Slashdot Mirror
Compressed Beyond Recognition: An MP3 Compendium
Point Of Order, Point of Clarification Justin Maurer writes:
"it's come to my attention that a lot of news organisations, and napster themselves, have been twisting words around in this whole napster case. if you'll bear with me for a second, i can try and clear up a little bit of it.everyone (including napster) keeps saying that the judge ordered napster to be shut down. this is not the case. the judge ordered them to make sure no one is trading copyrighted material, and the result is that napster is telling everyone they've been ordered to shut down. if you'd like, i can provide sources for this information, though i'm going to bed now :)"
[Note from timothy: Here is a link to the Preliminary Injunction Brief (pdf file) from the RIAA site; given the way Napster works, though, it does seem like its grant would have effect of shutting all but the chatroom, doesn't it?]
Are Bassists Smarter Than Drummers? JHancock17 reminds anyone who hasn't to read Courtney Love's speech as reprinted by Salon a while back, and res0 points to this ABC News interview with Chuck D. in which the P.E. frontman continues his eloquent tirade against the music industry as a whole. But Mr. D and Ms. Love have been famous outspoken in favor of Napster and electronic music exchange for a while: Now those stalwarts are joined by another big name. srcosmo writes "Radiohead have become the first British band to condemn the injunction against Napster. Their bassist, Colin Greenwood, showed enthusiasm for the availability of Napsterized live recordings, saying "We have just finished a tour, we played in Barcelona, the next day the entire performance was up on Napster and three weeks later when we got to play in Israel the audience knew the words to all the new songs and it was wonderful." An interesting change from the Metallica look at things- hopefully more artists will follow their lead."
Follow Your Conscience: What You Can Do cLn writes "Napster has been shut down and irc mp3 channels are being flooded by desperate mp3 junkies. What they don't know is that there are ways around this small problem. Napigator is a windows program that'll help the napster client connect to other servers other than the few it trys. Tripnosis works alot like napster, but you can download other files (zip, arj, rar, mov, avi, mpeg, jpg, gif, ect...), you can also search through online users files using the sites search engine."
And DrEldarion points to "http://www.kripto.org/blocks/, "an anonymous distributed file transfer system designed for people with permanent 'always on' Internet connections;" good explanation on the site itself of how it differs from other such systems.
Mad Ross (Ross McKillop) writes "Everyone now knows of the recent decision about napster's future. This is unfortunate and many still agree unreasonable but I am attempting to gather all the open source clients and alternative servers in one place and create an organised network of replacement napster servers... If anyone is interested in helping by...
- contributing a client
- helping as a server operator
- running a napster server
- etc...
What Else You Can Do: Alert The Media (Mavens) battery841 writes "In light of Napster getting an injunction against it by the courts, someone decided to register riaaboycott.org and setup a petition. You sign the petition, and once it's gotten enough signatures, it's going to be sent to numerous sources, including Napster and the RIAA." And as CmdrTaco posted the other day, there are boycotts in the air.
Another Angle On The Big Picture: Danse writes "Salon is running an article with reactions from all sorts of people connected to the music industry, Napster, Napster alternatives, etc. It's pretty interesting reading. Everything from the arrogance of Jack Valenti to the apparent cluelessness of Erwin Drake to the insightfulness of Glenn Reynolds to the amazingly short (obviously not written by Lars) comment by Metallica. To sum things up, the industry thinks this is a big win and that they now have a chance to offer consumers music downloads on their own terms. This displays their current lack of understanding of the real problems that users are seeking to remedy with Napster and the other music/file trading options. Napster supporters and alternatives feel that it's a loss for free speech, but that in the long run it will only hurt the record industry as people move to litigation-proof solutions."
I agree that supporting Napster is a little hazy. On the one hand, it's just a distribution system. On the other hand, it's designed specifically to distribute files that are currently about 99% copyright infringing.
As some people have said, boycotting the RIAA may just be a very small drop in the bucket.
A more positive thing might be to go to MP3, and shell out $10 for a non-RIAA artist. If 10,000 people don't buy CDs at Tower, it'd be a pretty small blip.
If 10,000 people went to MP3.com and bought a CD there, it'd get noticed.
That'd be a way to say "Online music distribution is important" without saying "I want to steal my music."
This may be totally off the wall, but an idea just occurred to me...
The central reason why you can't hide your IP after establishing a connection is because the connection is directly from your machine to the other person's machine. The idea is this: why not drop the requirement of a direct connection? You can route your connection through another machine...
And who says this has to resemble anything like Napster's centralized topology? Any arbitrary client machine can act as a "router". In fact, you can even be simultaneously a "router" and serving files through another "router" to mask your identity. And this doesn't have to be just one level deep; you can have several "router" machines between you and the client. And you don't have to worry whether one of the "routers" in the chain will break; since the whole protocol is distributed anyway, I'm sure it's possible to come up with a self-correcting protocol that will allow alternative routes easily.
One way to implement this is for the protocol not to publish IP's of where files are, but just say, "123.123.123.123 is a machine that knows where file XXXX resides", so if you're looking for file XXXX, you connect to 123.123.123.123, which doesn't have the file but knows where it can get the file from (which, itself, may be another router).
I know network people will scream "INEFFICIENT!" but it's just the turn-around time that's slowed down. Once the file transfer begins, it's basically a pipeline between the source host and the destination client, so the throughput will still be reasonably fast. And since any participating machine can act as a "router", there won't be a problem of router congestion.
What do you network experts out there think of this idea? :-)
---
mikre he sophia he tou Mikrosophou.
Why the hell was a REDUNDANT post (above) moderated to FOUR? This IS on topic. No offense to the poster, but I call blatant cut-and-paste of someone's post "FISHING".
/. stories have a handful of 4, 5 scoring posts and that's it?
Why is it lately that all
I propose that when a moderator adds +1 to a 4-score post, they actually SPEND FIVE MODERATOR POINTS.
Why charge so many points? Because some moderators are lazy, or just want to enforce their ideology and bump up already high like-minded posts. Since these people do seem to value their moderator points, weighting the price of +1 would encourage deeper digging. Moderation is supposed to be a bell curve, and you can't get a feel for the community when you have a dozen posts ALL at 4 or 5 points when the curve looks like a "M".
I thought about posting this Anonymously, but I know only a minority of moderators would ever read a 0-score post.
How long will it be before we start hearing "You don't buy the music, you buy a license to use the music the way we say."
This was the exact argument made by the MPAA in the 2600 DeCSS case. Their argument at trial was that when you buy a DVD, you are only purchasing a license to play that DVD on an MPAA-authorized and licensed DVD player.
Shine on, you crazy diamond.
With all these Napster alternatives, isn't the collection pool being diluted? One of the reasons Napster was so successful was its large community and hence its large selection. The above links as well as Gnutella and the slew of other file sharing programs means that it will be just as hard to find what you are looking for as it was in the good 'ol days of web pages.
Wouldn't it be better to move to a single (or at least as few as possible) communites - possibly something which would have a harder time being shut down? Of course, there would probably be a whole bunch of flaming with respect to chosing those few communities...
Being with you, it's just one epiphany after another
I dont know if Napster is the battle we want to put all of our energy into fighting. As much as some of us use it, we DO know that it is being used for a lot of piracy that is beyond the terms of fair use.
BUT Napster also highlights the problems with the concepts of IP, fair use, and copyright, especially the model that is currently being forced down our throats by the RIAA.
Some of my very best friends are independent producers. Their music is up on MP3.com. MP3.com has ways for the artists to promote themselves, to link to other artists they like, runs contests and promotions to encourage the artists. I have found some great people whose music I would have never heard otherwise... because people whose music I already respected suggested them. This is a model that can, and does work. And a quick comparision of mp3.com to Napster leaves Napster very much lacking in these sorts of features, which ARE the features that link the artists directly to their listeners.
MP3.com has my full support. Napster... I have a hard time justifying it. Its VERY grey...and I think we all need to pick our battles carefully on this one.
just my thoughts.... *dons flameproof suit*
Check out Magic Firesheep!
Long ago, Roblimo , put the quote at the bottom on Slashdot. IMHO, the record companies have been ripping us o^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H enjoying high profits and FEAR the end of the gravy train, and having to subsist on the profit margins more common in other industries.
* **
***********************************************
Re:Another victory for the forces of mediocrity. (Score:3, Insightful)
by roblimo (roblimo.nojunk@slashdot.org) on Monday March 27, @09:54AM
EDT (#77) (User Info)
More aptly, what if 95% of all popular music was controlled by only four or five record companies and those companies formed a trade association whose main purpose was to keep its members' products selling for high prices instead of allowing "the market" to determine what a given song was worth?
The end result would probably be wholesale music piracy using technology the record companies couldn't control.
Not that anything like this could ever happen in real life, mind you; this is just Monday morning speculation on Slashdot...
- Robin
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Now, if you really want to do this sort of thing right, you don't start a company and advertise what you're doing. That's dumb. You also don't have a centralized server whose operators can be sued. Instead, you set up a decentralized system where everyone is a client and a server. Gnutella is one possibility, but it still allows you to identify where the pirated files are located (on various servers, identifiable by their IP addresses, which may be dynamic but do have a specific meaning at any given moment). Freenet is better still; the files are distributed in such a way that you can't tell where they are, and in fact a given file may not be in any one place in its entirety. Now that's tricky to sue.
So I think it's pretty stupid for people to be talking about setting up new Napster servers. You want to get sued? Fine, go ahead. Your pockets are probably a lot less deep than Napster's, but the RIAA will be happy to take whatever you've got. In the meantime, those of us with clues will be working with Gnutella and Freenet, doing essentially the same thing you are, but not getting sued. Take your pick.
I dont think the music industry has any lack of understanding when it comes to the problems we "pirates" are trying to remedy. They know their distribution mechanism is severly flawed, but it is flawed entirely in their favor. They control (for the most part) the media that influnces what you buy (think radio and MTV). They countrol the distribution method so that they, make the most out of it (and of course the few artists that have mass appeal due to their help). Everyone else get the short end of the shaft.
Why would they want that to change? Even if things like napster caused people to go out and buy MORE music, it may not be the music they are promoting. Having that kind of power over the masses is something I dont think many individuals would give up, much less a corporation. I am not naive enough to think that this is for monetary reasons only. The music industry has power over poeple, power that is clearly illustrated by the fact that as sharaing technologies became more prevalent, the majority of what you see is MAINSTREAM music, Nsync, Brittany Spears, Eminem, ect. Most of the music is fun yes, but talented and emotional, probably not. However it is what is getting crammed down peoples nural pathways by radio and MTV at the cost of millions of dollars. That in and of itself show the gullibility of the masses, and that is what the RIAA and the MPAA exploit.
I myself am a musician. Not a very good one, but you know what my opinion of my music is? I do it for ME. It is a release of my creative energy, my emotion. If other people hear it and like it then great, but if not no loss because I did it for ME. Now yes, I put my music up on places like mp3.com and napster for public exposure. Why? Because no matter how bad I suck, I want to hear other peoples opinions and critiques (sp?).
I have mad all of about $10 from the mp3.com pay for play program, and also put my music out through napster, normally before releasing it on mp3.com. Now what? The RIAA has spent millions, silencing ME an artist, by shutting down one of my distribution channels. Even if I was good, I would never distribute or promote through corporations that behave like that.
I think the RIAA is fighting this battle more for the POWER than the MONEY. The fact that they are still breaking profit records I think proves that.
Ok... rant over.. return to your lives people...
www.mp3.com/Undocumented
www.mp3.com/Undocumented
Following the injunction against Napster, 20,000,000 Napster fans worldwide flooded into the Slashdot website en masse, desperate for up-to-date information on alternative sources for thier free misic fixes. /.'s front man Commandante' Taco, "all you're really doing is swishing the water around."
"[the injunction against Napster] is like trying to smooth out lumps in a waterbed," said
Slashdot, a news forum for self-styled "geeks", is a leading advocate of free software (including many free Napster alternatives), Star Wars, and Hot Grits.
"People are realizing that only through free software can men be truly free, t'was always thus, and always thus will be." Said Slashdot's verbose Mr. Antonius Coward, "People understand that Gnutella (a Napster alternative) can never be blocked, sued or injuncted. It has been a great coup for our wicked underground agenda".
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
This is just another step in the record companies long slow suicide. If they really had a clue about the future, they would not have shut down the lyrics databases when they should have just bought them out. They wouldn't be trying to stop Napster, they would be pressing ahead with colateral merchandise and expanded experiences. They would be giving music videos away and using the web to create affinity groups of music types, collect ad revenue and build brands. They would recreate themselves as a modern business capable of dealing with changes in the marketplace.
What do you do when you have a song stuck in your head? Since there are no lyrics databases left to search openly, I go straight to a text search engine like Altavista or Google and find whatever fragment of a phrase I can scrape together. Most popular lyrics seem to be online somewhere, and I usually find the song in a few searches.
Since the record companies have done absolutely nothing to help find one song on an album, let alone make it possible to buy just that song, hello Napster. Custom CDs are not the answer. When blank CDRs are for sale at KMart, it's a little late to try and convince us that CDs are hard to make. If I want one song, I want it now, and I don't want to be forced into buying 10-15 other songs for $20 and having to wait a week for delivery.
Music has been digital for years, and that means that there are no originals. Everything is a copy, the only original is the music being recorded. Without copies, there is no music. There is absolutely no difference between the content on a CD I purchased today and 10,000 of the same album purchased anywhere around the world.
I'm glad Radiohead came forward, again they prove to be among the most forward thinking musicians out there. I'm also glad I own all their albums. And I'm going to go download their live shows right now...
Thomson Multimedia controls MP3 patent licensing. If the RIAA wants to stop MPEG Audio Layer 3, it could just work with Thomson to get the patent royalties upped. This will cause League for Programming Freedom to throw up a site called Burn All MP3s Day and everyone will go download Vorbis software from Xiph.org and re-rip their CDs.
<O
( \
XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!
Will I retire or break 10K?
This sounds like a troll, but what the heck.
/. every day for cryin' out loud!
I do agree that many Napster usera are leeches, but there are as many people who buy more music because of it. I have a collection of songs by Neil Diamond and Elton John that I have only come to appreciate because I got the songs for free (though not on Napster). Had I not gotten them for free, I likely never would have had any interest since my primary musical interest is 80's punk. I think it makes good marketing sense -- I am now CONSIDERING a purchase that I otherwise would not have made. Call that leeching if you want, but I disagree.
Personally, I question why the software company I work for has T1 internet access. We host our own servers and provide Internet services, but those run on their own T1. We as employees have a separate T1 for Internet access at our desktops, and I'd be incredibly surprised to discover that even 1% of the traffic is for "legitimate" purposes. I spend an hour on
I registered my hate for Jon Katz
The RIAA would go well to examine the saga of OLGA, the On-line Guitar Archive.
Years ago, people started posting guitar transcriptions on USENET. Someone started collecting them on an FTP site at, IIRC, the University of Arizona; later, this evoloved into a web site, olga.net.
The Powers That Be didn't like this very much - in their minds it meant that they were losing money since people weren't buying books of transcriptions anymore. (Never mind that there's a huge difference between not making money and losing money, that these books were overpriced and sucked, that people have been showing each other how to play songs since the beginning of time, and that composers were getting performance royalties when someone like me played stuff they'd learned off the net down at the local bar.) So they brought down their legal might and crushed OLGA.
Which led to dozens of new guitar tab sites springing up all over the web.
You can't stop people from sharing information. Gnapster has built-in support for OpenNAP. Need I say more?
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
But really, I tried using Gnutella and I couldn't make it work, so I'm not as worried about it as I was about Napster. I spoke to about 20 people who agreed. Of course, anybody who wants to steal music will do it; the diligent pirate will always succeed, but that doesn't mean we should allow it to become mainstream.
If the history of bleeding edge apps which serve a purpose has taught me anything, it's that rapid improvment comes quickest to those packages which are potentially the most useful. Mr Howard A. King doesn't know it yet, but he should be far more worried about Gnutella than he is now. Napster was easy to sue - public, high-profile, has management in suits etc. Gnutella (and other desperately subversive tools like IRC and ftp) will just take up the slack - untraceable and impervious to lawsuits.
--- Hot Shot City is particularly good.