appeal of Napster is that it's so simple a sheep could use it. Just type the artist name and title, and boom, "[music] You've got MP3s!"
The popularity of Napster is built on word of mouth communication, and not too many people have heard of Gnutella or the alternatives. I worry that without a strong unified alternative to step in and take Napster's place that the sharing of music industry may be stunted (for the sheep at least) for a while. (Don't get me wrong, we can't put the genie back in the bottle now, but it may take a little while to recover...)
Hello?
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
The judge is on crack.
-E
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
First, you people are mising the point when you say that why bother, there are alternatives to Napster. Yes, of course there are but the point here is that Napster is just a file-sharing program that happens to specialize in Mp3 (but can be used for everything as Wrapster has proven). This is what the Internet is about!!!, file sharing, we share HTML files, PNG images, Java applets, files of ALL kinds!!! We should NOT be talking about whether Napster has two faces or whether there are other (allegedly better) alternatives. Sheesh, of course there are other alternatives, centralized and distributed, but that's not the point. This is what Chomsky talks about, our discourse is now between two poles and they're NOT the proper ones, think outside your little box, people: we talk about two choices, one, what Napster does is legal and, two, what Napster does is illegal, "a monster" as the judge so eloquently said. But the point, that Davies Boies and the other Napster attorneys have been trying to make is that users are NOT trading songs for a profit. They are giving away this music. Someone out there DID BUY the record and began giving it away; it is completely legal. So there is NO contributory copyright infringement! Napster is just helping people what they're entitled to, give music away without making a single dime. Napster is helping them to do what they can do via ICQ, IRC, email!, there're so many options. That IS the real point, that's what we should be making people understand. Somewhere, sometime, we, the press, the judge, were lead to believe giving away copyright works to friends or WHOEVER we feel like was illegal. Maybe at some point the law was modified so it actually was illegal, but it's not. The argument Boies et al. are using is so simple that nobody is buying it, but it's true!
Second, right now I feel very frustrated because I'm not an American citizen (not that I wanted to be one, no offense). This not some judge from my government who is doing this, I don't have a congressmen to write to make him understand what's wrong with DMCA. What can we all, non-US citizens living around the world, do?? I'm not trying to start a flame war US vs. Rest of the world, BUT you US citizens have now a greater responsibility because this is happening in your country (and the same goes to many other issues, like what's been happening with Network Solutions, an American company, misbehaving). Sure, we outside the US could start our own Napster service, maybe we will, but right now the problem is on your side of the court, we can only help with our opinions.
Third and last, I believe the RIAA has such a big problem with Napster because it's now a commercial venture. That's what Lars Ulrich said, they are being the middlemen and they, of course, want a piece of it, that's not fair from their point of view. Now, this is just a vague idea, but don't we all need a Napster-like public service?; what if Shawn Fanning decided to ask for volunteer contributions to support Napster servers instead of basically selling all his share of the company to some greedy investors? Would that have made any difference? I think it would, what happened today it would be more like closing a public library, which is not like closing a bookstore at all.
Anyway, I should probably stop ranting. Sorry, can't help it.
"All the things one has forgotten scream for help in dreams". Elias Canetti
I'll have to read the judge's ruling and the statute, but my understanding is that an injunction is backed by a bond (or perhaps other terminology, but same effect) placed by the plaintif, in proportion to damages. I suspect a similar arrangement in this case. Statute would be 17 USC 502, though I don't see reference to the bond here. Hmmm....
IANAL. Corrections/amplifications apprecitated.
What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?
Scope out Kuro5hin
What part of "gestalt" don't you understand?
I've mentioned in the past on Slashdot and I'll say it again. This whole crusade isn't about legal or illegal, right or wrong, artist rights, etc. CALM DOWN ALL YOU PISSED OFF PEOPLE! TAKE A DEEP BREATH, AND THINK. All this stuff you've been hearing in the news is fluff to what's really going on behind the scenes.
;)
Accept the fact that there are highly intelligent businessmen richer than you that run the music labels (contrary to what you might perceive). They're not idiots. When they see a company like Napster go from 0-20 million users in nine months, they have no delusions that the Internet music revolution will be stopped.
All the RIAA has to do is DELAY the onset of online music distribution. Their executors for carrying out these delays are lawyers and the US Judicial system.
Okay, so what are they DELAYING for then? Simple. CDs are not dead yet folks. They are still sitting on a well honed multi-BILLION dollar CD selling machine. For every day that passes by that they can keep customers away from free Internet music.....$Cha$Ching! Easy Money.
*For those of you that want numbers, the RIAA web site posted last years global music market at US$38.5 billion. I won't do the math here but it should be apparent to you home viewers that keeping Napster shut down for even a month is more than just a morale victory
Eventually, all the lawyers in the world won't be able to stop the change. The music industry will reach a point when the cash cow is milked dry and they will be forced to switch over to the Internet. And that key point in time will occur when the mass of the global music consuming population has access to "broadband" Internet (we aren't even close yet, trust me). Without broadband, downloading music is pretty much a hobby.
They plan on giving away music free. FREE!? Yep, you heard me right. This makes sense when you consider the competion they face from programs like Napster. Simple. Free. But the music labels have an advantage in the Simplicity Department. By running well polished sites, they will be able to quickly and reliably deliver music much easier than any Napster-like file exchange program ever could.
And exactly HOW will the music labels make $ by giving music away free? Well, it's a very interesting business model and one I definetly wouldn't have thought of myself. It requires the music labels to merge with or partner with those who provide access to the gateways of the Internet. While everyone's diverted by all the lawsuit crap, we're all failing to see the busy bees at work getting ready to make this so. Need proof? Can you say "Time Warner/AOL merger"? Also EMI records is merging with Time Warner as well. God help us, I can see the AOL commercials now: "Sign up now, and get free access to every recording made in the history of mankind"
Don't we all feel dumb now.
Aaron Cook
Politicians pay attention to demographics. If a lot of college kids vote in this year's election, they'll care more about your causes. It doesn't even matter who you vote for (except to you), so VOTE!
Scream, yell, jump up and down flapping your arms.
Get in touch with the EFF, and add your name to any relevant class-action-suit against the RIAA that you can possibly find.
Talk to an attorney at the EFF. The RIAA is depriving you of income. The RIAA is illegally leveraging it's monopoly power to prevent you from taking part in fair competition.
Thanks to Microsoft, you now have a legal precedent to point to. IANAL of course.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
#lin -- EFNet
--
Restating the obvious since nineteen aught five.
Forget that, Nader is even more pro big government than Gore & company.
Just because you feel the urge to run away from the encroaching arms of the corporate world, doesn't mean you have to run into the arms of a nanny government. You won't be in a better place.
Vote libertarian, or at least demand the right to choose how you live your life from those who you do vote for. Fight any attempt to take away your constitutional rights, and don't allow the burdensome and unfair tax system to remain.
(mods: feel free to moderate this Offtopic as needed)
- Jeff A. Campbell
- VelociNews (http://www.velocinews.com)
- Jeff
You don't get it both ways: If music CDs are to be protected by the US justice system via copyright law, then principles of Fair Use, First Sale, and personal archive apply -- and the courts have said it doesn't matter what medium you use for that archive. It is perfectly acceptable to make that "space-shifted" copy on a hard drive (see the Rio Diamond case) and so the RIAA is being blatantly misleading here.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
Hey I went to this guy's page, and it's fucking good shit!
Judge shuts down the Internet
... this is not sharing, it's duplicating. Down with the Interweb.
SAN FRANCISCO, July 26 - A federal judge today granted a temporary injunction barring users from transferring information via electronic networks, pending a trial. The decision marked a major victory for U.S. movie industry, which had targeted networks such as the Internet as a dangerous rival that could short-circuit traditional movie sales and distribution.
U.S. DISTRICT JUDGE Marilyn Hall Patel said it seemed clear that the Internet's millions of users were not all simply engaged in reading news and researching information.
Patel said that members of the Internet were encouraging "wholesale infringing" against the movie industry. Patel noted that 900 million people are expected to be using the Internet by year's end and said "what lures them is the availibity of pirated movies... and pr0n. Hey... get away from my computer!"
When the infringing is of such a wholesale magnitude, the plaintiffs are entitled to enforce their copyrights, Patel said.
Patel's order, which came after a two-minute hearing, instructed network administrators to cease its network operations by midnight Friday PT.
The judge also ordered the Motion Picture Association of America to post a $5 bond requested against any financial losses Internet corporations could suffer from being shut down temporarily.
Vint Cerf, founder of the Internet, responded quickly, announcing that their legal team would work around the clock to appeal the ruling before Patel's Friday deadline.
"We understand the ruling and basis for it," Cerf said. "We disagree with it, and we will continue to work hard between now and Friday to allow Internet users to continue to use our service."
The movie industry, which had targeted the Internet as a high-tech haven for piracy and copyright infringement, was quick to declare victory.
"The decision will pave the way for the future of online music," said I. M. Veryrich, a lawyer representing the RIAA. "This once again establishes that the rules of the road are the same online as they are offline, and sends a strong message to others that they cannot build a network designed to transmit copyrighted work without permission."
Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich, whose band also sued the Internet, was a bit more blunt in his euphoria.
Hell, yeah... this f*cking rocks!" Ulrich said. "Sharing is such a warm, cuddly, friendly word
CLOSELY WATCHED DEBATE
But the injunction is far from the last word in a case that has pitted new technology against old laws and sparked concern among everyone from heavy metal rockers Metallica to America's most powerful corporate directors.
The Internet works by letting user transfer digital information from one computer system to another, without the use of a central server, or "hub". While originally designed to tranfer information between universities and government organizations, it has since become a haven for illegal movie distribution, pornography, and trolls.
The MPAA sued the Internet in December, accusing it of encouraging an unrestrained, illegal, online bazaar. On Wednesday, MPAA attorney I. Makemoney told the court that, as the hearing was going on, 1,400 movies were being downloaded each minute via the Internet. He also added that they were paying him $1000 per hour with money earned from inflated ticket prices.
"It is the most egregious case of massive copyright infringement that has ever existed," Makemoney said. He added, "Do you like my new Porche? It's better than my two other ones. And more red."
900 Million Users
Internet lawyers argued that personal copying of files is protected by federal "fair use" laws, and that it encourages the quick distribution of these files in a manner quicker than floppy disks.
They said its service should be considered a non-infringing use as defined by the precedent-setting Sony Betamax case. In that case, the movie industry tried to quell the development of VCRs, claiming they would be used primarily to make illegal copies of copyrighted movies. The movie industry lost the battle, but Makemoney said the Internet did not meet the same criteria as VCRs, since they can't make a deal with the Internet in the same way that they did with the VCR makers.
He also said it was hard to envision applying the "fair use" principle to a worldwide network of some 900 million users.
The movie industry has made the Internet the focus of a long-running dispute between copyright owners and thise who believe information of all sorts should be traded freely.
"All of this litigation is really setting the groundwork for what is going to the future of information," said Larry Iser, an intellectual property attorney.
A SETTLEMENT IS UNLIKELY
The heavy metal band Metallica has been particularly outspoken against the Internet. Metallica sued the Internet for copyright infringement after the band found more than 300,000 users trading their songs online.
In response, one company, Napster, blocked access for more than 30,000 of those users identified by Metallica, but new people log on daily and continue trading the band's music.
The RIAA estimates that song-swapping via Napster by an estimated 20 million people worldwide has cost the music industry more than $300 million in lost sales, and now they can't feed their children, and they have to buy the house with only two garages.
But some research suggests that the Internet file transfers may not be so bad for the movie industry after all.
A recent study of more than 2,200 online music fans by Jupiter Communications suggests that users of Napster and other music-sharing programs are 45 percent more likely to increase their music purchasing than fans who aren't trading digital bootlegs online.
Both sides now must gird for the next step in the battle, a full trial over the future of movies and copyright law.
Many industry analysts expect the legal pressure to boost efforts on both sides to come to some sort of compromise which will extend copyright protection to information which is distributed over the Internet.
But Patel disagrees with that. "I think that a settlement, frankly, is unlikely, since I get paid more to let these things go as long as possible." Patel said.
Your reality is lies and balderdash and I'm delighted to say that I have no grasp of it whatsoever. - Baron Munchausen
(*) I am currently still deciding whether I think that it makes sense to say copyrights can be "owned", so I avoid the phrase "copyright owner" (which is used in the media and in case law). Copyright is clearly transferable. Is it exclusive? When I "license" a work to someone, can I give them a partial or full right to copy at will and to extend that right to others, even without my consent?
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
What I object to is the bit about 'no substantial legitimate use'. Now, I asked for my stuff to be put on Napster by anyone who used it, but I know that I and other indie guys don't add up to 'substantial' use. However, I don't think 'substantial' is the point here! The point is that the judge, in caving to a large and rich faction, has taken action that _injures_ my access to media and cuts off my options. I have a problem with that. I might grudgingly tolerate it from private companies, for instance if Napster went "Hey, let's ONLY do RIAA acts just to piss them off!", but I have a real problem with my access to distribution channels being choked of by the judicial system of MY government just to benefit MY competition (who do not need help! sheesh! They have a freaking stranglehold)
I don't think I need to argue that I represent a zillion indie musicians to illustrate that there's a problem there. It's not that I am simply not being represented- I am being _injured_ specifically to prop up my deeply entrenched competition.
SLASHDOT THE RIAA SITE!
My personal position on Napster is that they are trying to make big bucks with little value added, so while the music industry is (as usual) being closed-minded and ignorant, Napster are not the big heroes in my book.
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid