Slashdot Mirror
RIAA Responds to Napster - Raises Serious Questions
Cosimo Leipold writes "The RIAA has placed a reply to Napster's now infamous Motion for Stay. The points they raise are very good and well worth a read. It is very interesting to see the claims Napster made in its early days -- including that you would never find a no-name artist on their search (which they now claim is what they are all about!) -- claims that they can't stop pirated music (though it is explained how it could be done) -- claims they can't ask for copyright priviliges from artists (though they already do -- from "new" artists! -- if they can ask "Joe Blow" they can ask Metallica no?) -- etc. It is a damaging read for Napster.
Acrobat Reader required: RIAA PDF"
Napster splits what is offered to you at any one moment in time. You can not see every user's library. I am not sure if they set it up geographically, by internet traffic, or what. Plus, not every napster user is online when you are.
Ah, fond memories of HS deb8, god how I loved crushing other teams with my logic ;-)
That is absolutly not true.
Fact: Sales in record stores near colleges are down.
This also is not a direct cause effect relationship. As you cannot prove that record sales by college students themselves are down unless a seperate study is done on that matter. There are two important facts to remember when considering the previous fact.
Fact: more and more college students are living farther distances from college (it would be interesting to see a graph over a long period of time of college record sales to see if there has been a steady decline in the amount it increased every year previous to this years decreasement.)
Fact: College students tend to buy many things online, CDs included. If all the major online record sales companies could look in their database to see all the 20 somethings in college towns and include say 80% of that figure into the total college record sales. Would be another interesting figure.
So anyways, anyone up for another study??
Before you start constructing arguments, you must begin by constructing phrases. What did you mean by this?
Then the suit should be focusing on the advertizing campaign and Napster's implicit concent, which is sort of the way that the RIAA is trying to go with their most recent documents. See,they've realized that their original grounds (which were entirely based on the idea that Napster was a pirating service) don't work, so now they're trying to point to the idea that Napster executives knew that their users were copying copyrighted material. I wish them luck, actually, but doubt that the judge will fall for the reversal.
You bring up some good points, but do not support the premise that I failed to complete my metaphor. Napster is a medium (regargless of another poster's illogical claim that a medium cannot be implimented on top of another medium, e.g. IP over phone lines) and all transport media should, IMHO, be treated the same. Laws of free speach and the responsibilities of the media owner apply. In that light, I think that Napster, Kodak and The Phone Company all have the same rights and obligations.
I think it's more specific than that, personally. The only possible purpose of Napster is the trading of MP3s; it can be hacked, but the program was written to do this, and is now backed by a company that provides this.
Gnutella isn't not only a business, but it's a general file sharing protocol -- it can be used to share any type of file, not just MP3s. What needs to be handled with care in this case, IMO, is that the judgement needs to be against Napster, the company, without doing ANYTHING to the technology. Difficult, but I do not believe impossible.
Ni bhionn an rath achx mar a mbionn an smacht (There is no Luck without Discipline)
Regardless of Napster's motivations for creating Napster, the service itself is not illegal.
The service is "legal" until the court decides that it is not legal. That's how our justice system works.
There are legitimate purposes for Napster, therefore Napster should win.
There are legitimate purposes for assault weapons, therefore everybody should have access to one. Please think these things over please; the issue is not so clear-cut.
What came before the Big Bang? Hum, it must have outside of time...
Well what about that CD you sorta want? You might like 1 or 2 songs but don't want to pay for the whole CD, because you'd rather eat that day.
Plus if it was a reasonably common CD and you are a college student, you don't need Napster to get the mp3. Just ask someone for a copy and burn a copy or rip some mp3s. Or go on the school network and see if anyone is sharing it. Napster is not the only source.
Personally I have bought 3 CDs this month and probably ~25 of the ~50 CDs I have bought since this time last year because of Napster or mp3.com. Probably more like 35 or 40 if you count the music that music from Napster led me to. That seems like an increase in sales to me.
The public has overreacted, but the RIAA started the war.
In what way is this not a wholly reasonable response to the problem? Let's say this alleged overreaction causes half the RIAA companies to go bankrupt next year -- not that there's a snowball's chance of that happening. (Except as a legal shell game to transfer wealth.) Will they have lost more than the "Big Five" have stolen from the public in the last few years?
Remember what fraction of a dollar a CD costs to manufacture, how much you pay, and how little goes either to the artist or to the CD manufacturer. Integrate over time.
Would those RIAA companies' bankruptcy at the hands of Napster really make up for the way that industry has been jacking up prices ... forever?
We shouldn't let FTC's price-fixing decision against the recording industry go forgotten, either. They got off with a real wrist slap, but still paid most of a billion bucks ... to who? How? Lawyers I guess. Maybe a better judgement would have been that they have to let Napster work its future out unimpeded.
Be careful ... you don't want to get sued for copyright infringement!
Uncle Sam sent me to the Persian Gulf, and all I got was this lousy Syndrome!
The case made by Napster that people who use Napster are or are not more likely to buy CD's is equally irrelevant.
The fact is, the unauthorized distribution of copyrighted music is illegal. People have been doing it for decades and will continue to do so. However, let us not hide behind baseless self righteousness by saying that we are empowering the artist by opening distribution channels or other clever rhetoric.
While I agree that mp3 technology has tremendous potential to eliminate the despised record industry, this is not the arena to debate this issue. I wince while I type this, but I must agree with the RIAA's legal brief when they state that "napster is facilitating copyright infringement on a massive scale
So, my question is this, if you feel so strongly against American laws, then why do you continue to use American companies on the Internet?
I feel strongly against the American laws? When did I say that? Personally I couldn't give a stuff about American laws and politics. It doesn't affect me unless the US congress decides to drop a bomb on my home, and the chances of that are as slim as Microsofts chances of getting out of their anti-trust case unscathed in any way.
My point is that regardless of how we all feel (and I do support Napster) the law remains unchanged and as such, those of us that use services like Napster and Gnutella and Scour Exchange and all the others, are breaking the law as it is now.
Contrary to how you appear to perceive me, I do agree that the RIAA is going about things the wrong way, however I am not so deluded to think that just because a law is outdated it is okay to break it. The RIAA is well within their rights to sue Napster, the MPAA is well within their rights to sue scour.net. Whether or not them doing so is perceived as good or bad is up to the individual.
But is it legal for a company to help you trade music? It is a gray area.
Okay, is it legal to willingly drive a get-away car for a bank robber? My point is that aiding and abetting any crime, regardless of the social perception of that crime, is illegal.
As for what country I'm in, this one, that one, any one. It makes no difference. I am just glad I'm not in the USA. I'm sure its a nice place once you're used to it, but I wouldn't want to live there myself. Hasn't really impressed me in the past, recent events (online and offline) impress me even less.
As we speak, the record labels are "eveloping napster clones". Should Napster (rightfully, IMHO) be declared a legal peice of software, they will "already" have their clones ready to market to compete with Napster. In fact, should Napster be declared illegal and shutdown, they would most likely implement this anyway! You won't hear about this now because it would ruin their arguments in court. However, I bet that after this is settled (regardless of the outcome) the record labels are going to come to market with some system of MP3 distribution.
Also, as stated in the introduction of the RIAA filing, "Napster brings about the Death of CDs". Absolutely. CDs ARE DEAD! Take a clue RIAA! You just don't know it yet.
Napster provides easy access to MP3 distribution. MP3 is the next technological music revolution. Just Cassette replaced 8track, and CD replaced cassettes.
To see my sweet car MP3 player/GPS/Quake Jetta click here.
Don't think that a small group of dedicated individuals can't change the world. It's the only thing that ever has.
Really...I do. That way, open source napster-like rouge services can proliferate through-out the net and truly screw RIAA artists by not being a liable business for the RIAA to take to court. Anyways, What is the RIAA really trying to do? For the past 15 years or so, industry professionals have seen the RIAA stifle every new and upcoming form of digital distribution technology. Look at the history of the DAT machine for example. It scared the bejesus out of them. Now they sit back and receive royalties for every DAT sold. The RIAA also tried to do the same thing to the rio players back in 1998 when they first came to market. Many of us remember the excitement that the rio brought for the future of digital music, but I also remember the bitter taste that the RIAA left in my mouth with that lawsuit. So, I say let the RIAA win this one. Just remember this, the Internet has been forever changed, and the possibility for a napster backlash is unlike anything the net has seen.
Yes, in 2005, Microsoft should be able, if they wanted, to incorporate the code from Linus's original Linux 0.02 into their products. They would then be fourteen years behind the still-copyrighted kernel 2.4-pre-test-whatever. I think that would be a huge step forward for everyone concerned.
Chris
I haven't actually read the RIAA paper (1.5 megs is too long a download :( ), but I don't really think it matters what they have to say.
Let's face it, Napster is just a search engine with a special client. What they have done is 100% legal, the files don't pass through them.
If Napster is shot down, I fear for all the WWW search engines, and a ton of other things - I think its a scary precedent (if I was a lawyer I might like it, I'd be rich :|.
SSL Certificate
It's so obvious what everyone has articulated, and now that the RIAA is actually (gasp) mounting a challenge to the supremecy of mp3 distribution, is that we need a new system.
/Templux.
Imagine a forum, where Artists (registered?) could post their music, including the big bands such as Metallica and Limp Bizkit, and you login and search for a song. Then, after you find the song, you simply enter your credit card details, or whatever, maybe 50c per song, depending on the artists. The money would go straight to the artist - you would be given a code which allowed you to download the song at a specific IP, over a period of say, 24 hours. This would eliminate the need for record companies.
Okay, so maybe that is a bit utopian, but you can see my point. Napster has opened up a can of worms that has now pervaded our everyday lives. If Napster gets banned, should http, ftp, usenet, and any other form of file distribution be banned? Why doesn't the RIAA go after CuteFTP, or BulletProof FTP, or any other FTP software - because mp3 trading was rampant on FTP before it was on Napster. Napster simply provides a (poorly constructed) GUI which allows more simplicity for file distribution.
What we need is a better music distrubution system, or else things like Napster will keep trumping the system. Trading illegal mp3s is illegal. We all agree on that. But that's not the POINT of this whole argument. The point is, music distribution has changed the way we will listen to music, FOREVER. I have an mp3 cd player now, and I don't listen to normal audio cds (when I buy them, I rip them into mp3s and burn them onto a blank with about 10 other albums). This must stand for something - Napster has paved the way for the future of music, whether it was constructed for illegal purposes or not. If the music industry kills it off, they are destroying a huge chunk of their future revenue. And as has already been mentioned, music sales are way up. So where's the parity that they are losing money?
I really don't know what the resolution is, to be honest. Either way, the music industry is going to rant and rave about people pirating music, but this has been going on a LOT longer than Napster has been alive. It's time for a change - we're in the 21st century.
Accually the GPL dose NOT need the EULA to exist.
The GPL isn't the shrinkwrap liccens the EULA makes posable...
The GPL grants redistrobution rights that would simply not exist without the GPL. The user has all the same rights to use the software that a user would have had the GPL been replaced with the standard "all rights reserved" copyright.
Also Microsofts has had shrinkwrap liccenses long before the EULA so it's quite posable Microsofts own liccens dosn't accually need the EULA.
Now if copyrights were to go away... the GPL would simply cease to exist..
But then the GPL would also cease to have any meaning.
The whole idea of the GPL is to prevent someone from running off with someone elses free works.
Eliminate copyrights and you eliminate this problem.
But copyrights serve a lagit function. People code for a living and they need copyrights to protect that work from theft.
My personal alternitive to the GPL would simply be make it just as illegal to turn public domain into products as it is to give away commertal code.
It's theft eather way just one is currently legal
I don't actually exist.
You know what... you reminded me of all those nifty Usenet copyright violations.
Mag/newspaper articals, books, etc...
Just scan em in OCR fix the OCR defects and post...
(If your so inclined you can also just type it all in by hand).
Not just text.... image files... "gigs and gigs of copyright violations" <- the discription attached to one porn newsgroup...
How did anyone survive all that?
They went after the accual violators... and worked with people to get the message out.
For the most part it's done and over with. It may still happen but theres no rush to steal books.
It was handled in a nice polite mannor. "Please don't do this" not "Dear sir, We are legal experts here to scare you".
The RIAA could take some lessons from recent history.
Yes the Internet is new but the text and still image world is allways going to get hit first...
I don't actually exist.
Which leads me to:"THE LAW IS NOT WHAT IS WRITTEN IN BOOKS IT IS WHAT SOCIETY DEFINES IT TO BE." Well, this is supposed to be a country "of laws, not of men," meaning that the interpretation of the laws (which are written down in books) should not depend on who's in power at the time. Yes, enforcement of laws can be arbitrary and depend on society's whims, but the police may not arrest someone under a law that has not been written down.
Just my two cents.
Ceterum censeo Microsoftam esse delendam.
And when a software company abuses a monopoly, ie Microsoft, they become hated and people find alternatives. BSD basically was made as a copy of UNIX that cost way to much. The same to a lesser extent is true of Linux. AT&T tried to shut down the BSD project ('92 I think?) because it provided an alternative(it used the "trade secrets" technique).
Artists don't need the RIAA to get paid. In fact, they barely get paid under the big music companies (about as much as a teacher, much less than a programmer, when their companies make ~3-6 profit on each CD).
I know what peer to peer file sharing is thank you. Just because you share something peer to peer instead of through a server doesn't make it any less illegal.
.mp3 files. Wrapster is just a hack.
1) How do you know what filename to search for?
2) How do you know what filename to search for?
3) May or may not be legal.
4) I thought we were talking about Napster here.... they obviously designed the system to only share
5) Probably not legal.
6) How do you know what filename to search for?
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
Intellectual property is a concept designed for nothing but a profit motive. I can't help but think that if you removed copyrights then the only people making music would be those who loved it. Imagine life w/out Brittney or nSync, or anyone else who had to be beaten into our heads. Oh, the horror.
Here is an interesting link.
.02
My
Quux26
My
Quux26
www.crashspace.net
Have any idea how big uncompressed mpeg video is? You better have more than 4 gig of free space.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Woefully, points 1 and 2 (which seemed to be going somewhere) do not lead to point 3. Neither does point 3 serve to tie the premise together. It is true, compelling and misleading. Thus, unless you can shed light on what you meant I cannot say that I see this as anything but a logical fallacy.
Again, please construct an argument. Napster is a filesystem over which users share files containing sound. It turns out that, given a filesystem, users will share copyrighted sounds. Really not Napster's problem any more than it's Kodak's problem that child pornographers use their film. I am strongly in the camp that says that the use of a medium where monitoring activity is possible should not lead to a mandate to monitor activity. Digital camaras should not be required to transmit their images to the FBI, phone switches should not have pre-installed taps and Napster should not have to monitor it's users file sharing transactions in order to prevent copyright infringement. These are all, as far as I can tell, the same issue: should the medium provider (profit-making or not) be required to sanitize and/or monitor it's usage?
You appear to believe half of the RIAA's answer (that shutting down services that don't sanitize or monitor is reasonable), but do you believe what I think is the logical conclusion: that sanitization and monitoring should be required? I'm not trying to say that the RIAA wants this (I think they do, but that's just my personal theory for which I have zero evidence). However, they have certainly taken a big first step.
If people start using Slashdot to share uuencoded MP3s, should Slashdot be shut down? What if they advertize that they're the hottest site for discussion forums full of MP3s? What if they say "fuck the RIAA, we have pirated MP3s on our site"? When does it become a problem of the media provider? Is Exodus (Andover.net's ISP) responsible for the MP3s? Should they be sanitizing the bits at the router? Monitoring for Brittany Spears patterns in the HTTP traffic?
You begin a long and slippery slide the way that the RIAA is going. The only thing I think they can justify is pressing charges against the people trading the music and getting a warrant for the logs on the Napster servers. If there's anything there that identifies users, then they could be busted. The problem is that that would mean directly going after thousands of mostly kids. Can you imagine how pissed their parents will be? How long before that turns into an anti-RIAA backlash that could cost the RIAA millions in legal fees? All for what? To punish fans who tend to be good customers in the first place? No, RIAA wants to shut Napster down so that they look like bad-guys only in the short-term and concentrate their legal guns on a single, easy target.
Welcome to copyright in THIS century.
Honestly, I have no idea how it works.
Let's suppose I wanted to share what I have in directory D, and was looking to download file F. How would I do that?
I know it's supposed to be a type of "publishing system," but the sourceforge website is REAL skimpy on details of actual use, and the program's UI is virtually nonexistent so it's not like I can figure it out from context. Any tips?
Thank you.
4920616D206E6F7420656C6974652E
Email me.
+++ATH0
I noticed that the PDF mentioned several times that the Labels were losing lots of money as a direct result of the napster software. The only evidence used to prove this theory is the success of napster. Does anyone else wonder how record sales are going? If the labels are suffering so badly why not show some statistics listing really bad sales or even moderatley decreased sales, within a decent frequency over noise filter of course.
Bzzt Whir Click
...rip from CDs scratched to oblivion
;)
I posted this before, but it *does* work!
[1] Get yourself a soft, old toothbrush
[2] Take your scratched cd
[3] Get some toothpaste (i wouldn't use any freaky flavour - just stick to minty freshness)
[4] Using the toothbrush, rub toothpaste all over your cd
[5] Wash the cd (hey some people might not realise)
The scratch-less playing doesn't last for long, so it's probably best to rip it and burn it onto a new CD.
Anyone have even the slightest clue why or how this works?
Have fun
jh
"Education is the perpetual realisation of our ignorance"
YOU SAID: "Trading MP3's online is no different to recording a bunch of songs from the radio or TV shows/movies and letting your friends have copies of those recordings. Its illegal...." Hold on my friend.... You are incorrect. It is legal for you to share your recordings with friends and family. You can make digital mp3s or analog cassette tapes, but these recordings can not be apart of any commercial setting. Of course, the law was written back in 1989. In the year 2000, your friends live all over the world thanks to the Internet. So, is it any more wrong for you to share your digital recordings with a friend in Europe than it is with your friend next door? Of course not. That's the whole point of this. The law is outdated, ambiguous, and it is restricting the entire digital entertainment industry. The law must be changed in order for progress to be made. Look at MP3.com. They are slowly settling lawsuit after lawsuit from the big 5 record companies. 4 down and god only knows how many more will come in the end. The law was made in hopes of protecting the music and film industries from piracy, but it was not written to limit the growth of a new economic sector and to give monopoly-like powers to the RIAA. So write senator Hatch and tell him that he is the man!
Since when? Character is important to a lot of consumers, but if that were true for all consumers, why would we have so many cheaply made electronics?? Consumers don't care if their VCR's manufacturer has character. Is it cheap? Does it work? That's what it comes down to.
I mean, most of us will openly admit that Napster is unethical, and we'll also openly insist that the RIAA is unethical.
They're greedy pigs, but they're not unethical. They're just doing what people in America have been doing for a long time, makin money.
Maybe I missed something, but if you can prove that the RIAA killed someone, bribed someone to get their way, etc, etc, then you're correct.
Buses stop at a bus station
Trains stop at a train station
On my desk there's a workstation....
Check this out...the bitches only cost 65p each! (minimum order 1000) , it's the same with concert tickets, here it says 34% goes to the band, although this varies wildly depending on the source - some say up to 60%.
;)
Did someone say "MP3 is giving greedy bastards their comeuppance?"
I did, just then
jh
"Education is the perpetual realisation of our ignorance"
not really the argument is thus:
1. Lots and LOTS and LOTS LOTS of people trade pirated music on napsters service.
2. So many in fact and so rampant that when the judge granted an injunction against napster telling them to stop the trade of RIAAs copyrighted material they had to shut down the service becuase of the copyrighting.
3. Napster doesn't want to lose the amount of users this is why they are opposing this in court because they would lose 80% of their users if you couldnt' get the latest nsync or metallic. So they could start throwing ads in the client and reach some 30 million people with Ads.
Theres the inherent problem. This is like having a pizza parolor that can let 30 MIllion mobsters luander money meet and buy a pizza while they're there (hmmm maybe thats where 'Papa' Johns came from so fast). Napster doesn't want to lose their 'little mobsters' cause those people trading music are some 69 million eyes (some people only have 1 eye give or take 100 thousand) and alot of ad revune.
Anyway theres the problem. The judge will never force napster to shut down. They will force them to prevent their users form trading music the owner of the copyright doesn't want traded. If napster shutsdown because they can't facilitate preventing illegal acts on their service then thats their own fault
-Brian Peace
How does preventing the transfer of any files with an MP3 header stop illegally stolen music?
.mp3 files, but that they can't have the mp3 header? So should I just gzip each file before making it available?
It would seem to prevent all transfer of mp3s, illegal or legal (say, Rage Against the Machine files).
Or are you saying to continue to let people transfer
I don't see what you're saying. First you say that it's trivial (but I've disproved that), and then you go back and say that Napster should pull the plug, if there is somehow no way to filter out the stolen music.
All said, there is obviously no way to distinguish a legal mp3 from an illegal one. You would have to listen to each song, and then find out what the artist's policy was. So I guess according to you, Napster should just shut down.
Okay, now let us take this premise a bit further: if a service cannot filter out illegal content, it should be stopped:
By your premise, my ISP should be stopped, because I sure as hell need a connection to pirate music. You should also get my phone company stopped, because they supply the line that my modem uses to connect me to my ISP.
Now, you might turn around and argue that Napster's primary purpose is to allow music piracy, whereas ISPs and phones have plenty of other good uses. But this is not so clear cut:
Irregardless of what its creators intended for the service to do, I can argue that the service is currently used to share music of underground artists, and that this is an important use.
The original intent is not important: Digitalis can be used to treat some heart problems. Used in large amounts, it can kill. Supposing that the original discoverer of the drug decided that he was going to use it to create a new poison? Does that mean that we ban a life-saving drug today because its discoverer created it for evil intents? I should hope NOT!
The same is here. Even if the original intent of Napster was to get rich off of banner ads while users were lured by pirating commercially-available music, as long as the service is used for other legitimate purposes today, it should not be shut down, anymore more than my ISP should be just because I have the ability to download w4r3z through the connection they give me.
It's about both. The RIAA believes that what Napster is doing is illegal. They are infringing on the RIAA's clients. That's what this case is about. However, if the RIAA can win this case, they'll have precedent to start shutting down other servies. Then, they'll have control, just like they've always had before Napster and the others came along. This case is about illegal distribution, but ultimately, you are right, it's about control of distribution.
If the RIAA was fully committed in protecting artists interests, they would be prosecuting the end parties themselves.
That is silly, here's why:
a) The RIAA knows this would be a stupid and fruitless thing to do. This has been proven time and again. Going after Joe Bloe Anonymous downloader is pointless.
b) Why go after the little fish when killing the big fish would have the same effect??
Of course, this goes under the false assumption (which the RIAA supposedly subscribes to) that by shutting down Napster, all online distribution of music will suddenly stop. As much as I think the RIAA is a bunch of greedy pigs, you have to give them a little bit of techsavyness. They realize that they can't shut down the IRC or the ftp sites, so they go after whatever they can go after, and that's Napster. It's the last desperate grasp of a dying, bloated beast.
Buses stop at a bus station
Trains stop at a train station
On my desk there's a workstation....
This is not true either. Although other file formats might be far less popular for trade on Napster, there is a program available for download known as Wrapster that masks *.(any) extention to a *.mp3 extention, and allows any type of file to be posted for DL on Napster. The files are generally named after their content, ie: "Natalie_Portman_Nude.mp3" After downloading, the "Wrapster" utility converts the fake *.mp3 file back into whatever it was.
--I assume full responsibility for my actions, except the ones that are someone else's fault.
. In the Napster case, the exact opposite is true. Napster is used almost exclusively to transfer copyrighted material.
... and see just how many people download; I'm sure 3000 out of 20 million is real convincing, statistically ... and in court.
Impossible to prove this, on technical grounds. The server merely shows you who has what files available, or who has the latest Britney Spears trash or whateverthehell people listen to. It has no idea that they actually downloaded said songs, since one would contact another client, and not Napster servers, in order to download a song.
As it currently stands, the most they could show is that more copyrighted music vs free music is made available on Napster. Even then, they can't show that the party downloading does not own the CD.
(I download mp3s for cds I have all the time, because I'm too lazy to rip, and encoding on this piece of shit is far too slow).
As it were, I don't think it can be proven with the clients that are out right now that a single song has ever been downloaded from Napster!
A point could be made that new clients could come out, which notified the server whenever a file download successfully completed, together with username and filename.
Even in this case, Napster could simply put up the 'upgraded' client on their website, with large bold red flashing letters saying 'THIS CLIENT HAS NO OTHER NEW FUNCTIONALITY OTHER THAN TO RECORD YOUR MUSIC DOWNLOAD HABITS AND SEND THEM BACK TO US! OLDER VERSIONS OF OUR CLIENT SOFWARE DO NOT DO THIS. YOUR DOWNLOADED HABITS WOULD BE USED IN THE NAPSTER COURT CASE!'
Since the RIAA are suing, they have the burden of proof. Let's see them prove that their copyrighted music is getting pirated then!
You don't need to get the official Adobe Acrobat Reader to read PDF files--the latest verisons of Ghostscript understand PDF, so you can just use Ghostview. (And if your printer driver is based on ghostscript, you can send PDF files directly to your printer!)
There better be a lot of complex pictures and formulas inside this file, to justify them using a 1.5 Meg PDF instead of a 20k text file....
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
I finally get it!
I never understood why someone would try to leverage a "cute little file sharing app" into an empire - after all, most people would [free,share]ware it and maybe show it off at job interviews.
But now I realize that it was a brilliant plan to get gullible VC's to foot the bill for the inevitable legal battles! And get some cool servers and some marteking money for free concerts to boot!
Instead of being a small, independent software vendor getting legally reamed by the RIAA, this guy raised more dough than the EFF to fight this file sharing issue in court!
I thought he was petty, greedy and stupid, but now I realize that he has a buiness accumen and genius that I can only begin to comprehend.
- bridgette
This is the part of the Napster argument that everyone always misses. I hear a lot of "Screw Metallica, they don't need the money." But what about the unsigned artists that really do need the money? In this case, the bands LP getting placed on Napster steals a large percentage of potential sales away from that band. Also, album sales do more than just line the pockets of the RIAA. An album selling many copies will cause the artist to get more money for a tour from their label, and thus really make the artist some money. That's why it's stupid to boycott the RIAA, when you can hurt the artists you listen to. Mp3 samples or even whole single songs can be cool to get someone interested in the album, but just pirating the albums and saying "I'll buy it later" just isn't right. Peace
nWo 4 Life
I definitely see your point - and I've taken that into consideration. My main idea was not that they might try to go after Gnutella, etc (client-based) or that they will go after other server-based programs, but rather where will they draw the line as to what DOES constitute a program that encourages or even provides access to copyrighted material (aol's mail handling system, irc, etc).
Or might they even go so far as to try and make the possession of such client-based programs (gnutella, freenet) against the law? Surely they couldnt...
--
send all spam to theotherwhitemeat@ropine.com
Gnutella is not in the "right", but it is legal as it is a user-to-user transaction with out a profit being made by anyone in the deal.
When I read this comment, I almost laughed my head off. I think I'm beginning to see this Napster trial in a new light. Its being publicized as anti-authoritarian net users fighting the big bad corporate giant, or pirates stealing from the poor starving artists or whatever. But its really the software industry versus the music industry. And either side winning is a good thing. If the RIAA wins, it means that Napster's "click-wrap" licence was illegal and not binding, as the clause (effectively) saying Napster was not responsible did not apply. Which (IIRC) can then be used in any future case as an argument against the validity of a "click-wrap" licence. And if Napster wins, it will (hopefully) cause some serious review of the "extensions" to copyright law and attacks on fair use.
Although both also have their respective downsides...
Thoughts, comments, criticizms, corrections?
-RickHunter
The RIAA lawyers shut down OLGA's own archives, and the OLGA page has the entire sad story posted. However, you can use their search tool to find songs off a handfull of rogue mirror sites. Try it, and you will see what I mean.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
--
send all spam to theotherwhitemeat@ropine.com
Napster, the application, is not on trial here. The service is not on trial.. the COMPANY is.
The COMPANY is attempting to make money using their serivce. The put up such service, *knowing* that it would be popular *only* because it would be used primarily to help joe average user share his pirated files with someone else. Something that joe average did *not know how to easily do*.
Therefore, napster is in business to help people pirate. Plain and simple.
Sure, people had FTP sites and such... but napster provided a forum.
Is the tool illegal? No. Is the company breaking the law? I'm starting to think so.
The studies did NOTHING to prove a causation, ie: Napster usage CAUSED the people to buy more CDs. It just proved a correlation, ie: people who use Napster buy more CDs than those who don't.
= pr000721
http://www.jup.com/company/pressrelease.jsp?doc
Thank you.
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
And.. if the public is not willing to pay for music anymore, and are just going to rip it off.. then there is *NO LONGER A MARKET FOR POP MUSICIANS*. SO your buddy might have to get another job.
You cannot force the public to pay.
Napster should pull up stakes, move their machines to Sealand, and put up a big flag that says: "Down with the RIAA." I doubt the RIAA can muster the kind of military might it will take to defeat the indomitable Prince Roy!
Let's drop the probable outcome (Napster loses, Napster is commecialized ala mp3.com), and try to see what would happen in the "worst case scenario."
Let's assume that napster and napster like programs continue to grow and expand and become easier to use, until it gets so "bad" that Joe will go out and buy a computer ($800) mainly to copy music. Let it get worse, until the recording industry crashes. Let it get so horrible that there is no way to produce something digitally AND make money on it, except through honesty. And let everyone be as honest as Satan.
What would probably happen in this case?
My guess is that the amount of NEW material would decrease. And continue to decrease, both in quantity, and perhaps, quality. So perhaps Napster and like programs will lead to an Information Ice Age, where everything can be trasfered from one person to another, but not much NEW stuff is created, at least not by those that either want to or have to make money doing it. It is obvious that there is a heck of a lot of information out there right now, would it really affect people much if the flow of new information (read Britney Spears, etc) slowed or stopped? I still have not heard every OLD song, or read every OLD book, so do we really need new ones?
I am just wondering what this would do to the Information Superhighway, if it stopped expanding.......
.sig
Fellowship 9/11
What she said...
I get fed up of people screaming "But CDs don't cost anything to make."
This is abject nonsense. The band have to eat, have to have a roof over their heads. They have a right to be rewarded for the pleasure they give us.
People who work in recording studios from the cleaners to the sound engineers get paid to work there, and the money to pay them comes from the cost of using a studio.
The CD plant has staff working there.
Someone gets paid for designing the CD inlay.
Someone has to drive a truck delivering to the shops.
Someone has to work in the shops selling CDs.
All these people have to be paid by someone somewhere along the way and all of their salaries goes into the cost of every CD.
In the wonderful CD-less world of Napster, well, most of the people employed in the production and sales process from the manager of the CD pressing plant to the guy behind the counter of your local record store LOSE THEIR JOB.
It's not about the fat-cat bosses of the record companies, it's about ordinary people who make a living... They suffer. That's the bottom line.
Artists aren't going to spend years of their lives writing songs and recording albums just to have them freely copied with no financial reward, and anyone who believes this is living in a little dream world of their own.
People have an basic right to be rewarded for their efforts. Napster piracy waves two fingers in the face of this basic right. It's a bad thing for everyone involved. It's only a good thing for johnny rip-off who wants everything handed to them on a plate and can't be arsed to produce anything himself.
"Information wants to be paid"
This argument only holds up if Napster use CAUSES more sales. Really, all we know is that Napster users are also record buyers, but the arrow of causation could point the other way -- that record buyers are more likely to use Napster.
It could be shown that Napster users buy a more-than-average number of records in the first place, and that Napster is causing them to buy fewer than they would, although still more than average.
People buy more CD's after having used Napster than they did before, after controlling for all major demographic factors.
To quote from Jupiter Communications' press release detailing their report: "When we conducted our consumer survey, controlled for key music purchasing factors-such as existing spending level, age, income, gender, and online tenure-we still found that Napster usage is one of the strongest determinants of increased music buying." (emphasis added)
Meanwhile, the only study the RIAA can point to is one which shows that sales at "college record stores" are going down. Unfortunately, this brain-dead excuse for a study miraculously fails to take into account purchases made at online record stores like CDNow!! This despite the fact that college students are always at the leading-edge of adoption of online phenomena, including online shopping.
Oh yeah--and the RIAA's report shows that sales at "college record stores" dropped more in the year before Napster came out than the year since!
So basically, the available evidence if pretty conclusive that so far, Napster has increased CD sales over what they otherwise would have been.
But it still doesn't prove whether a persons CD buying goes up or down due to Napster...The studies are shit, basically. They don't prove a damn thing.
Wrong.
When you forward the email, all that is forwarded is the text and the link to the file. The file itself remains in the same one spot -- so you can forward the email to 100 different people (and BCC it as well). It's like a huge warez FTP, only you're forced to use a horrible interface.
When I was on AOL in 1996 (yes, there was such a time) there were automated "mail server" programs that would use the WinAPI to simulate clicks on AOL's buttons and forward lists of available files and the files themselves to anyone who asked for them in a chat room.
I'd wager that this hasn't changed much today.
--
If the RIAA companies were benevolent organizations, CDs would cost the consumer $5, not $15-25. If CDs cost $5, I would buy them. Currently, I have no interest in paying $15 for a CD, especially if it only contains one or two pieces that I like.
It might make you sleep easier at night to fool yourself, but the truth is that it's the moral equivalent of looting during the LA riots
I fail to see a similarity. Please explain further.
--
The only digital-media distribution systems that make sense are RMS's tax-based proposal, the Street Performer Protocol, and the electronic tip jar. All of these schemes share two traits:
- they don't prevent people from copying a digital work and not paying
- over 90% of the money that the customer pays or gives in these schemes goes directly to the artist
The RIAA would rather have a scheme that:- includes some form of copy protection or watermarking
- maximizes the baksheesh that record companies can get from the blockbusters they push
I think they're going after a chimera, but the people running the RIAA have a powerful incentive to believe otherwise.--
send all spam to theotherwhitemeat@ropine.com
To put Napster out of business, even if not permanently, would do a serious disservice to the online community's reputation. While the RIAA claims that their clients are being harmed right now, and therefore Napster should be shut down, it is also true that Napster has a right to be providing it services, pending a court verdict. Either way the court decides, action must take place after the verdict, and after the judge has had time to make up his mind.
Napster isn't being put out of business. The injunction says that Napster cannot allow the distribution of copyrighted works with out permission. This doesn't actually change anything, legally, since Napster can't systematically allow it's service to be used for copyright infringment anyway. (There are many precidents stating this explicitly for Internet services. For Napster to run an Internet service and be ignorant of this is simply not believable.) The fact that Napster chooses to represent this as "putting them out of business" simply shows the lie in their assertion that their service is actually used, to any significant degree, for anything other than copyright infringment.
Just try explaining that to the cop that pulls you over at mach 3. Not very understanding people when they have to call in jets to stop you. I wholeheartedly agree and have applied this to my life.
Since all of this is dealing with downloading mp3's directly for free, is there a way to make everyone happy (ie. Artists, RIAA, users) by doing something like having a user subscribe to a service then for each mp3 they download, their credit card is charged a 'royality' fee for the download? Ofc the rate shouldnt be too crazy since I know alot of users just want 'one' song and dont want to have to buy the entire CD and have to rip it just to have an mp3 for themselves. Just wondering if anyone is doing this now... -- Michael
Artificial intelligence is no match for natural stupidity.
The NRA's position on this debate is clear: "Guns don't kill. People do."
Who gives a fuck what the NRA say? They're all a bunch of quasi-fascist twats who'd feel emasculated if you took their big phallic objects away. If only Heston would get shot, that would be wonderfully ironic.
So if having guns doesn't cause gun-related crime, how come there's so much more gun-related crime in a country where any fool can go buy a gun?
Bad argument...
Anyway - perhaps artists don't want to spend every day of the year touring....
"Information wants to be paid"
...is NOT MP3 distribution. In the Napster case, the exact opposite is true. Napster is used almost exclusively to transfer copyrighted material.
By this you seem to be saying that mp3==copyright. I hate to break this to you, but if you ONLY use mpeg layer 3 to encode copyrighted material, then you have absolutely no vision or idea what technology can do for your life. Let's see if we can come up with some uses for a digital audio compression scheme that retains most of it's audio quality while minimizing file size...
- Classroom notes - many students record lectures and play them back (with the teacher's permission). Having an easily editable, digital format for these would be invaluable.
- Bird watchers - It would be nice, I think, to be able to keep the calls of several different birds on a portable mp3 player for quick identification.
- Meeting notes - see "Classroom notes" above, but in context of workplace meetings
I could add to this list, but I'm @ work and in a hurry. My point is that you are trying to kill some fairly spiffy technology based on the fact that it could be misused. That said, I think that musicians should stop expecting to be paid for their 10 hours of studio time spent creating a song that they can't even play live. IMO it's a travesty of good sense to assume that musicians or record labels deserve several years of steady income from a month's work. If musicians really want full time pay, they should do live shows for it. We might even start to find bands that actually write a song, get good at playing it, and THEN record it, as a service to their fans (just in case you didn't know, most bands write songs in the studio as they are recording them). Of course we'd lose the NSync's, Backstreet Boys and other half-assed talentless manufactured groups, but I expect we could survive the loss.
Politics, Culture, Food?
See, I think your first statement is wrong. Peer to peer is between individuals, and making compilation tapes for friends is legal. Ask Orrin Hatch. Now I think they are trying to argue subtleties like, you need to know the person you give a copy to, and somehow an mp3 is different than a tape, but obviously that argument is still being fought.
1) How do I know to search for Metallica? Because I know the name of Metallica or the name of the song. You can name a file anything you want to. Lets say my song is Little Brown Jug on the spoons and armpit. I call it Little Brown Jug - Folk Traditional Armpit Spoons.mp3. It's just like searching on any other file system. Go on Napster right now and search under Folk, Alternative, etc.
2) Same as above
3) I don't think anyone is refighting the AHRA again. Well, I take that back the RIAA never liked it to begin with.
4) We are discussing Napster and its legal uses. I am indexing and sharing Wrapster files exactly the same as any other, using Napster. What do you think Gnutella et al, is? Hack, schmack, it's a legal use of Napster.
5) I won't get into a hairy Fair Use argument but even the RIAA has agreed that intra-personal sharing of video tapes between friends is legal.
6) Same as 1 and 2.
Regardless of my responses, looking at yours, 3 of the six I listed you have no legal arguments only a question about how to search for it. So if only one is legal, then Napster has legal use. For a technology to be declared illegal it needs to not have the possibility of substantial legal use.
Are you telling me you can't think of any legal uses of a peer to peer, ".mp3" file sharing software? This was my initial post. That argument is rediculous. Just because a shit load of people use it for illegal uses has zero to do with whether the technology is illegal.
Peace of Love my Brother.
- I like pudding.
1. 30 seconds of a track usually dosn't help much. Listen to Orbital's Halcyon + on + on sometime. A 30 second cut isn't much of a representation.
why not call tower records and see if they have it in their listening stations?
2. I'm about am hour drive away from a record store with listening stations. Now what should I do?
why not go to a friend's house and listen to it
3. Easy, I have no friends.
gnutella might not have the sex appeal of Napster but gnutella is far more useful.
I am sorry to rag on someone but this statement is complete and utter bullshit. There are a _litany_ of ways that companies can make money without resorting to intellectual property, and indeed the software industry shows so many such examples that this message should be treated as a troll.
As far as being bit in the ass. Any economics 101 will give you some idea that perfect competition (ie no barriers to entry and perfect market conditions) will drive profits to zero. The fact that the IP luminati make extraordinary profits should be claxon number one that something about the market in question is screwed.
As for the net social utility from a lack of IP, the analysis is more complex, but _globally_ speaking the benefits from no IP are certainly vastly more than the benefits from having IP. This is probably true from within national economies, including the US.
Don't forget that there is over half the population of the planet that could not give a rats ass about the legal niceties of precedent based legal systems.
I used to think that the kind of idiocy that we are forced to endure as a result of the existence of IP would take decades to resolve, but with organisations such as the RIAA wandering around like dinosaurs in a pre-meteroite strike paradise, perhaps it will only take years.
So there
PS, sorry again for the rant but, I mean _really_!!! (exasperated)
"The first thing to do when you find yourself in a hole is stop digging."
What is if we were to pull off something akin to the DeCSS T-Shirt absurdities? Something like downloading an MP3 onto a floppy and sending it through the US Postal service ? What is the RIAA going to do shut down the post office?
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
Granted, that sounds funny, but there is legal precedent (also mentioned in the .PDF) that states that the fact that people are avoiding paying for the actual product makes it a commercial use.
Actually, that makes sense, in a twisted, legaleese way.
Please read: http://www.gnu.org/philos ophy/reevaluating-copyright.html
Can your IM do this?
You miss the point there. Napster did not create it's own record label and sign artist to ditribute them free over their service. They just created a way to distribute what wsa owned by the RIAA (and I am not begining a debate over if the RIAA SHOULD be able to own it, I'm just saying they currently DO own it) for free and for their own profit.
Imagine I create a corporation, write a good software allowing people to share their softwares (like MS Windows and stuff like that) and then try to make profit out of it...
The concept of sharing behind that is great, the concept of making money by distributing other people's stuff for free isn't.
"If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear"
You have got a hole in your argument. Producer of films has income from selling films, no matter how and for what a user uses it. Creator and/or producer of music or literature etc. gets nothing at all if his work is pirated. As for new, untouched film - you can steal it or buy it. Not to copy it (== pirate it).
You can not make material copies of new films in any easy way. You can make material copies of songs very easily. Yes - both of them are made of mass (constructed from ordered atoms). Computer file exists in any disc or memory in a material form. If it is possible to read formed molecules and atoms of a film and re/materialize it (to make exact copy of it), then you are caught in nearly the same (but not exactly the same) hardly solved problem - do you spoil anybody's right (some kind of copyright)?
So I can ask - is any electronic copy of a song materialization of it? It takes some place in physical world. If you record a song in ROM, it is really coded in mass, it takes physical place the same way as any other mass. If you delete a file from disk, it does not mean that in deleted area there exist absolutely nothing. No "nothing" exists at all.
If somebody steals a mass he/she is theft. If anybody steals eg. car and later throws it away it is the same as if he/she steals a song and later he/she deletes it from any recording device.
The problem is in the right of use. Not just in possibility of making (or deleting) copies. Nobody can say that if he/she makes an electronic copy of anything that he/she takes nothing from the author just because the author also has his own copy, no matter how many copies are being done by others.
How would you comment if somebody makes copies of your thoughts that are materialized in your brain (in its neurons)? Is that OK? No? Why? Just because you gave no right to anybody to copy that? Right so. So that - who gives anybody any right to copy anything without clear permission of its source (author)?
GPL gives its kind of permission to users of GPL software. You can take anything with GPL, transfer it to you and materialize it in an area of your HDD, and start to use it without paying for it. But you can not take any software from eg. Torvalds if you have not his own permission. You can not copy and use any song (for your pleasure) if you have no permission of its creator. Is that clear?
Trying to make chaos pieces meaningful. The more meaningfullness I get, the more new chaos appears.
We already have a 'free as in beer' music distribution system, and have had for a long time, its called radio. The record companies fought radio back in the early days, until they realized that radio airplay actually increases record sales rather than decreasing it. Perhaps if Napster wants to exist as a commercial entity and be supported by advertising as radio is, then they should work out a system whereby artists are paid royalties similar to the way that ASCAP and BMI work.
As for most musicians being able to make a living, it is already true that most can't do it through music. Signed artists are the lucky few. Most musicians make their money by 'stealing' from signed musicians by playing cover versions of well known songs in bars, at parties, etc w/o paying royalties. Napster probably won't significantly change that one way or the other. A few non-signed artists may actually benefit from being able to do an end-run around the record company's AR men.
I am sorry to rag on someone but this statement is complete and utter bullshit. There are a _litany_ of ways that companies can make money without resorting to intellectual property, and indeed the software industry shows so many such examples that this message should be treated as a troll.
There are two fallacies to this argument:
1) This of course assumes that people will be interested in paying for something that they can get for free. Take a look at Napster as an example of how this system really works in practice.
2) The software industry is not representative of other industries. When software is open sourced, companies make profits by selling services or by selling other products for profit. Many times, things that would normally seem to be open sourced to the user (e.g., search engines) are prime examples of IP - the technology is licensed to others, so the free use may continue unhindered (and thus, intellectual property is still necessary). However, how do you sell service on a movie? Is Fox going to pay a representative to wipe my ass for me?
Half the world may not give a rat's ass about US law, copyrights, or patents; however, the other 3 billion people are enough to ensure that food gets placed on the table.
Crosland said hundreds of thousand of restaurants and bars pay ASCAP an annual fee - which varies widely but averages about $200 to $600 -- for permission to play any of the more than 4 million songs it has in its repertory.
Could there be flat fee licensing to consumers, say $20 to $60 per year, for digital access of 4 million songs?
Though this question is kindof off-topic, the article makes an interesting read on the interpretation of United States Copyright Law (Title 17, United States Code).
The important question is "What can I do with the copy of the song I own". What are my right now that I "own" a CD.
I can play it for myself.
I can play it for my girlfriend.
I can make a copy for myself.
Can I loan it to my girlfriend?
Can my girlfriend make a copy for herself?
What if its some random person I meet. Can I loan them my copy? Can they make a copy?
The existence of Napster has raised all these questions. On the internet the act of listening to music is physically equivalent to copying music.
The trouble is, there ain't no way to get around it ("Its over Johnny, Its over!"). The question now isn't whether its right or moral, the question is "how do I make money under the new rules?".
I have a sneaking suspicion that the RIAA would like to change things so you have to pay everytime you listen to a song.
Everything else from them is a delaying tactic until they figure out how do accomplish that.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
I don't think I can really blame the RIAA for filing suit with Napster and all the other internet startups that distribute music in the Napster fashion (i.e. through a central server indexing all of the users' files). I mean, really, these companies are out there to make money, and they are making money off of other people's copyrighted work.
Wouldn't any Slashdotter be pissed if their favorite GPL software was downloaded by Microsoft, "extended", and released as a proprietary product, without the sourcecode or anything?
Maybe that is an imperfect analogy, but I can't think of a better one right now.
Friends don't let friends use multiple inheritance.
Heh. Napster makes Microsoft executives look like Saints.
After reading this RIAA brief in it's entirety, they are pissed, and I would say rightfully so.
It's beyond a point where the music industry is going to be willing to work with Napster. This isn't a questionable offense against the business like mymp3.com, this is blatant abuse.
What Napster is doing is unethical, immoral and easily illegal. Napster knows this, and apparently doesn't care and has said so in it's internal documents.
I would have to predict that Napster is going down, they will be shut down and out of business in six months time.
Another important thing to keep in mind, is that alternatives such as gnutella are just going to make Internet regulation worse. If they become a problem, the music industry will come down on them hard as well. It won't be a namsy pansy court case like this DeCSS thing either, it will be a consorted effort.
And if you think it's difficult to do, all they have to do is lobby for Congressional legislation. Warrants for the arrest and confiscation of computers running napster like software will be next.
Don't think this will happen? You just watch.
If Napster is a verb meaning "to copy copyrighted material, in specific music in the MP3 format" then you are correct. Otherwise you're wrong because Napster could be a noun that stands for software that give people a means of exchanging data, specifically music in the MP3 format. The makers of Napster did nothing wrong other than possibly encouraging people to actively copy copyrighted material. This is not strictly illegal either.
However what the people did with it, which is to copy copyrighted music, is indeed illegal. I won't even qualify that with a "technically illegal" or "illegal by teh letter of the law", after legality has /nothing at all ever/ to do with morality. well... maybe legality ocasionally is based on a particular morality, but it quickly becomes something too rigid to encompas any true sense of morality, which is most often based on situation.
I told my wife that I would have gladly paid .50 to $1.00 a song to do this.
Could it be that you lied when you said this? I mean, nothings actually stopping you from paying $.50 - $1 for each song. Just write a letter to the studio that owns the rights, enclose an amount, and write enclosed find a voluntary payment in the amount of $1 for listening rights to Blah by Blabber. Sincerely, me. (Napster User).
I'll admit you'd probably get a response like: dear napster user, we under no circumstances wish to grant you listening rights to blah by blabber through Napster. Please pay $15.99 + $100 in the next 30 days for a CD containing Blah by Blabber and your settlement costs for violating our rights on this title. If we do not receive payment for this you can expect us to arrange a court date for the matter to be settled by the law. Sincerely, Us, (legally protected copyright holders).
Sucks, doesn't it?
--Daniel
This is kind of backwards logic. The only reason the GPL needs to exist is _because_ of copyright. If copyright didn't exist, we wouldn't need to worry about someone taking a free work and making proprietary, becuase proprietary works would have no protection under the law. I'm not saying this would neccesarily be a good thing, but you can't justify copyright by saying it's neccessary for the GPL. That's like saying criminals are good, becuase without them we wouldn't need police.
--Matt
Because they want to kill the whole concept, not just that particular company.
The RIAA certaintly does make a strong case in this reply, and Napster is in serious jeopardy.
The reply quotes Napster in saying that the primary use of Napster is to test out music in mp3 form before buying the CD. This is obviously not true and by lying about what Napster does, I think they are fighting the wrong case. I personally have bought more CDs because of Napster, and it's possible that Napster has increased CD sales in general (I don't believe the stats the RIAA has stated that say otherwise), but still, most people use it to listen to illegal mp3s. That's why some people have gigs and gigs of mp3s.
So in order for Napster to be right in the eyes of the law, it can't win this case by blurring what its software does - it has to change the very law itself. But America is way too entrenched in copyright laws for music right now, and I'm afraid the change will come about slowly, and not in a breakthrough Supreme Court case. Until that law is changed, there is nothing Napster can say or do to change the fact that their software is used primarily for illegal activity.
One possibility: maybe the law won't change in long time, but more and more artists will start consenting to sharing their music online, essentially allowing for a 'legal' Napster. Who knows, but don't expect a miracle during this case...
-----------------
The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what we share with someone else when we're uncool. -Crowe
These guys are in it as a business and are trying to get money. I'm sure the original kid wanted something different, but too bad he gave ALL control over to the suits.
I don't have the exact facts as to what position the inventor has in the company (you can check a /. article from last week if you want it), but I know he has pretty much no control.
IANAL, but I play one on
Although I cannot stand the RIAA, the more I think about it something just seems wrong about Napster making a profit off of someone elses work.
Like, oh let's see, Amazon.com? Yahoo? Ebay?
If those studies about Napster users buying MORE music than the average consumer are true then there is nothing wrong with Napster making money on providing a service.
If Napster was not doing this is for profit, then it would be an easier case for me. But with Napster doing this as a business, it seems fair that the record companies should get a cut; even if they don't really deserve any more money.
If the information that I referred to earlier is accurate, then the RIAA and the individual record companies ARE getting a cut. They benefit fromNapster's use.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
In theory, yes, but in practice, simply renaming a Metallica song to something else does no one any real good, except, perhaps, for Metallica. If no one knows that it is a Metallica song, no one will know to download it. So what's the point?
If I copy "01-Metallica-EnterSandman.mp3" to "BorkBorkFoobar.mp3", yeah, the RIAA, Metallica, Napster, etc. probably won't catch me. But what is the chance that a Metallica fan will stumble on that? Pretty much zero...
So I suppose you could go spread the word that "BorkBork" meant Metallica, but the second you start distributing that information to the public, you open yourself to getting found out by the RIAA, Napster, Metallica, etc. So the only way that would really work is if you keep it a secret and only tell trusted parties. But that's going to slow down the infringment down to the level of tape copying.
Which is pretty much RIAA's goal, IMO.
The cake is a pie
It seems so obvious to /.'ers, but the RIAA still seems to miss this point. If I were in the recording industry, I'd be looking ahead as many years as I could to see which way the market is going. I'd be trying to anticipate the market and be an early adopter to collect the marvelous profits that accompany such adoption, done well.
There are now about 5 years of experience out there of moving retail sales to the internet. Electronic-format books and music are lagging because they're worried that the cat will be let out of the bag when they distribute online. But the cat is out already for the RIAA member companies! Every wasted minute is lost profit! You'd think that they'd see Napster's user stats as a potential market that turned to piracy because they were ignored, and act to supply that market.
Again, from the RIAA's perspective, having affordable digital distribution running when they sue Napster would also solve many of their PR problems. "See?" they could say, "you can get what you want for $x per song from us, you pirates!"
The RIAA are handling this in the wrong way, even from the perspective of their own self-interest.
SteveHere's a thought -- the RIAA's not staffed with fools, methinks. Even the most blinded sycophant would have to come to the realization that while Napster may go away, MP3s will not -- and neither will the method by which MP3s can be transmitted (i.e. the Internet)
The RIAA has been around long enough (and the record industry as well) to know how this will go. They'll fight, bitch and moan, but the end result will be the new technology catching on.
Napster's a red herring -- look for something more sinister than "Burn the Napster witch!" Napster fights for its survival, on whatever front that may appear. The RIAA is looking for something else from this.
I don't know what it is, but I suspect that they are looking for a definitive intellectual property ruling -- one that will make digital music more controllable. Remember silver certificates? You were supposed to turn those in back in the 60's, I believe. The government asked for you to return them, and in return, they give you paper money from the Federal Reserve -- no longer backed by silver.
Do I think the RIAA has something of that magnitude cooking on the back burner? No, but the concept I'm sure gives some of the top brass massive erections.
Watch this case carefully. RIAA hasn't tipped their hand yet -- don't get blinded by the piteous cries of Napster screaming "foul!" There will be more...
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
Hmmmm. Seems like M$ also finally picked a fight with "people more equipped than it". No way should Napster or anyone else imitate M$...they should stick to the fact that (a) they're not selling anything and (b) settle whether sharing something will be considered illegal - or not.
Admire M$ just because the "got away with" something and took "less heat"? No thanks.
I am glad you are not hypocritical about it. And yes, I too use Napster to download songs I know: I use it to download songs and mixes that are either on sucky compilations or impossible to get.
However, recently I was thinking about it from the artsist's POV. I have a couple of snaps I took up on my website (which, BTW, is being worked on style-sheet wise so is unreadable right now). How would I feel if I had no control over those images? What if I checked the web one day and found some person was using them un-attributed on their personal pages? On on their ad-pages? On their gay-hating propaganda, or Republican anti-choice pages?
I'd be pissed, that's what. I'd be even more pissed if I had no control over it. At least I want to be recognized for making them.
Now, nobody is using these Napster MP3's yet for their personal gain. And my pix are too crappy to be stolen that way. But this did happen to Phil Greenspun of photo.net. So before we all decry copyright as an outmoded anachronism that has no place in this world anymore because of well copying works, do remember what it feels like when your stuff is take from you. And how the next step after losing it is seeing it be misused for somebody else's personal gain.
Yes, this is very much a battle over control. And maybe the RIAA is evil and represents and evil set of businesses, but I think somebody should be fighting it, somebody should be part of the checks and balances, and not let the "everything is for everybody is for free" forces steamroll this alone.
Yeah, but how else is a musician supposed to make serious money for his work? The Internet is a fledgling distribution method. It's going to take some serious time before more than 20% of the world can get music off of the Net.
In the meantime, the RIAA is the way to musicians get their money. Lets face it: the system sucks. While we change it, let's just get along until we can move on.
Guess what? Money laundering is still illegal.
Yes, but the Pizza Parlor is not.
No, the GPL is different from that - it's not like the BSD, because with the GPL you have to give up the source of your derived app. It's more restrictive than a no-copyright situation, because in that scenario, the proprietary app still isn't distributed with source.
Free BeOS, runs from a Linux partition
you can't pirate a digital copy of music. don't confuse copyright infringement with piracy. they are two totally different things.
if you are confused about the difference, just ask someone smarter than yourself. in your case, that would be just about anyone.
--
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
Worst of all, what about General Lee defending the southern states that had built their fortune and economy on the hard work of a whole race? He could be blamed for that, like you're blaming Napster, but I am sure a lot of southeners would have plenty of excuses for him. Of course, you can always say anything you want with examples like that, so I am not really making my point here. But your point was strange.
what stops me from distributing metallica's song under a new free artists name? nothing!
Well... That gets a little silly, though: They ban "Metalica" Ok, the jolly music pirates come up with a solution "Muttalica" is now the secret name for Metallica. But if enough people know this, Napster ought to be able to block that, so the process starts over.
The key is, if you have to do it this way, pirating music is like pirating software--you have to spend hours following bad links, fake files, or incomplete downloads. The whole lure of Napster isn't free music. It's free music for anyone. You don't have to be 'leet or get the latest band name dupe-list from a chat room. You just log on, and it works.
What I find tiresome is the constant lying. Napster is like so many other corporations that just lie through their teeth because it's good for their bottom line, the truth be damned. I've noticed more and more as of late how truly ugly most marketing types are (and I don't mean physically)... it comes from having no moral direction... and Napsters line of BS is a prime example.
Mod down people who tell people how to mod in their sigs
Isn't what they're saying about MP3Board.com?? Wasn't that they're whole argument about linking in the first place??
It would be trivial for Napster to prevent transferring illegally stolen music: simply prevent transferring any file with a valid MP3 header. This would give a few false positives, of course, but I think that's Judge Patel's (and the RIAA's) point: Napster created a monster (Patel's words), and now it is their burden to control it. If there is no effective way to filter out the illegaly stolen music (as there isn't with today's technology), then the only way Napster would not be guilty of contributory copyright infringement is to pull the plug on the services all together.
But yeah - there are copyright laws in place. There are remedies when copyright is infringed. Go after the infringers, and make BIG examples of them.
I do wonder if this is going to turn into the War on Drugs of the 21st century, though....
---
The RIAA may be looking out for the interests of its musicians, but that is only a side effect, or a front, depending on how you look at it. What they are really looking out for is the interests of their corporate music publishing members, who take a much larger chunk of every dollar, peso, pound, mark, franc, or ruble spent on CDs.
Much of that pays for CD manufacturing, distribution, marketing, and so on, and the associated profits realized to the owners of that business. That in itself is not evil. But the internet is clearly going to make that aspect of music less important (if not eventually obsolete). We just won't need that in the future, but the RIAA and its members are indeed struggling to keep hold of their revenue sources amidst all this change.
One thing of interest to note is that a great deal of investment is made by the music industry to get an unknown name artist started. What the internet now does is make that cost virtually disappear.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
There are legitimate purposes for injectable morphine, but that doesn't mean that anyone who sets up shop to sell it should be allowed to.
Not that I'm taking a stand on RIAA versus Napster -- I'm just pointing out that your logic doesn't stand up. Having a legitimate purpose is not the same thing as being immune from prosecution.
--
Napster users will first turn to utilities like Gnutella and Scour Exchange to get files (I would have listed more, but don't want to tip off the RIAA or MPAA to ones they don't know about yet). Then when they have queued up a few days' worth of downloads, they will go out and riot, rape, loot, pillage, burn, the usual stuff for pissed off geeks in Napster withdrawal (or was that Vikings/Medieval soldiers in villages?). One thing to do before August 18th is sign the RIAA petition. Don't forget to take time off for those important activities listed above on the weekend of the 19th and 20th!
Anyone else find that highly bizarre? Apparently, under the Audio Home Recording Act, 'digital recordings' are protected but computers are not 'digital audio recording' devices. Furthermore, Diamond managed to beat RIAA by PT Barnuming the court into believing that mp3s are NOT "digital musical recordings".
RIAA now claims that, because mp3s are not "digital musical recordings", the AHRA does not protect mp3.
mp3 is obviously digital, or it couldn't be stored as bits on a CD. So, if mp3s aren't "musical recordings", how is the copyright being violated?
88
Those studies you refer to prove nothing. They simply state the obvious: many people who use Napster are music buffs, and are inclined to buy more CDs than non-music buffs.
.sig again.
The studies did NOTHING to prove a causation, ie: Napster usage CAUSED the people to buy more CDs. It just proved a correlation, ie: people who use Napster buy more CDs than those who don't.
Until a study is done proving that Napster is the CAUSE of this increase in CD sales, your argument there means jack shit. Perhaps you should read your own
-[Blaine]- "'Oh dear,' says God, 'I hadn't thought of that,' and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic."
The Napster lawsuit is only one example of a disturbing trend in America -- that of "legislation by civil suit".
Basically, we have reached the point of law saturation. The average American cannot go through a day without breaking some sort of law. As a result, we no longer even try. Want to hear a bit of Metallica before deciding to buy the album? Fine -- download a song or two off Napster.
Of course, you've just broken the law. No matter how innocent your intentions, you are a criminal.
When we reach this point, people begin to have a lack of respect for the law. We KNOW not to commit murder. We KNOW not to steal. But when you tell me that I'm a crook for trying to be an informed consumer, well how am I supposed to respond?
This is where we are today. Laws no longer effectively control people's behavior. There are just too many to keep track of.
How do you control people's behavior now? Simple -- attack the people providing the means. Hit them in their pocketbooks. It doesn't matter that the providers are not directly responsible for breaking any law. The goal is to stop the behavior you don't like by any means necessary.
Want more examples than Napster? Look at the lawsuits against the tobacco industry. Look at lawsuits against ISPs for the actions of their clients. The ISP is just providing a service. The tobacco industry is just giving people their legal drug of choice.
Beware. This trend will continue. Napster is only a footnote in a brave new world of de facto legislation by corporate interests and politicians who can't get their pet laws passed the right way.
The real DunkPonch is user 215121. Everyone else is Bruce Perens.
Haven't seen this said yet,
so... without further ado...
Napster promotes piracy in the same way
that Gun Manufacturer's promote Murder.
You wanna punish someone? Go after the pirates.
Leave the invention -
which is little more then FTP + ICQ
all dressed up in fancy make-up -
and the inventors alone.
Either that, or sue all the ISP's out there.
What, they facilitate piracy
by making electronic distribution possible,
don't they?
May the One shine in us all, even if parallels exist.
--WorLord
"In RIAA v. Diamond Multimedia Systems, Inc...this court held that "under the plain meaning of the AHRA's definition of digital audio recording devices, computers (and their hard drives) are not digital audio recording devices [and] that MP3 files contained on computer hard drives are not "digital musical recordings".
What is an MP3 then, if not a digital musical recording? To me, it sounds like they still continue to believe MP3s to be inherently evil. I'm not terribly worried about Napster, but it would be disappointing for this case to reaffirm the idea there is something wrong with MP3s.
I'm going to live forever or die trying.
I thought that was very interesting though. Because the judge in Diamond v. RIAA held that the computer and hard drive are not digital audio recorder, Diamond was in the clear, and exempt from the home recording act.
But because the home recording act doesn't apply to computers, Napster can't claim the home recording act as a defense! It's ironic that the RIAA is using its loss as a defense (as stated before), but also that Napster, "little guy v. RIAA" is being harmed by precedent from another "little guy v. RIAA" case.
I wonder, will be complain about how the courts are being consistent now that it hurts their Napster cause? (as opposed to the randomness of the WIPO rulings?)
Consider - if the Napster case had before Diamonds, and won, portable MP3 players might very well be *illegal* (if the stance of computers-as-recorders were reversed)! Interesting...
Here is the text from p11 of the PDF:
In RIAA v. Diamond Multimedia Systems, Inc., 180 F.3d 1072, 1074-1075 (9th Cir. 1999), this Court squarely held that "[u]nder the plain meaning of the [AHRA's] definition of digital audio recording devices, computers (and their hard drives) are not digital audio recording devices..."
Diamond also held that MP3 files contained on computer hard drives are not "digital musical
recordings." 180 F.3d at 1076-77. Thus, under Diamond, a computer is not a covered device,
and a copy made by one Napster user of an MP3 file residing on another Napster user's computer
hard drive is not a copy of a "digital musical recording," and is not covered by Section 1008. 17
U.S.C. 1001(4)(A).
ShoutingMan.com
The RIAA doesn't want to change the distribution modal because they will make less money. The only way would be to force them by using new technology. Even if it is illegal they aren't going to change unless it threatens them like Napster has. So Napster may be illegal but it is changing the way music is distributed and forcing the RIAA to notice it and think about it. Erik
If Napster is a greedy, corporate entity like RIAA says it is, I'm still going to root for them over the greedy, corporate entity of RIAA! Do you mean they are committing the unpardonable sin of wanting to make money?????? Heres a news flash for ya, Jack -- EVERYONE WANTS TO MAKE MONEY!!!!!!!!
Since when did it become taboo to want to get a couple of bucks in your pocket? At what point did earning a living become the wrong thing to do?
Are the artists payed obscene amounts of money? Of course they are. Do the record companies spend make billions of dollars on record sales a year? Sure thing. Are CDs overpriced? You betcha. But we're still buying them (as a society,I mean.. I am sure that you only listen to the sophomore kid's garage band down the street since you are so upright and moral), but everyone else is ponying up the dough. It might be a lot of money, but dammit, the record industry earned it.
I betcha if I offered you $200,000 dollars a year to write code... you would take it in an instant. I bet if I had to charge $500 dollars a copy just to pay your salary, you wouldn't have any issues with it. And if it was a run away success and people were willing to pay the price, we would all profit and be happy. And I promise that you would crack down on anyone who was pirating your software for free. Know why?? Because you are a greedy corporate entity.
So I am going to start a trend. I am going to be the first to stand up and say
I LOVE TO MAKE MONEY. YEA CAPITALISM!!!
Do you have Linux and a DotPal? Click here now!
"Pirating music is not a right. You're rights are not being stepped on. "
Actually, it is stepping on my legal right to make non-commercial copies of things I own. It also is legal to make tapes of music you own and give it to someone else, as long as you do not sell it, or know that it will be used commercially. Otherwise, you couldn't tape a TV program.
Scope of the copying has nothing to do with it.
Claims of money lost by RIAA is spurious. That "money" would have not been spent anyway. It's fairy gold.
And the problem here, perhaps, is that we are comfusing Napster the corp and Napster the idea. I care not a bit about Napster, which will probably cut some deal with RIAA in the end; I'm concerned about the attempt to create a precedent that digital copying per se is illegal.
But in a very hackish sort of way....
It's over here
Don't mind the URL. As some people know, I hate napster. And it's not formatted very well... maybe i'll do that soon, but for the time being it's just pre tags.
And no flames, please.
I have my own small MP3 collection which I ripped from my own CD's, which I play on my own computer, and I'd always assumed that most Napster users were like my little brother, who wants to grab some popular, cool tunes so he can hear them on RealJukebox (which he also grabbed for free and doesn't necessarily care how Real, Inc. uses his personal information). So today I downloaded Napster and clicked through the regular encyclopaedic licenses.
Or, at least, I tried to. This time a message popped up that said, "You must read the entire license agreement before clicking OK!" So I did. After the regular legalese protecting Napster, Inc. should my lawn mower run over my neighbor, etc., there's this tidbit:
Unauthorized copying, distribution, modification, public display, or public performance of copyrighted works is an infringement of the copyright holders' rights. [...] As a condition to the license to use the SOFTWARE, you agree that you will not use the SOFTWARE or the Napster service to infringe the intellectual property rights of others in any way. (bold added)
So basically, if I'm to abide by the Napster license, I'm not supposed to download or distribute any copyrighted works over which I have no authorization. This seems straightforward enough. But does anyone take this seriously? Does anyone ACTUALLY believe that Napster users are NOT downloading or distributing works for which they don't have authorization? Apparently not the first 100 people that I got a hit for when I searched for a favorite song of mine.
So what this is really about, then, is 20 million people infringing on an entire industry by stealing that industry's copyrighted works. As far as I'm concerned, it doesn't matter if it's an evil industry. It doesn't matter whether Courtney Love can write a moving diatribe against it. This isn't Robin Hood vs. the Sherrif of Nottingham. This is nothing more than people convienently deluding themselves into the ethics of self-interest.
(Apologies for the excessive use of bold. Yes, I did mean it.)
--
Have fun: Join D.N.A. (National Dyslexics Association)
"there's nothing wrong with obtaining an mp3 of something you have on cd already. "
I've seen that argument made. But, as we saw with MP3.com, there is something wrong with it. (well, at least with MP3 keeping those recordings on hand)
Realistically, if you have the computer & bandwidth to d/l MP3's, then you obviously can get a CD ripper (there are free ones) to convert your CDs to MP3s yourself.
The "I'm downloading music I already own" position seems pretty thin.
ShoutingMan.com
Napster is causing a vast number of consumers to believe that free music on the internet is an entitlement.
/. fairly well.
That seems to sum up the view of the Jon Katz contingent on
"Politicians are interested in people. Not that this is always a virtue. Fleas are interested in dogs." P.J. O'Rourke
...they would just print those damn .mp3's onto a T-Shirt...
M$: "We're #2!"
First place I always check for my favorite copyright violations is The On-Line Guitar Archive. Not only do they post lyrics, but (as the name implies) you get the bare bones of what you need to cover the guitar part, too. :)
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Am I the only one who's noticed that, regardless of what happens to Napster, UNAUTHORIZED DISTRIBUTION OF COPYRIGHTED CONTENT IS NEVER GOING TO GO AWAY?
Jesus F. Christ! It's not going to go away no matter what happens! Why don't people figure out how to DEAL WITH IT instead of whining about morality and law? God, this is getting annoying.
And to forestall those of you who would demand an answer from me, here it is: Unauthorized distribution of copyrighted content (let's call it UDCC -- I have trouble equating murder and robbery on the high seas with downloading "Enter Sandman") is going to happen no matter what. So people who don't want it to happen should provide a reasonable alternative for the consumer. Ideally, it would be some kind of system where people can download compressed digital audio (MP3 or Ogg Vorbis or something) for something as cheap as 99 cents a pop. Heck, there already ARE lots of sites like this; what if ALL the big labels did it?
This is of course dependent on a few things:
- There has to be an easy and secure way for people to pay for these things.
- A large segment of all music has to be made available. If it's only 10% of what I can find at the local music store, then screw it! I'll go buy the CD.
- It has to be easy to use, portable, and transmittable between devices. (If I download one of these songs, I had damn well better be able to copy it onto my Rio or other portable digital music player.) This pretty much throws out using any kind of encryption. (Digital watermarking or something like that, if it doesn't interfere with the music, is fine by me.)
"But," you say, "everyone will just download it once, copy it, and give it to all their friends!" You know what? No, they won't, for the same reason that all software sold in this country isn't pirated. (China is another matter.) Quite a lot of people buy software, because they want things like original CDs, manuals, and even the nice shiny box that gives you a warm feeling just to look at. Downloading an authorized copy of a song is always going to appeal to those with a certain sense of morality, or just the desire to support the artists they like. (Once nice benefit -- hopefully -- of a system like this is that the artists get a much larger share of the pie, as opposed to the RIAA, who can all shrivel and die for all I care.)Seriously, would everyone quit bitching about how immoral/illegal it is? Just focus on what IS GOING TO HAPPEN.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
Its not the riaa, or napster (both are evil in their own ways) that Im against so much as it is the piracy. Im talking about the current method of distribution that assures us that we will get nothing but crap like spice girls, or n sync, one hit wonders, pay 20 dollars for a cd that has only one good song, rob from the poor, while giving to the rich. Peer to peer file sharing will help us get rid of this monster that we call the recording industry. The sooner it is destroyed on our grounds, the sooner we can put in a solution on our grounds that is fair to everyone, not just a few record executives.
>"Napster is causing a vast number of consumers
>to believe that free music on the Internet is
>an entitlemant."
... which is a flat out lie. The notion of "if it's on the internet then you're free to use it" did *NOT* originate from Napster.
For the VAST majority of its existence (most of which predates Napster (and, for that matter, the web)), the "internet culture" has been one of shareing. If there was something on the net that was pretty nifty, and you saw a use for it, you were perfectly free to grab a copy and put it to (fair) use, or if it was GPL software, modify it and redistribute. Hell, I taught myself HTML and javascript by surfing the web, and if a page did something I thought was cool, viewing the source and shamelessly learning from the original. That was a much better way (for me) to learn than any HTML book I've run across. And there was never any real problem with this, because if you wanted any cred, you recriprocated by uploading anything YOU do, just in case someone else thinks it's nifty, and someone ELSE might like it.
And there was never any problem with that. The whole point of the net was to share data. (well, okay, originally the whole point was to survive a nuclear attack, but the most common (post DARPA(whose involvement in what is NOW known as the internet was rathar short))use was shareing of knowledge).
It wasn't until VERY recently that giant corperate monoliths such as the RIAA noticed the net, and decided to turn it into their own private playground. They want to destroy the old, free, permissive, sharing culture, impose a meatspace culture on it, and turn it into nothing more than one more marketing demographic.
OF COURSE there is going to be a culture clash.
But to claim that Napster just came along to a perfectly controlled, orderly, on-line marketplace, and just suddenly declared "if it's on the net it's free", is pure FUD, plain and simple. That culture was always there. It's the RIAA who is the uninvited interloper trying to destroy a culture, *NOT* Napster.
john
Resistance is NOT futile!!!
Haiku:
I am not a drone.
Remove the collective if
Imagine all the people...
it seems a couple weeks ago slamming the RIAA was all the rage and every comment regarding the various copyright infringments napster was committing were shouted down with cries of "Music revolution!" Now all of us sudden the "well they do have a point.." crowd is being heard. I for one do not approve of the RIAA. Any group that is responable for churning out boy bands and britney spears clones by the dozen while thwarting attempts by smaller artists to make a strong name for themselves deserves whatever punishment it inflicts on itself. In this case, The RIAA is priming itself to be blindsided by one or two major artists saying "to hell with this" and releasing all of their music via the web in the same manner stephen king released his latest book. The only problems are still a. electronic music is easy to copy, it always will be and b. who will be big enough to stand up to the RIAA? Metallica, for all the guff they took, have decided to stay witth what works. That in itself is admirable, but I think the geek community would have embraced them more had they opted to ditch the major label stuff AND napster and sell all of their catalog via metallica.com. This whole napster debate seems like a drunken one night stand. While it's going on, you don't have a problem with it, but in the morning, you sober up and realize that maybe the choices you made weren't the best. Of course that won't keep me from snagging a few more MP3's before the jack booted thugs kick the door down.
--
There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell 'em.
What it said probably doesn't matter. If it was written by suits, it was probably OKed by them (or was written before the suits came along). It might have even been written by suits to perpetuate the image of the company.
I don't know much about the company, but what the public thinks of the people in the company is how it was in the beginning and is a carefully protected image constructed by the suits.
IANAL, but I play one on
Perhaps the music quality would increase since the jack-asses that are just in it for the money, and turn out utter shit would have no reason to waste our time.
Just a thought.
This isn't necessarily true. Artists make quite a bit of revenue from ticket sales, t-shirts, poster, etc. Allowing a free distribution of their music gains fans that go to their concerts, buy the t-shirts and whatnot.
quality of music would lessen
What we would have is an increase in music quality, not a decrease. Live music is much higher quality than recorded music.
It may seem kinda wierd, but human error on stage is one major reason live music is better. Every time a band plays the same song, it is a little different.
If you want true quality music, go to live shows where you can hear a song for the first time, no matter how many times you've heard the recording.
if we boycott one but not the other, or neither, that makes US unethical.
however one (read: I) could argue that ethics arent' really useful.
botono9
All limits are self-imposed. You are all absolutely free.
Copyright laws were originally created to prevent corperations from stealing musicians / authors /etc work without just compensation. This works well in book publiishing where copyrights revert back to the author after the first printing. Unfortunatly, the RIAA labels make musicians selll them the copyright outright. I think the only way that traditional music distribution could be fair to artists would be to make it illegal to transfer a copyright away from the original orner, i.e. the labels would only have the rights to a single printing of an album, then it would be the authors. Unfortunatly, the above legal reform seems impossible considering the RIAA's power in cogress.
Now, if you can not fix the laws legally then you should fix them illegally. Musicians like Courtney Love feal that they would make more money if they fans just donated money to them and ignored the record industry---Fairtunes and Upriser are ting to implement a system which allows exactly this. Ideally, people would stop buying CDs and start giving money to artists directly which would totally screw the RIAA labels, thus allowing the artists to broker more benificial deals with their labels.
I think Ms. Love's strategy is a good one. It might work or it might not work, but it seems to be the only real option available to today musicians.. when your getting fucked over bad enough by the establisment then it's time to set fire to the establishment and hope the new order is more to your liking.
BTW> Napster is very very bad since it wants to replace the RIAA's strangle hold on musicians by monopolising the distribution of online music, so we should all try to get people to use diffrent file sharing systems.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
This is a bit of a stretch, as they insinuate that sharing MP3's is as criminal as stealing a CD from the store. Many people didn't see Napster as illegal since everyone was doing it and there were not any real consequences or explicit warnings from Napster...plus, some viewed it as synonymous to sharing tapes, since the quality is worse (kinda like recording off the radio) and besides, until this trial, no real law has been defined around MP3's.
I think that's their point: Napster has desensitized people to illegal theft, and those engaged in it do think twice (or usually even once) about their actions and just keep on stealing. The scary part, for people who advocate compensation of artists and developers for their work, is that these people have only been engaged in this activity for a few years. In a few years, kiddies will have grown up using only this technology, and the concept of paying for content will seem absurd to them. If you work as a software devloper, musician, system admin, web developer, or the like, your career will be severely curbed (unless you want to moonlight as a t-shirt maker!)
is Pizza Parlor symbolizing Napster the service? i got lost on all the analogies.
thank you
> How is this really relevant to the Napster discussion? Napster is just a way to connect users. It doesn't require you to offer copyrighted tunes to gain access or pay off studio gophers to lift demo tapes. > Nah. The RIAA is a consortium of record companies, not some watchdog group looking out for artists. Ask any recording artist about the RIAA stance on work-for-hire amendments and you'll see steam come out of their ears. This is more about protecting a distribution network than it is about protecting intellectual property rights. Sure there are a large number of Napster users transferring illegal material. But then people are also illegally selling guns in the street. I'd like to see Judge Patel tell Smith & Wesson how they've created a "monster" that they have to deal with that was clearly intended to kill people. Hey, let's at least be consistent in this society. I'd encourage the Judge to re-read the Supreme Court case in favor of Sony re: Betamax that mentions a technology only needs to have the "potential" for significant non-infringing use.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
I'd be scared anytime someone invokes precedent from a $cientology case to back up their argument. Creepy.
-Vercingetorix
-Vercingetorix
"Necessitas non habet legem." -St. Augustine
In the document, the RIAA states that organizations and artists in the industry are working on online distribution methods, and that "The unchallenged evidence clearly showed that the record company plaintiffs have spent vast sums and years of effort preparing to develop legitimate commercial acceptance by consumers to pay for digital downloads of music."
/.'ers are the ones who "just don't get it." :)
The RIAA would argue that the
ShoutingMan.com
The RIAA's arguments here are really no different
then they were before. They are simply being
more elaborate. I expect Napster to do the same,
this is just a big game.
What some readers here don't realize is that this is a game which will determine the future for these technologies to some extent, at least for
US citizens. Both sides are lying and using underhanded tactics, although the RIAA tries
to appear to do so less then Napster, it is the
same thing.
Vote for the RIAA if you are part of their system. Vote for Napster if you like MP3s. That's about all there is to it. Everyone is lying to you,
Napster has their own commercial agendas which
if they were able to follow I bet would make them just as nasty as the RIAA.
The precedent that needs to be set is whether it is legal for people to share music. Well, is it legal ONLINE...... The Net is a new avenue for commerce, and the good 'ol boys are not going to let the control fall into the hands of the users....
Fight for what you think is right,
My opinion is that Napster should win, not out of any respect for the company, but rather for the ability to share music without breaking US law.
This law also sets precedent in other countries that follow international copyright treaties. Beware.
Regardless, Napster could just filter and stop transmission of copyrighted works via their system (unless they have permission to distribute the works).
er, and just exactly how would they go about doing such a thing? nothing differentiates a copyrighted string of bytes from a non-copyrighted string of bytes.
you couldn't even use the file name, because i can still misname them, or give them names like "m3t4ll1c4 - f4d3 t0 bl4ck.mp3"
not that easy.
anthony
"I think any time you expose vulnerabilities it's a good thing." -Attorney General Janet Reno
Napster is not unethical. Napster is a tool that makes it easier for people to do unethical things. Big difference.
Remember the NRA motto: Guns don't kill people - people kill people. Napster doesn't illegally download copyrighted material, it just makes it easier for the average Joe to illegally download copyrighted material.
---
Gort! Klatu Barata Nikto!
But you cannot shut down all pizza parlors because they can be used for money laundering.
Perhaps you meant to construct an argument instead of introducing a logical fallacy.
Vietnam wasn't just about Vietnam, it was a stopping the nasty communism from taking over the world. Do you think those evil communists would have stopped at Vietnam! no! they won't rest until they pillaged our cities and raped our women.
----
Give me a break. The slippery slope argument was fanaticism back then, and its fanaticism now. The RIAA hates napster because it allows users to intermittenly send mp3s to anyone looking for them. You can't do that with email, and if you put it on a webpage its *much* easier to shut down.
Where or not its right to ban tools that allow users to break the law is another debate, but lets no turn this into something larger than it is.
no comment
How much is 'serious money'? I'd pay a small amount for each mp3 I downloaded. I'm just waiting for an efficiant way to do it.
Sure, without the media exposure the publishers can generate less musicions will become millioners but more of them will make a decent living. I'm all for flattening the money distribution curve a little bit.
Nowhere is it written that rock stars get to make millions of dolars.
I agree with you, and I wonder whether you can push the reasoning further. If you can prove that the RIAA is losing less money than napster (and other MP3 sharing methods) is making them lose, then you might have a point in proving that it is in fact a malicious lawsuit against napster and not about money. The purpous of the lawsuit being to preserve its monopoly on music. BTW, aren't there laws in the US about cartels? AFAIK the RIAA is a cartel.
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
All in all, it's a fairly compelling document. I'm not terribly sure how ethically or legally right Napster is. Napster does maintain a database of copyright protected music with the intent to profit (in some nebulous way) from it. But the document still has some interesting thoughts from the RIAA. Some gems include:
Oh my, how dare anyone attempt to "usurp" or "undermine" the record industry and replace it with something else! How dare Napster view copyright schemes as combersome and avoid being hindered by them! How else will the RIAA enjoy it's God given right to make money. Feh. Anyone seriously attempting to change how music is distributed, even with great respect for copyright, will attempt to "usurp" the record industry. Such a company could quite reasonably view record stores as obsolete. This is in no way grounds to take Napster down.
It's nice to know that if you're an artist not involved in the case, you're "commercially insignificant" and as such not deserving of the right to use Napster to distribute your music.
All is not lost, since the RIAA the RIAA generously gives Napster a way to continue hosting files:
(Don't be misled by the "For example", it's the only example they give. The only other options I can see are ineffective lists of prohibited titles or requirining "hindering" copyright protection technology.)
So, if you get a tape from a non-internet saavy friend musician who encourages you to make copies for anyone you want, you couldn't put it onto Napster without getting Napster some official form of authorization. If sending an email saying "I own this and I authorize it" is enough, it will be trivial to forge emails granting permission for the RIAA catalogs. If some sort of proof is required, it becomes an onerous burden for the copyright holder.
Search 2010 Gen Con events
Yes, if you choose to effectively steal a CD by downloading every single track from Napster and then burning it to a CD-R, you will stop the record company from getting its $12 or whatever. However, you also stop the artists from getting their share.
This is somewhat similar to saying "well, the people at company X get poorly paid, so I'll just do everything I can to bankrupt company X (which signs the paychecks for the poorly paid employees) to help them out. Sorry, doesn't make sense to me.
I don't think that switching to Gnutella is going to damage "personal autonomy and freedom of speach". Another question that copyrights become extremely hard to enforce, especially if RIAA wins. It is sad that artists will suffer, but this is life. Freedom is more important that good music, though I would prefer not to have this choice.
Good luck, RIAA
That is not the same thing.
Napster is providing a way to access music that is sold my the RIAA without paying the fee that the RIAA asks for the music. It is not the same thing as making a copy of a music tape from a friend. It is like walking into a store, making a copy of a tape, and the store owner gets handed a dollar for allowing you to use his location.
RIAA is saying that that dollar should be theirs, since they own the rights to the music.
This argument only holds up if Napster use CAUSES more sales. Really, all we know is that Napster users are also record buyers, but the arrow of causation could point the other way -- that record buyers are more likely to use Napster.
It could be shown that Napster users buy a more-than-average number of records in the first place, and that Napster is causing them to buy fewer than they would, although still more than average. Then Napster would be hurting potential sales.
I don't at all know what the truth of the matter is, but the stat that Napster users buy more music than the average consumer is interesting, but really doesn't at all speak to whether Napster use causes more or fewer sales.
--
God, I get so sick of those spammers around here who call themselves trolls. What happened to the real trolls, that would post inflamatory stuff just to get a response? What happened when you could proudly declare *THWACK* when you detected a troll? Okay, this isn't a good example, but still I'm glad someone is at least trying.
anyway... From Merriam-Webster online (emphasis mine):
piracy
Function: noun
3 : the unauthorized use of another's production, invention, or conception especially in infringement of a copyright.
Oh, and *THWACK*
The enemies of Democracy are
This couldn't be more wrong. If there were no copyright, then there would only be two types of source code:
You are correct. However you can make the distinction between free speach and free beer.
The original poster and his pals(which apparently consist of the entire population of the internet) will argue that you are incorrect, because if there was no copyright then copying/trading software would be everywhere and they'd never have to pay for a copy of 3DSMAX again. (or spend all their time on irc trying to find a decent cracked version).
Ergo, the GPL would not be needed, since they wouldn't care if MS used some GPL code in windows, since windows would be free-to-download.
Number dislectic?
-- Fur is worn by beautiful animals and ugly people
WHAT profits?
My copy of the Oxford English Dictonary traces the use of the word piracy in the sense of presenting someone elses work as your own or as an unauthroized reporduction as dating back to the 17th century.
I know RMS has his own little agenda, but don't look foolish by saying that by properly using the term piracy you are equating something with kidnap and murder. Words can have multiple meanings, you know?
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
Napster is causing a vast number of consumers to believe that free music on the Internet is an entitlement. Teece Rpt., p. 16 (R544); Dreece Decl., 6; Valenti Decl., 7; Frackman Decl., Ex. F.
I have experienced this firsthand. I can't tell you the enormous amount of rationalization I've heard from people trying to justify downloading thier favorite new songs from the net: "try before you buy", "My brother's girlfriend bought a copy of the cd, it would be the same as me borrowing it" come to mind.
Napster encourages literally millions of Napster users, who never would consider taking a CD from a record store without paying, to commit infringement by downloading music from the computer hard drives of strangers without paying. Thus, as one Napster user posted on the Napster website: "We all know it's illegal. We just don't think it's wrong." This is a bit of a stretch, as they insinuate that sharing MP3's is as criminal as stealing a CD from the store. Many people didn't see Napster as illegal since everyone was doing it and there were not any real consequences or explicit warnings from Napster...plus, some viewed it as synonymous to sharing tapes, since the quality is worse (kinda like recording off the radio) and besides, until this trial, no real law has been defined around MP3's. However, as an adult, you have to be very wary of anything that's too good to be true.
I need a TiVo for my car. Pause live traffic now.
You appear to have missed the point, perhaps because you didn't read the RIAA brief.
They make specific mention of this supposed benefit, and they point out correctly that it is irrelevant. The RIAA never asked Napster to advertise for them, they certainly never gave them permission to advertise in the way they have. What the RIAA is arguing is that if this form of theft is not stopped, it will impact financially those companies who are working to provide legitimate business plans because people will expect full copies of music for free.
The GPL has nothing to do with this. The GPL is something you buy into, you have a choice in what you do with your creation.
What Napster is doing, essentially, is saying "Hey wow, there is a whole lot of stuff out there people have created... Let's force them to make it public domain."
The rest of your argument seems to be a rather lame attempt to justify theft to yourself.
Admire them? Not at all. Is it honest? Not at all. Would it have saved Napster's butt? Probably.
pt
Will the real Richard Stallman please stand up?
If you drive the getaway car, you're still responsible for the crime even though you didn't rob the bank.
"But Your Honor, I was just driving a car -- a perfectly legal activity! I had nothing to do with my passengers who just happened to rob a bank!
--
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Well, as mentioned in the PDF, even a simple filename check (a file doesn't show up in the index unless it has a filename of X) would do wonders. Sure, people can still rename "Britney Spears - Oops! I Did It Again.mp3" to "Indie Band - Some Song.mp3", but what good will that do? People will search for Britney Spears, see nothing, and then leave.
They are right - using Napster harms the artist.
Napster harms them, they own the artist. That's the only way napster harms artists. This distintion is important since "they" have also helped make laws, that a)turn musical works into "works for hire" meaning the artist can never regain their copyright, b)remove the right of an artist to get out of a contract (which gave up their copyright) when declaring bankrupty, and c)extending copyright beyond the lifetime of your average person.
So yea, they are fighting for their life. Fuck'em. This is an issue of control. And they couldn't care less if Napster, Gnutella, whatever, is making money or not. They specifically amended copyright in '98, so that is not a consideration.
--
+&x
Pirating music is not a right.
Very much agreed.
You're [sic] rights are not being stepped on.
I disagree. There are many people use and who have used Napster to distribute files legally. That can mean that they are the copyright holder for said file, or that they are acting within the copyright's boundaries in distributing said file. An example of the former is the unsigned artist who puts his music out on Napster. An example of the latter is a couple of Deadheads swapping tracks from an uncommercially-released Grateful Dead show. The RIAA's actions prevent them from doing this, and I don't think it is right.
I can use a toothpick to kill somebody, so should toothpicks be banned by law? Ok, before you jump all over me, I realize that the analogy is not valid. The question is this: does Napster exist to assist illegal activities? If that was the idea from the beginning, then I think it's fair to say that Napster should be shut down.
-- "Complacency is a far more dangerous attitude than outrage." -Naomi Littlebear
First, there would be public domain code. All open source projects would fall into this category. This code would be open, available, and owned nobody and controlled by noone. Anyone could use this code for any purpose.
Second, there would be code that nobody ever sees. Individuals and organizations who wanted to produce closed-source software would have to shield, obscure, and otherwise protect their code with contracts, usage licenses, and security.
The big difference would be that the public domain code would have no protection whatsoever from being absorbed by closed-source projects. There would be no protection for programmers who wished to enforce their choice of open source development on others.
In a world without copyright (and therefore no GPL) there would be nothing to prevent Microsoft from using any and all of the Linux kernel code in their own closed-source products. Without copyright protection, if your code was open, it would have to be public domain.
It is copyright law, and nothing else, that gives the GPL its teeth. Don't believe for a minute that the lack of copyright protection will somehow eliminate all closed-source software. The truth is, without the protection of copyright, there's no middle ground and we'd see less, not more open-source code.
Anyone who was around and using software in the late seventies and early eighties knows exactly what the software world would look like without copyright. Back when nobody knew what "software" meant, it was very unclear exactly how much protection copyright offered for software. Copyright law took several years to mature and adapt to the computer revolution and during that period the growing pains were sharp and harsh.
Would we really want to return to the days of dongles, hardware copy protection, usage contracts, and burdensome licenses? Without copyright, that's what software houses would have to fall back upon to protect their intellectual property. It wasn't until copyright established itself in the software world that we were finally able to move past those cumbersome and ineffecient methods.
If this concept bothers you, ask yourself why? The foundation of the GPL is that programmers should have the right to dictate how their code is used. If you accept the GPL, you accept that a programmer has an inherent right of control over their code that they can then be able to say "this code should never be used in a closed-source program".
How is it that programmers should have this right and musicians should not? Why should software have protections that music should not? Shouldn't a musician have the same degree of control and be able to say "this song shouldn't be made freely available"?
Nice try. A "normal" CD weighs in at 650MB, which stores 74 minutes of music. Using our trusty calculator, we can see that we are using 8.8MB/min of music. So if we multiply by 4min/song, we have a grand total of 35 MB/song.
Off by a factor of 10. Not bad for Slashdot. :)
"Evil will always triumph over good, because good is dumb." - Dark Helmet (Spaceballs)
In many ways, the parrellel between the industries is perfect.
To this date, millions (is not hundred of millions, I don't have the numbers) of people have died from cigarettes. How many artists died from copyright infringements? They sure lost a couple bucks, but there is a huge difference between the two. Also, if you want to push the analogy, note that the cigarette companies are still in buisness, while napster might be out of buisness soon.
Now, I cannot predict the verdict, but let's assume that napster is illegal. It can mean two things: "napster is bad" or "the laws need to be changed". Sure the RIAA has the (legal) right to defend their copyright, but sometimes "legal right" != "moral right". What might have started with napster (actually, maybe even before) is a movement of civil disobeissance (OK, I'm french!). It's the equivalent of a small revolution against the RIAA dictatorchip (I'm talking musical dictatorship). You might be for or against napster, but ultimate point here is not "is napster legal", but about "what should be legal in the future".
At last, I'd like to add (though this is not new) that the "the artists are losing money" is not really valid, since most artists (all but the very popular/rich ones) make almost no mony from sold CD's anyway. For them CD's are not about direct money, but about being known and making money with their shows. The problem is that the RIAA is using its monopoly on CD's to "force" the artists to agree to their rules (giving up their copyright to the RIAA), because the RIAA controls the radios which are the only way artists get known.
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
Most music you download on Napster is ilegal so the RIAA has all the rights to pursue legal action. The real question here is who is at fault. Napster should NOT be responsible for what it's users share in it's system. It's the same thing as sueing Apache because people are using it to distribute mp3s. That's the only defence Napster has and in a country with a fair legal system it would suffice.
Pedro Côrte-Real.
Napster cannot stay. If Napster were to win, what would happen to the music industry?
Artists would not be able to make sufficient profits, and I'm sure several artists would drop out of the bussiness, and the quality of music would lessen. Napster would ultimately be destroying the industry it was trying to distribute.
This may sound hypocritical coming from a Napster user but I am not against all music piracy, I am against widespread mass piracy. One is a normal and harmless factor, the other is damaging.
The RIAA completely ignores the argument that napster can be used for discovering new music because they don't want people to discover new music. They want people to buy their britney spears crap. They don't want people to know there are other kinds of music which are not produced by major labels
Why doesn't anyone seem to understand that? They perfectly know that no one steals from them and that napster helps them sell more CD, the problem is that they don't help only them, they also help all the "underground" labels.
Copyright is important, but most important is that the purpose to which copyright is put should be agreed upon. The GPL makes a perfect use of Copyright in order to force a particular work to remain free and allow sharing. This is a good use of a currently half-broken system. Using copyright as a reason to prevent people from sharing anything without paying a sum (any sum) to a large organization is not a good use of the system.
From my understanding (by no means complete), Copyright was created as a method to allow a creator to benefit from their work without being abused by various unscrupulous publishers. If that is the case, then it is not achieving that goal. In this case, it's being used by the (often unscrupulous) publishers to abuse the recipients of the work (that's us, the fans), forcing them at the same time to pay homage. If you really think this is right, then by all means stand up for the RIAA. If you think that creation, creativity, and sharing are more important than corporate profit, then seek action to correct the current copyright system. Become as informed as possible. Put in your voice and let those who make these decisions know what is right, and what you want them to do about it. You have the power to change things for better or for worse.
I hope you decide to change it for the better, or get the heck out of the way because a minor revolution is coming and if you stand for the wrong side you may just get trampled on.
Anonymous Cowards: Proving daily that human beings are innately jerks.
They began stealing from the public when they expanded copyright from anything reasonable, when they declared war on fair use copying, and when they have such a monopoly on distribution that artists have no choice but to sign over their rights
The guerrela warfare reaction is the public's response to corporate theft.
It might be technically illegal to break into my neighbor's house to steal something, but if that something was originally stolen from me, and the neighbor has bought off the police so I can't get it back, then technicalities be damned, I have the moral right to retrieve it.
The RIAA have stolen my public domain rights, and stolen artists' rights, and they are suffering the consequences.
Did you see the news about Louis Prima's estate and Disney? Disney says that even though they pay royalties for audio recordings of The Jungle Book, they don't owe royalties on video recordings, even though there is an audio track, because the contract didn't specifically mention the new technologies.
Do you *still* claim the congolmerates have any rights? Do you *still* claim they protect artists?
--
Infuriate left and right
the /. crowd swings from napster defense to riaa defense as easily as a jerry springer crowd switches from jilted lover to the transexual ex.
Yes. But those college students would have bought some of the mp3s. I haven't bought a cd in over 12 months, and that last cd was only because i wanted the enhanced cd for Aphex Twin's Windowlicker album.
I can name countless albums I would have bought if it weren't for mp3s, but I ended up downloading them, instead. MP3s do hurt artists. Maybe every download doesn't equal a lost sale, but many downloads do.
But you cannot shut down all pizza parlors because they can be used for money laundering.
And Napster wouldn't be shut down if they only trafficked in legally licensed music. The point is that just because a service might engage in both legal and illegal activity, doesn't make the illegal activity OK.
Perhaps you meant to construct an argument instead of introducing a logical fallacy.
Perhaps you meant to think about what I said instead of stating a non sequitur.
--
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
All I can say in response to that is a recent study found:
* 100% people who smoked - even for one day - have died or will die.
I'd say that's pretty damning if you ask me!
There is a point at which something is so obviously designed and used for illegal purposes that the tool itself is *for all intents and purposes* considered illegal. For example, a sawed off shotgun is considered by courts to be illegal. I believe automatic weaponry in most (all?) states is illegal (for citizens). Why? Because the danger to the public is considered too great and because they have little redeeming, legal value or use.
Granted most things in this category (bioweapons, rape drugs, nuclear weapons, etc)are because of the potential for human harm, but please re-evaluate what you said about guns as well as Napster. There's sometimes quite a difference between the letter of the law and the spirit of the law and in court it can go either way.
Perhaps Napster makes it too easy to pirate *lots* of music. This is why things like IRC and ftp sites aren't being too heavily sought after. Also, those don't have one big public point of attack. Perhaps there are not enough checks to prevent illegal activities (erm, sounding like Carnivore now).
Whether Napster is in such a category is debatable but I hope we are NOT so stupid as to delude ourselves into thinking that they(Napster) acted responsibly, especially in light of their status as a business.
Fsck cluebie moderators. I'll say what I want, offtopic or not. And fsck having to qualify every bloody statement just
Just because you can break the copyright laws by recording a radio broadcast doesn't mean you can do the same on the internet. The radio station PAYS to play those songs. It ain't free. The RIAA also has a dim view of magnetic tape media. DAT anyone?
As for the cd costs, I agree with you. The recording industry is really sticking it to the consumer here. I hate buying cd's from one-hit radio bands because the other tracks on the cd are usually a lot worse than the one that gets the radio play. So I am stuck paying 15 bucks for a cd with only one song that I like! Yikes! I like the idea a free forum to preview songs and new artists without having to rely on radio or tv to filter content.
Too bad the RIAA and Napster can't both lose.
The problem with Gnutella is the porn. Alot of Napster users are kids, and their parents dont really care if they are downloading illegal music, but you better believe they will flip when they see the porn adds next to the music listings on Gnutella. Napsters one saving grace was that it was only used for music. The more general utilities are going to be cursed by their openness
so? If they have those hundreds of MP3s, they must like the music, and the artists should be compensated. If they couldn't have purchased all of those CDs then they shouldn't have downloaded the songs from them.
Just to use an extreme analogy, if I have $30,000 saved and steal an $80,000 Mercedes, does that make it right, since I never would've bought the car anyways?
There is a 'copyrighted' bit in the header of an MP3 file. So apparently, the creators of the MP3 format had copyright violations in mind, but as anybody can figure out not very many people bother to set this bit when they rip an MP3.
=================================
I pledge allegiance to the flag...
of the Corporate States of America...
"However, you cannot blame the service for the actions of its users. That's debatable.
Regardless, Napster could just filter and stop transmission of copyrighted works via their system (unless they have permission to distribute the works).
What's the problem? Oh wait - they'd go out of business since no one would use them to pirat^h^h^h^h^h share music anymore. Boy, that's a problem.
ShoutingMan.com
You are right, they do have a reason. The REASON however, is not one of such high morals as "defending their copyright", it is that of monatary gain / uequivical control. They see someone else getting a piece of the pie, and instead of actually using this tool to promote "their" artists, they do it the american way and sue.
I'm not saying that they are wrong to desire monatary gain, but get it straight. Their METHOD is enforcing their copyright, their REASON is something vastly different.
They are right - using Napster harms the artist. Using cigarettes harms your health.
Most importantly, I think you are failing to see the problem with the RIAA. I would point your to Courtney Love's piece on Salon.com (can't find the link) that gives an artists perspective to the whole mp3/napster/RIAA debate. In short, she blames the RIAA for stealing from the musicians. They force bands/artists who want to promote their music to, for all intents and purposes, sign every creative thought they have over to the RIAA.
While we may not like Microsoft as a business, I'd find it hard to condemn Microsoft for defending its copyright
I see your point, but I think that disagreeing with the RIAA goes far beyond disagreeing with their right to sue. Perhaps leagally they have this right, even ethically, but you can't so innocently break this argument down and say "They are just upholding their copyright." can you? I don't think that Microsoft or the RIAA has once been struck with that sort of thinking. They are looking for a tool to extend their wide sweeping arm of power through everything, this just happens to be it.
The media conglomerates have abused the copyright system. They have stretched it far beyond any reasonable interpretation of being for the public good. It used to be 14 years plus a 14 year extension, now it's 75 years after the author dies. They want to stop fair use. If anyone proposed libraries today, they would scream about copyright infringement.
In other words, they are stealing from the public, using the force of the government to back them up. This has nothing to do with artists' rights and everything to do with theft from the public domain.
They have declared war on the public, and the public is fighting back in the only way possible. The public has overreacted, but the RIAA started the war. When the powerful push the weak too far, the weak fight back in the only way possible. Like the Brits prior to the American Revolution, there comes a time when the oppressed have had enough, and after all these years of overpriced overpadded CDs, the consumers are reacting.
The future involves priceless distribution. The RIAA can no more stop it than King Canute could stop the tide. The RIAA would be better off getting in bed with Napster than trying to kill them, but they are so short sighted they don't see it. They will die.
On another take, how much do you really think the conglomerates are actually losing? Your little brother -- how many of those tunes could he have actually bought? That's the only cost. You can't say he has 100 CD equivalents and that's how much they lost.
--
Infuriate left and right
Trace the theft. At what point in my downloading a song an artist did not agree to did I deny someone property? My crime is copyright infringement which is not theft. If it was theft, then in the legal briefs filed, Napster would be accused of abetting in theft not in assisting piracy (using definition #2, not #1).
This is not the way to build a lasting empire.
That is not the point. Napster is making money off of somebody else's product without providing any sort of payment for the use of that product. If I ran a site where people could download scans of textbooks--for which I made a profit--don't you think the publishers would be annoyed?
The RIAA might be making money out of the whole deal with increased sales of records, but if you don't protect your property, you might lose it. Napster is also guilty of some double-standards (thatr have been discussed on slashdot), so I have a hard time feeling sorry for them. Remember that lousy music group they sued for trademark infringement after the group started selling clothing with the Napster logo? Napster might get more visitors when people saw the illegal shirts, but Napster sent off their own cease-and-desist letter....
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
I will probably be misunderstood :-( so I will amplify a bit.
I don't mean it's ok to download the mp3 instead of buying the CD, and I don't mean it;s ok to install AutoCAD in lieu of paying. For instance, if someone installs AutoCAD because they want the "best", instead of buying a cheaper competitor, then there is a real loss, although not to AutoCAD. If someone buys a harddisk and fills it with mp3 instead of buying the CDs, there is a real loss, and to the artist.
My point is that most of what the RIAA calls theft is no such thing because there is no monetary loss, or any loss whatsoever, because the hundreds of mp3s downloaded by starving college students are not in lieu of buying a CD. I doubt the actual monetary loss is more than 1%. I bet it is compensated for by people like me who use mp3s to find interesting music and buy the CD. I doubt the RIAA wants to bring either of these factors into the equation.
--
Infuriate left and right
You can miss name files all you want but 95% of Napster users are not gonna go searching for mnemonic strings just to be able to listen to something for free.
But then again it's not really that simple. Consider fair use - that means that if I buy a CD, then there is the understanding that I not only have bought the CD but also a copy for myself in whatever form I like.
That is a side argument though and not relevant to my point. I'll restate in a slightly different way what I was trying to get across - that by releasing a performance to the public (that includes live performances) an artist implicitly UNDERSTANDS that anyone can have it for the cost of duplication.
They may not AGREE with those who do not pay for it. They may not WANT it to be copied. All that is irrelivant however in that they KNOW it is possible to copy it, and therfore it CAN be had for the cost of duplication.
Again, I say that given what you know, you have to be an idiot to think you can keep making money that way and should be looking for viable alternitives. I'd like to see the artists get as much as possible for performances, to maximise profit for the performer - that does not happen under the current system.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
- Rackham
"You can't protect anyone.... You can only love them."
Music from an artist is essentially free in that if they do not want people copying the music, they only way to really stop that at this point is to not play it, or keep it locked away from people entirely. By performaing the music at all, by placing that music in the public, they have implicitly stated that anyone can have it for the cost of duplication.
They have said no such thing. When an artist releases something on CD, it's with the impicit understanding that if you want to own a copy of that song, you will buy the CD.
"Politicians are interested in people. Not that this is always a virtue. Fleas are interested in dogs." P.J. O'Rourke
I don't know about the rest of you, but I'm growing tired of people bickering over who is right and who is wrong.
Napster has provided a service to all that is convenient, easy to use, fast and comprehensive. Through the Napster servers you can search for any song you like and more often than not, you'll find what you're looking for.
This is great, but its wrong. Copyright laws are in place for a reason. They are there to protect the artist and his rights to retain ownership of what he creates. In this case, music. The RIAA is there to protect those rights of the artist. Napsters very essense is against those rights, and breaches the copyright laws that have been in place for many many years.
People complain that the RIAA is only interested and cares about the lining of their pockets being coated with dollar bills, and to an extent I agree. Many artists and the RIAA are continually charging people far to much and most of us are at breaking point. We like the music, we support the music, but many just cannot afford to buy it.
However that does not excuse the fact that by sharing your files on, and downloading files from Napster you are breaking the LAW. The law that has existed to protect artists for many years now but that with the digital revolution, appears to have been thrown out the window.
So what if its easy to do? So what if there is no way to stop it? Regardless of how people feel about it, its still illegal.
How does this tie in with Napster? Quite simple. They are aiding and abetting the practice of copyright infringement and THAT is illegal in pretty much any western country of the world. Napster are in the wrong.
Now, before you think I'm totally anti-napster and pro RIAA, let me rip into the RIAA's methods and madness.
No matter whether Napster is doing something it shouldn't or not, the RIAA needs to understand that instead of trying to squash Napster and destroy it, they would probably achieve a lot more by partnering with it. Trading MP3's online is no different to recording a bunch of songs from the radio or TV hows/movies from the TV and letting your friends have copies of those recordings. Its illegal, its wrong, but its common practice and something that most people I know do or have done.
The RIAA needs to understand that they cannot shut down MP3 trading (Just as the MPAA cannot stop DivX or VCD trading by closing down Scour Exchange). In effect, what they're actually doing is promoting the traders hobby, bringing more people to the ranks and pushing all the traders deeper underground. I have been using Gnutella for a while now, and the court telling Napster to shut down its servers created such a huge surge in the number or people connected to the network, it flooded me right off.
The existance of digital versions of music, movies, TV shows, graphical images and the like are here to stay. Anyone with half a clue can see that. What needs to be done, and what several companies are working on doing, is create a digital medium that can protect copyright while at the same time being as easy to use as an MPEG file (both video and audio types). The best idea I've heard of so far is watermarking the medium in a way that would destroy the file if it were removed.
The biggest problem with these initiatives is that the online community sees everything on the internet as free for all. If its available in a digital form then the online community assumes that the author or the copyright holder has given up its legal rights to it and anyone can have it. So what do we as a community need to do? We need to help and promote services that will allow us to continue to enjoy the benefits we have now, while at the same time not stepping outside the bounds of real world legalities. The Cyber Universe exists inside and is very heavily dependant upon the Real Universe for its existance. That means that it too falls within the bounds of real world legalities.
We NEED to learn that just because its in binary does not mean that its any different to its analogue counterparts. The medium is different, the content is the same. We need to learn that we cannot break the law simply because we are in the cyber universe where national boundaries do not exist. By breaking the laws of the real world, we are giving governments and companies reason and right to start enforcing censorship and all that goes with it.
The RIAA is legally right, but their methods are wrong. Napster itself is a great service, but its methods are illegal and wrong. There IS a happy gray zone in there, but so far, everyone has done their best to avoid it, simply because it would mean conforming in the Cyber Universe to a rule/law that exists in the Real Universe. Come one people, pull your heads in. We don't cease to be humans simply because we log on to an ISP and sit in front of a computer.
PS. Don't get me wrong. I'm just as annoyed at the RIAA for trying to do this as most others are. I admit to being a trader (ironic eh?). The difference is that I acknowledge and understand that by letting others copy my files and by copying others files, I break the law. What a lot of people don't seem to grasp is that this is wrong. Too many people see it as their right to download anything, regardless of the laws involved.
Quoting Claude Raines from Casablanca..
"I'm shocked... shocked..."
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
You think the ability to copy artist's music without compensation is a sign of freedom? So, by your rules, I should be able to walk into a bookstore, photocopy any book I find in there, and then walk out? How about plagiarism...is claiming someone else's work as my own part of freedom too?
Our society is based on people getting compensation for their services. Musicians provide a valuable service, and they deserve to be compensated for it.
Nothing you can know that isn't known
Nothing you can see that isn't shown
Nowhere you can be that isn't where you're meant to be
It's easy
C'mon, everybody sing it with me now!
All you need is love
All you need is love
All you need is love, love
Love is all you need.
That about covers it. There is indeed nothing you can say, but you can learn how to play the game.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Seems to me if it's not a copy, how could it be a copyright infringement?
They can't have their cake and eat it too.....
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
1. Radio stations pay royalties to play imperfectly transmitted songs. CD resellers on the web pay royalties to play short, low quality excerpts as previews on their sites. Napster does not pay any royalty (or get any permission) to play exact duplicates of an entire work (not just an excerpt!) See the difference?
2. Irrelevant. If you can't afford the item, you should refrain from buying it, instead of illegally stealing it. Especially for luxury items such as recorded music.
Actually the recording industry is paid twice for recording a song off the radio. Once when the radio pays BMI or ASCAP. Twice when the cassette tape manufacturer pays the per cassette royalty to the RIAA for expected piracy. It is LEGAL to make mix tapes and record off the radio. Unless you are talking imports, any CD can be had for under $12. Most of the time you can find things used for $6.
Thats right everyone. "They are changing some peoples opinions" is now a valid legal argument. I can see similiar attempts in the 1770's..."The works of Thomas Paine cause vast numbers of people to believe they should have elected representation. This subverts the very purpose of King George's majesty, to the long-term detriment of the public."
Fucking duh, RIAA. Ever consider that changing views is legal?
Its declared goals also included the following: "Seize control of digital distribution....Napster brings about death of the CD... Record stores (Tower Records) obsoleted."
I suppose its also a valid legal argument that "We have been making money like this for a long time, and its now our right to do so." Read the first excerpt again: Napster is causing a vast number of consumers to believe that free music on the Internet is an entitlement. But the RIAA's entitlement is ok.
Compare this to RIAA's reply to Napsters answer to the Motion for Preliminary Injunction and other earlier documents. It has always been Napster's side of the story that the Supreme Court didn't mean what they wrote in Sony, and that Napster have been evil sly dogs.
It has always been Napster's view that the law is on their side. As a lawyer, I'm more likely to buy the hypertechnical defenses on behalf of Napster, but hey, that's just me. The District Court was moved by the "hey, they're taking everything for free" rhetoric, and the few cracks of light they could pull out of Sony.
Time will tell how the 9th Circuit feels about the matter. In the meanwhile, I didn't see anything really new in this brief at first glance.
Are there any musicians here such jerks that they only want people to listen to their music if they can pay for it? This is what the record companies are saying (along with a whole host of unconstitional things).
If that is the case, then not only do I have zero respect for you as an artist, but you deserve whatever piracy befalls you.
>> Nowhere is it written that rock stars get to
>> make millions of dolars.
Of course not, and, unfortunately, many aspiring musicians are under this delusion.
I think that C. Love is right on when she says that the distribution and licensing system needs to be restructured. Music copyrights should revert back to the author.
However, Napster isn't helping to put money in the pockets of musicans. eMusic isn't really working, although I could be wrong. CDNow is just an online music store. Services are being created to allow easier distribution on the Net, but its awhile off.
After thinging about this for a few more min. A good open soucre Porn filter would be a good plug in for Gnutella, anyone up for the task?
It's a pathetic display when companies and organizations go through what Napster and the RIAA are going through. A settlement will obviously never happen, which really makes me curious as to what 20 million pissed off ex-napster users are gonna do when the RIAA gets its way...
Look, I dislike the English as much as the next guy... but the fact is, clippers are used mostly (not exclusively) to pirate tea, and that's bad. Yes, the King needs to see the writing on the wall that representation is the way to go and that He can't gouge colonists. But that doesn't mean that John Paul and the rest of those pirates are a good thing! They're both in the wrong.
Cheap tea is not a right. The colonist's rights are not being stepped on. Maybe you buy more tea because you tried Jefferson's stuff first... so what? It's still not a right. King George is bone-headed, but He's not wrong on this issue.
It also alarms me that people get this issue confused with freedom of religion, housing militia, etc... these have nothing to do with what the pirates are doing. Religion and housing are about control, using your own property as you wish. Running clippers to get past the British is about making money for Jefferson and his friends, not freedom.
"Is this company just so chock-full of idiocy that they jumped into a product with no viable method of making money? "
:)
Doesn't that question apply to every dot-com in existence? We're a dot-com, We don't need no stinkin' revenues!!
Reminds me of the old SNL skit about the bank whose primary service is making change. Bring a dollar, and they'll give 20 nickels, or 10 dimes, whatever you need. How do they make money? From volume!
ShoutingMan.com
IANAL, but I don't see that what they SAY they want to do, make CD's obsolete, crash the entertainment industries distribution model, etc, has anything to do with the legality.
Is what they are doing illegal is the question. Mark Furman may have said lots of racist things, he may have hated every black person alive, but that is irrelevant to whether he planted the glove or not?
I have no particular love for Napster, in fact I think they are like any other business and have every intention of milking users for money at the first opportunity, BUT, I don't think what they are doing is illegal.
Even if they could block pirated software, which they absolutely could not (having a file named Metallica - Holier Than Thou does not mean that this file contains an illegal copy of Metallica's Holier Than Though), why is it their responsibility to monitor their users actions? Thats B.S., no other industry has to do that, so this filing by RIAA is just about smoke around the real issue.
- I like pudding.
forget a word
Regardless of Napster's motivations for creating Napster, the service itself is not illegal. There are legitimate purposes for Napster, therefore Napster should win.
RIAA is pulling a moral stand here, trying to assasinate Napster's character. If Napster is a greedy, corporate entity like RIAA says it is, I'm still going to root for them over the greedy, corporate entity of RIAA!
Refrag
I have a website. It's about Macs.
On the day that the Appeals Court rules against Napster, the RIAA should come out with a broad announcement that justice was served and this is a win for the American people (they always like to say that stuff). But--then they should announce a plan like this:
- The major recording studios are pleased to announce a song-by-song availability download program whereby you can download MP3's cheaply.
- MP3's will be priced by popularity. If you wan't Britney Spears' new hit single, it will cost $1.50 [or more; $2.95 would not be excessive considering that people pay $1.50 to get cash from an ATM]
- When you download a song the studio will also give you a
.PDF file with the lyrics and various info. - Less popular songs will be available more cheaply. The 7th dance remix of Dead American Presidents' Peaches is available for $0.45.
- Charges will be made to a credit card, which you will only be required to register with us once. This information will never be [privacy policy]
- The RIAA has agreed to pay $1 million to Shawn Fanning and his uncle if they promise to get out of the industry.
Okay, I made that last one up. But the others are valid points. Popular artists (e.g., Spears, Metallica, etc.) will be compensated royally, while less sought-after artists will still be compensated, but a) not as much and b) their fans can download less-popular music cheaper.Everyone benefits. Joe consumer gets cheap downloads of his favorite music. The RIAA sells their copyrighted work for a fraction of the distribution cost of a CD. I'd wager a good amount that a lot of people will download new hit singles, listen to them, and on the advice of friends, buy the physical CD.
--
Have fun: Join D.N.A. (National Dyslexics Association)
I therefore propose the following changes to our current system of copyrighting intellectual property:
1. Only the creator of the work can own the rights to the work. In other words, the creator cannot sell his rights to another person or company.
2. Upon the death of the creator of the work, the work will enter the public domain. If the creator has a legal spouse, the work will enter the public domain upon that person's death.
I believe that this proposal will have enormous benefits in terms of protecting the artist/creator of IP, because he or she can never lose the rights to their work. Sure, the artist can enter into a contract with a company to produce hard copies of the work, but the actual ownership of the work remains with the artist.
This system will also provide 'incentive to create'. Instead of the system we have now, where people who never created anything in their life live off the 'rights' to IP, we'll have a system that forces people to constantly produce new works. An older artist certainly has the right to live off the work he or she did in the past, by releasing 'greatest hits' compilations and such. But the artist's children have no rights over the IP. They will be forced to create their own works. Similarly, a company or corporation can never own the rights to IP. Only a human being can own IP.
Like I said, just a modest proposal...
Although I cannot stand the RIAA, the more I think about it something just seems wrong about Napster making a profit off of someone elses work
Good thing Napster has proven just be be a money suck for VC capital then, huh?
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
Why doesn't the RIAA buy napster?
Because the CEO of Napster is willing to stand up for what he believes in. He doesn't care about the money - he cares about winning the legal battle his company is in. In other words, the RIAA isn't going to buy Napster because Napster isn't willing to sell itself out to the RIAA (let's hope).
=================================
I pledge allegiance to the flag...
of the Corporate States of America...
Incorrect. But don't feel bad; Lars made the same error in reasoning in a new interview in the San Francisco Examiner.
Digital artifacts are not being transferred away from one party toward another. They are being duplicated, such that both parties now have the artifact.
I wish people would think about these facts more clearly and face the realities of digital media. Otherwise, we're not going to make any meaningful progress on the issue.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
That's more accurate and is less likely to be the basis of an emotional, rather than logical, argument.
Anonymous Cowards: Proving daily that human beings are innately jerks.
It would be trivial for Napster to prevent transferring illegally stolen music: simply prevent transferring any file with a valid MP3 header.
It would be even more trivial to break this.
<O
( \
XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!
Will I retire or break 10K?
I said "you're" instead of "your"? Well, I guess the moderators either don't notice or don't care about grammar. :)
Hmm... Okay, for those artists who do want to share their music, and those users who only want to share said music, shutting down Napster is a shame. But there are better ways to do this -- mp3.com, for example.
I think it is clear that, despite their backpedaling once slapped with a lawsuit, Napster was created to facilitate pirating music. Napster themselves because it is the most lucrative, your average college student because they don't care. The legal uses -- which are all very good ideas -- were just tacked on later as cover. IMHO.
The enemies of Democracy are
Also, you can select text from xpdf (though I don't know about the others, but I don't remember having much luck with acroread (solaris version, slightly fermented)).
Bill - aka taniwha
--
Leave others their otherness. -- Aratak
Best I can come up with is advertising. An Ad spot on Napster might be worh a few bucks. Just make the client display the advert while you download. In a float-to-top can't-be-minimized window. Having never actually used Napster (Or any of its open source derivatives) I'm totally guessing on how the process works, of course.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Read my response to the other message - what I am saying is that the way things are, they are working for free weither they want to or not!! That is VERY BAD.
:-) )
I want the artist to make as much money as possible, but the way they are going about things they are trying to stay within a shrinking market segment. It may not be right, but it is happening. Ignore it at your peril if you are an artist (I am not of course and so may speak freely on the matter
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I had a talk with my musician friend, Phil R., yesterday about this whole Napster debacle. He thinks the Internet is great and is going to revolutionize music distribution. However, when he found someone posted the LP he and his high school buds were working on to the Internet he felt violated. "They" didn't ask, however if "they" did it would probably have been okay. But what I got from my chat was that a musician has certain rights. Those rights need to be protected if the musician is to live.
Sure the RIAA is evil, Phil will loudly attest to that. However, it is looking out for the interests of its musicians no matter how little money the musicians actually realize.
go get 'im, timothy!
...it's about distribution without the RIAA's blessing. This is not about piracy. It's about control. By putting this case forward, they are opening a door by which they can sieze control of an established distribution method.
The industry may "have spent vast sums and years of effort preparing to develop legitimate commercial acceptance by consumers to pay for digital downloads of music." But I don't see any sort of service actually available. Where can I pay for and download music on the internet?
Liquid Audio's site seems to include old-timers looking to get the last bit of mileage out of their catalog, or bands you've never heard of. Heck, that site is more like what Napster is trying to portray itself as. Truth is, you can't find the most popular hits of today on any "legitimate" website.
Don't forget that Friday is Hawaiian shirt day.
Dude, you just (said in not so many words or)gave me an idea for how we can solve this pesky Napster-RIAA-SaveTheArtists-DownWithCopyright debate!
HOW TO SOLVE THE NAPSTER DEBATE ONCE AND FOR ALL
Create a network of streaming music servers. Users use a Winamp-like client and create custom playlists of any songs they want. Anything conceivable. The music is then streamed to the client (and possibly cached locally). RIAA and independent artists alike could make their libraries of music available for free consumption by the public.
The catch? The service provider would track how many times a particular song is downloaded/listened to and pay a nominal royalty similar to what radio stations pay.
Furthermore, this could be the ultimate promotion/marketing tool. One that would remove all barriers to indie artists and allow directed advertising on a new scale. Imagine, while you're listening to your AC/DC tunes, an "agent" could notify you that new AC/DC tracks are available or that Brian Johnson has a new solo album.
The only problem would be convincing big-name music companies to get on board. No doubt they would be reluctant because to them, the web (after Napster) is just a new way to grossly inflate profits. But if you can convince even one major label to do this and show that it benefits everyone involved, I think we'd have a REAL music distribution revolution.
--
Matt.
From the brief:
The AHRA balances the interests of manufacturers, consumers, and copyright owners by plac[ing] restrictions only upon a specific type of recording device, specifically defined in the statute, requiring such devices to be equipped with copy protections and that royalty payments be made based on their sale, and exempting consumers from copyright infringement lawsuits for private uses of AHRA-covered devices: In RIAA v. Diamond Multimedia Systems, Inc., 180 F.3d 1072, 1074-1075 (9th Cir. 1999), this Court squarely held that [u]nder the plain meaning of the [AHRA's] definition of digital audio recording devices, computers (and their hard drives) are not digital audio recording devices... Diamond also held that MP3 files contained on computer hard drives are not digital musical recordings. 180 F.3d at 1076-77. Thus, under Diamond, a computer is not a covered device, and a copy made by one Napster user of an MP3 file residing on another Napster user's computer hard drive is not a copy of a digital musical recording, and is not covered by Section 1008. 17 U.S.C. 1001(4)(A).
Here is the RIAA's bait and switch.
The bait:
The question being addressed in the Diamond Multimedia case was whether or not computers and MP3 files are "digital audio recording devices" and "digital musical recordings" for the purpose of determining whether those devices were required to implement SCMS.
The switch:
The RIAA is claiming that only activities using devices and media covered by the SCMS and royalty requirements are protected by 1008. Unfortunately for them, they have made this up out of thin air.
The appeals court directly addressed this argument in lifting the injunction. From the text of the stay:
The court reached its conclusion that Napster users were engaged in direct infringement in part because
o it ruled that 17 USC 1008's protections only applied to copying by specifically identified devices rather than, as this Court said in RIAA v. Diamond Multimedia Syst., Inc., 180 F.3d 1072 (9 th Cir. 1999), to all noncommercial copying by consumers.1
1 The court relied on the fact that this Court in Diamond Multimedia had held (in the context of the AHRA's serial copying and royalty provisions) that digital audio recording device did not include computer hard-drives. The court below ignored, however, that 17 U.S.C. 1008 permits non-commercial copying by consumers using either analog or digital audio recording devices or "such a device"; that the legislative history makes clear that Congress intended by that language to immunize all non-commercial copying of music by consumers; that the same Diamond Multimedia Court expressly said that 17 U.S.C. 1008 "protects all noncommercial copying by consumers of digital and analog musical recordings" (180 F.3d at 1079); and that throughout the Diamond Multimedia opinion the Court discusses copying of music using computer hard-drives as AHRA protected activity.
The RIAA can of course continue to pursue their failed legal theory in this highly symphathetic lower court, but if the lower court finds in favor of the RIAA for this reason, the appeals court has all but said it will overturn a finding based on such a theory.
The other key point in Napster's defense is the argument that the activities of Napsters' users are non-commercial. The RIAA claims that Napsters are engaging in commercial activity:The RIAA can argue this point all they want to, but I don't think that they can make the case. This law simply forbids "quota" or "ratio" requirements, nothing more. This is not how Napster works. When someone makes files available on Napster, there is no expectation that they will be rewarded for their contribution by being given subsequent access to other files. When someone downloads files from Napster, there is no expectation or requirement that they make files available in return. Napster is probably the only possible file sharing system that is absolutely, authentically non-commercial with respect to its users' activities.
The RIAA reply goes on to try and prove that users of Napster are not engaging in fair use. This is irrelevant because Section 1008 does not say:It says, instead, If the activities of Napsters' users are protected by Section 1008, then the rest of the RIAA case disintegrates. If Napsters' users are not committing infringement, then fair use is not even an issue, and Napster cannot be liable for contributory infringement if there is no actual infringement.
In short, I don't think that the RIAA has made their case. Their counterargument is based on the exact legal theories that the Appeals court firmly rejected in overturning the injunction.
Either napster lied, and knew about all these things, or Napster changed it's tactics, and then how to go aganst these things. That's not good to do that. I love napster, and RIAA should be taking advantage of technologies like napster to distribute more music. Good Luck Napster. RIAA overcharged consumers 400 million in the last 4 years!
Whoa, whoa, slow down. Now, I can't speak for you, but when I say "pirate", I conjur an image of a college student making Win95 ISO images and Diablo available on the school LAN, not vicious kidnap and murder on the high seas. The word has been used so much to refer to the former that I really doubt many people associate the word with kidnap and murder.
I think the GNU philosophy on this may have been correct at one time, but the word has been re-defined by usage.
The enemies of Democracy are
(And if you are a detector-user, please don't "educate" me about the use of a detector "in case the police radar is miscalibrated" [as my brother-in-law argued]. If you're traveling at legal speed, you won't slow down if your detector goes off ... since you've no reason to. Only if you know you're over the limit would you react to an incoming signal.)
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
Law based on intent is usually bad law, and needs to be overturned. If you start an ISP because you really want a big pipe for your own personal use, downloading warez and kp say, does that mean that your otherwise legal business is illegal? I think not.
As you said, don't confuse morality and legality. Morally I condemn Napster. Legally I fear the precedent if they lose more than if they win.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
That doesn't sound like a sensible solution. There's little correlation between the file type and any restrictions on it's distribution or use. Word for windows might not distributed an MP3. It'd sound horrible. Some music I composed might not have any restrictions whatsoever?
What Napster really is just a useful utility and a directory. The utility can be easily replaced (freenet, gnutella, ftp,webserver, usw), as well as the directory (a simple cgi script will do).
The real monster is not even the internet, if they stopped it something else would replace it. The real monster here is technology. Try and stop it.
The more I think about it, the more I am bothered by what Napster has been doing. It's kind of bizarre because I understand and agree that it does help increase CD sales through exposure, etc.
It seems to me that others are beginning to feel the same way; I've already read several posts by users who have taken up with legitimate sources (emusic, for example) to ease their increasingly guilty consciences.
Anybody else beginning to feal this way?
Don't sweat the petty things. But do pet the sweaty things.
Oh please. Don't subject me to one more whining plea that no matter how evil the major record labels are, "Napster is still illegal". Armed coups are also illegal, but they usually have a reason. Don't you wonder why cassette tapes cost a fraction what a CD does even though the CD is MUCH cheaper to manufacture? The recording industry is GOUGING you and laughing all the way to the bank. Don't think for a moment that 10 songs downloaded digitally from a major label will be cheaper than a CD, even though the costs of production, sales, distribution, and warehousing are basically NON-EXISTENT for digital media. The members of the RIAA will continue to widen their profit margin and continue pushing to charge PER-USE because their greed and control over the distribution channels are unchallenged. People are STEALING and they're doing it to make a STATEMENT and because they are tired of the ongoing THEFT by the recording industry. It's fair, it's right, it's a revolution.
*** FLAME ON ***
Since you used bold: I am really tired of reading idiots who don't know shit about copyright.
'Unauthorized copying' is not stealing. It is simply 'unauthorized.' Being unauthorized does not, in itself, constitute a violation. Period.
If you bothered to read the Napster case, you'd find that showing damages is necessary to show a copyright violation. In fact, copyright law before DCMA established four "mutual non-exclusive" criteria for determining copyright violation:
(1) The nature of the use (commercial vs. academic, news, personal).
(2) The monetary damage to the copyright holder, if any.
(3) The extent of the work used (a phrase or sentence, or an exact copy of a painting).
(4) The intent of the person(s) making the copy.
(For those who care to do their research, the key documents here are the White and Blue Papers produced by Congress on the issues).
Unless the DCMA and other recent attempts to redefine copyright stand, copyright does not mean that you 'own' a work and can do with it as you wish. All you 'own' is the copyright itself, and all this means is that you have certain very limited rights to authorize copying of particular works. Very limited, as the point of this system was to establish a balance between the public's need and right to information, and the need to fairly compensate authors, spurring them to create new Works.
Once again: COPYRIGHT VIOLATION IS NOT A CRIME. The DCMA & etc. have yet to hold up in Court, and the Supremes have repeatedly indicated their intent to resist any attempt to limit fair use. Before DCMA etc., copyright was almost entirely a civil matter. Let's say it again: COPYRIGHT VIOLATION IS NOT A CRIME. THERE'S NOTHING TO STEAL. OWNING A COPYRIGHT IS NOT THE SAME AS OWNING A WORK. A WORK CANNOT BE STOLEN -- ONLY THE PAPER IT'S PRINTED ON. CODING IS NOT A CRIME, EITHER.
And again, if you bother to read through what people have posted here, through Barlow's writings at EFF, or things written by copyright experts like Pamula Samuelson, you'll find that copyright is a lot more complex than your "we can't let the masses storm the Bastille" rant assumes.
Got It? ?*** FLAME OFF ***
-----
You don't copy other people works, but your neighbor does. Then comes police to seize your computer to check whether you are infringing copyrights. They soon discover that your files are on a crypted partition. They ask your password to check your personal files. Do you want that police check you girlfriend's messages to you for MP3 attachements?
I don't. I would rather restrict myself to the IP created by people who don't care much about resticting copying of their works.
This prohibition of digital music is flat wrong, and created the black market demand that napster fills.
Think in terms of radio, A dj at a radio station can play any music he wants out to the world. The DJ can do this becuase stations are given a statutory license that covers all artists. They pay royalties through ASCAP, or BMI. A radio station does not have to ask permission from an artist to play a song, as long at it can meet the terms of the statutory license.
There is no associated statutory license for interactive broadcasts. What the web is good for is interactive content. If doubleclick can beam targeted ads to me, a webcaster sure as hell has the ability to stream me the music I want, when I want it it. Why dont they? Becuase the music industry has not created a statutory license for interactive content. This fact has crippled online music business models, there's no way you can get permission from every single artist in any reasonable way.
As a result digital stations are boring copies of their FCC counterparts, they are very unweb like. This is not about artist choice, this is simply about the RIAA's control of the new medium. They could easily create a statutory license for interactive content that webcasters could adher to, but they have istead chosen to cripple the medium.
Napster is simply a market driven response. There is a huge demand for interactive music, and napster was a quick black market solution and is still the ONLY solution that user interactive services across the whole of the catalog of music.
If the RIAA would let webcasters pay royalties to stream mp3s in a nonlinear fashion, so that users could interact and make choices as to what they listen to, then most of the naspter users would evaporate. People konw enough to konw the web can give them personalized content, and they are honest enough to use the legal services when they are available. In this case there are no legal services to meet the demand for interactive content.
Technically Napster isn't all that new and novel. peer-to-peer file swapping has existed for awhile. Even windows metwork neighborhood can do server brokered peer-to-peer file swapping over a LAN. Can't you see that global peer-to-peer networking was bound to happen sometime soon? I can't imagine microsoft.net not having a global peer-to-peer component as an enhanced version of network neighborhood.
Napster is a not a good solution, but right now there are no legal solutions. Even if Napster dies in this legal fight, the concept of peer-to-peer sharing is out there and its popular and will be nearly everywhere in a year or two as a general internet protocal like ftp.
So what if what napster is doing is illegal, the 20 million or so napster users are a big enough group to make congress sit up and listen. Copyright was never meant to be a basic right, and a few million well placed letters could persuade lawmakers make a few changes.
I dont't know the history of radio ver well, but Im sure the same arguments were made against it by muisc publishers at the time. Who would buy sheet music if they could hear it on the radio for free? I'm sure the beginnings of radio were full of copyright infringements till the laws changed.
Every legal argument the RIAA uses to prevent interactive online music, is one more law that could be erased in the public backlash when napster gets defeated. The RIAA can not afford to win this lawsuit. If they would back a way from the legal action and instead focus on bringing legal alternatives into the system, this whole black market issue would disappear. -jef
You are assuming that every download is a purchase avoided. I doubt very much that college kids with hundreds of MP3s could actually have purchased all those CDs.
There are also people (myself included) who have bought CDs they never would have known about because an MP3 provided a practical means of trying out new music. The only alternative would have been to order the CD and try to send it back after opening and playing it.
I bet it's a wash. I bet the only money the RIAA is losing is from legal expenses, and of course the opportunity lost from not cooperating with the new distribution methods.
--
Infuriate left and right
If the Mercedes could be produced for free, and your theft didn't prevent anyone else from buying one, I would have very little problem with your theft. But there is a very real physical cost. Just as there is a physical cost to an actual CD -- I would never condone stealing a CD from a store.
But bits? No cost there, other a few seconds of server time.
I see no theft in copying bits which you would never buy anyway. If you copy AutoCAd and play with it, but could never afford to buy your own copy, AutoCAD hasn't lost a cent. Where is the loss?
It used to be common for office workers to install Microsoft Office at home so they could work at home nights and weekends. No doubt they also wrote letters and recipies and resumes. Is there theft in any of this?
Here are counter examples. Suppose you are handing out coupons on a street corner. Suppose someone grabs one before you have a chance to give it out? Suppose someone takes two? Is either of those theft?
Suppose a store sale says "2 per customer" -- is it theft to go back several times and buy two each time?
How about contests "No purchase necessary" -- what if you enter a dozen times?
How about radio contests -- "12th caller wins!" -- is it theft to use a fast redial button? Is it theft to have your computer redial even faster?
--
Infuriate left and right
I'll agree that Napster is good for those things, but let's be honest: Napster has attracted the bulk of its audience, and continues to do so, not by offering the promise that Phil Ochs fans can obtain bootlegs of his work that will never be commercially released, but by offering the promise of Top 40 type music for free.
I don't especially like the RIAA, but the more I look at Napster's operation, the more sleazy they look to me. Notice how they suddenly started promoting unsigned artists only when the RIAA took them to court? The fact is that Napster are building a business empire by facilitating the theft of artists' work. And they've been plenty keen to attack anyone undermining their own intellectual property, too.
--
My name is Sue,
How do you do?
Now you gonna die!
"If metallica said no do u really think napter will all metallica mp3????" Hmm... Highly thoughtful post... Proofread, moron.
So what would happen if some internet search engine figured out a way to provide a very up to date list of all files available via FTP? Up to date enough that the only stale links were computers that had disconnected within the last 5 minutes. And what would happen if this search engine were used by so many "pirates" that the RIAA couldn't keep the number of sites down to a dull roar?
Certainly the RIAA would be up in arms. But would it be the search engine's fault for creating a better service?
--
DeCSS is not about piracy?! Cracking the decryption code was a legitamate (if technically illegal) action. And if they had released a DVD player for Linux (or another unsupported OS)... great. But a Windows tool?! What's up with that? No, this tool does not help Linux users (directly... I know you can the convert the .VOB to a linuxable format). No, it does not do anything directly useful. Yes, it does keep the file in it's Windows-only state. And yes, it does make piracy (especially re-encoding into MPEG4 or something and putting it on a CD) easier. If it quacks like a duck...
-- Is "Sig" copyrighted by www.sig.com?
Is the web (or ftp, gopher, etc)'s primary purpose to promote copyright infringement? No. If you took a look at all of the web sites, you would not find that 90% of the sites are dedicated to some form of piracy.
Napster is being prosecuted because their service is being used overwhelmingly to pirate music.
What incentive is there for the RIAA to move to a medium such as the Internet?
The RIAA makes a lot more money selling CDs at $14-17 dollars a piece than they will by selling individual songs. The RIAA banks on the fact that there are a few hit songs. These hit songs are then separated onto two CDs, with a bunch of mediocre songs filling the gap. Now, instead of purchasing 4 songs you really want for $8 (assuming something like $2/song), you spend about $30.
A few years ago record stores had kiosks where you could select the songs you want and then you would get a CD or a tape for about $15. This was quickly shutdown because the record companies were losing money.
The problem is that any change in the current business model will result in a loss for the RIAA.
Although I cannot stand the RIAA, the more I think about it something just seems wrong about Napster making a profit off of someone elses work.
If Napster was not doing this is for profit, then it would be an easier case for me. But with Napster doing this as a business, it seems fair that the record companies should get a cut; even if they don't really deserve any more money.
The MPAA case is a lot easier; they (the MPAA) are clearly in the wrong. But the RIAA have some valid points, and they are sounding more valid all the time.
Gnutella, on the other hand, is not a business and is therefore exempt, IMHO.
It's quite unfortunate that we couldn't have a clearer cut trial of Good vs. Evil, but in this case I have to side with Napster as the lesser of two evils. The problem is that the RIAA is not just attacking Napster in this trial. If they win, that would have a major effect on how we listen to music and what control we have over what we pay for. Even though Napster isn't neccessarily a "good guy" and should be replaced with something to help the artists out more, the RIAA must be stopped before we have to pay for music by how long it is and for each time we listen to a certain song.
Mas vale cholo, que mal acompañado.
I see two different models for how property could work:
1. When the consumer receives the product, the producer gets paid.
2. When the producer relinquishes the product, the producer gets paid.
In the case of physical property, the two models are the same. The consumer receives the product at the same time as the producer relinquishes it.
In the case of intellectual property, however, the models differ, because the consumer can receive the product without the producer relinquishing it.
Producers (Or publishers) of intellectual property prefer model 1, because it allows them to sell the product over and over again without relinquishing it.
Model 2 is closer to the way the real world works, though. The producer would create their work, and then once they get paid however much they feel is appropriate, they release the product retaining (say) only the right to be identified as the creator (Even this is artificial, but morally correct, I feel).
What we are seeing in this digital revolution, where the intellectual property is finally seperated from the physical medium, is just why model 1 is not viable, and why we should move to model 2 as the ultimate framework for property.
Actually, it's illegal to use a radar detector in many states.
Mmmm.. Donuts
It's interesting to compare the RIAA to Microsoft. I have 4 computers in my house each one purchased with an embedded Microsoft product.
Total revenue to Microsoft: 4*$30 = $120
I have something on the order of 200 CDs. At an average cost of $15 my tiny collection of CDs works out to $3,000 worth of revenue to the record industry.
Like Microsoft, the RIAA's products consist of bits on a CD and that CD can be easily shared and/or copied.
Piracy hasn't stopped Microsoft from making boatloads of money, so given that the same copyright laws apply to both (more or less), what is the RIAA worried about?
Answer: The RIAA is a cartel and it controls the distribution and pricing of music. They've artificially inflated the cost of their product and when they lose control of the distribution channel, they lose control of pricing.
I'm not really taking a side here, but if I understand correctly this is the central issue: Does making it possible to commit an illegal act make one a party to the illegal act?
The NRA's position on this debate is clear: "Guns don't kill. People do."
The legal ramifications of a win by RIAA could have impact beyond the music industry. The fact that Napster exists does not cause people to commit copyright violations any more than the legal and easy availability of firearms causes people to commit gun-related crimes.
Given that Napster or some similar service is certainly never going to go away (whether commercial or otherwise), I am driven to ask this question:
What ever happened to the days when artists made their money by actually performing their music? Undoubtedly, the music industry has changed irrevocably since then. I would imagine CD's are the bread and butter of many musicians, since they are so much cheaper to produce than concerts.
The fact is, the music industry has to change again to survive. They need to provide added value that you can't get from a free download (which people will get whether it's from Napster, gnutella, FreeNet or some other source). In the days where I would copy songs off the radio onto a cassette, the added value was the whole album. I suspect that's still the great appeal of CD's. What should the new value add be? Music videos?
It is clearly implied that The Mafia has created the hypothetical pizza parlor in the first place.
:)
The question then becomes: Can/should all Mafia-sponsored pizza parlors be shut down due to their lineage, or only if they are themselves culprit in illegal activity?
Much like the ski-lodge context of young women looking for husbands and husbands looking for young women, the situation is not at symmetric as it first appears.
Perhaps you ought to review your links.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
Actually, I disagree, there are some major flaws in their reasoning. Particularly when they essentially argue that fair use cannot apply to music. Read it carefully. Remember that copyright a special privilege instituted to encourage the development of the arts and sciences. Fair Use is the body of exceptions to copyright law necessary to prevent it from violating basic human rights. The RIAA would like to eliminate these exceptions. I believe their concern is not harm to artists but harm to their own business model, which is arguably worse for the artists than Napsters. Regardless of whether or not you agree, the fact remains that this harm is in depriving them of a privilege, not a basic right. If this harm cannot be avoided without weakening the protection of basic rights, that is too high a price to pay.
I agree the analogy is a good one, but the claim that the user is at fault is correct. Do the tobacco companies hire goon squads to force people to smoke at gunpoint? Of course not. Hell, I should know, I was a smoker for over 16 years. I have no sympathy whatsoever with smokers that claim that tobacco companies are responsible for their smoking. The tobacco companies sell the stuff, whether you use it or not is your choice. And Napster doesn't force anyone to use their service at all, let alone use it for illegal purposes.
On the other side, both the tobacco companies and Napster are clearly not without blame either. The tobacco companies almost certainly have knowingly lied about the safety of their product, and should bear liability for that. That is a much more limited liability than the ridiculous rash of recent suits against them have claimed, however. And Napster, obviously, is guilty of encouraging their users to break the law. That, also is a much different matter in terms of responsibility from what their attacker wants to pin on them. Whatever moral condemnation Napster deserves for encouraging copyright infringement, there is something called Free Speech to be considered here. It is illegal for instance to grow certain plants in this country, but it is still legal to write and distribute books/web pages/etc encouraging and enabling people that want to grow those plants. However wrong I think Napsters actions are, better to have that wrong than to lose Free Speech.
Again, I must disagree. The GNU license relies on copyright, yes, but it is a defensive application of copyright. Without copyright law, it would have no force, but it would also be unneeded. Visit gnu.org and read up on the philosoph behind the GPL.
What the RIAA is arguing in this case is NOT simply "the heart of copyright law for many many years" - their arguments, if accepted, essentially eliminate the fair use exceptions to copyright law that have been established for years as necessary to prevent copyright law from violating basic pre-existing rights, as well as the complete destruction of the important distinction between guilt by act and guilt by association.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
It is the only way I can spit in the face of RIAA.
/. is a commercial entity. goto slashdot.com
alright there are 2 things that are bugging me about the whole Napster debate.
1) The United States government is trying to control the internet. This buggs me for 2 reasons
a)I really dislike the idea that the internet can be controlled by any government or orginization. the internet, as much as possible should be controlled by its users.
b)I am Canadian. In Canada our government decided that it would not attempt to controll the internet in any way. So why do decisions that are made under US law affect me? I am a Canadaian under Canadaian Law
2)There are people who use the internet for valid purposes. I know of two
a)my dad uses it to trade old old radio programs
b)a frient trades classical music that is in the public domain
Why should they be punnished for the crimes that others are commiting? Just because the majority of people are using Napster for illegal purpose does not Give the US the right to punnish the entire group
It will only get worse
If I were to download a Metallica song right now, they would not be hurt, because I have no intention of buying a Metallica CD in this life or any subsequent one that I can forsee.
I suppose that I am hurting any artist whose music that I don't buy. I better get to the store quick.
Actually, that isn't entirely true, because in the abscence of copyright protections, then anything once published would effectively be in the public domain. Such an environment would make the GPL somewhat unnecessary. The only provision that would be lost would be the requirment that all changes to GPL code be published. However, if the code is not published it would be very hard to show that it used GPLed code. (Of course, I am not an expert on this sort of thing.)
Although copyright laws may be important and in the public good, I don't beleive the relationship between the GPL and Microsoft's EULA is at all similar.
I don't practice what I preach because I'm not the kind of person that I'm preaching to.
I wonder how painful it felt to use their own prior legal defeat in THAT case to bolster THIS one. It's interesting that they bring it up...
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
Out of curiosity, just who, exactly, would they sue in the case of Gnutella? Or Freenet for that matter? And assuming they could find someone to sue, what impact would such a suit have on Gnutella or Freenet, even if the RIAA won such a suit?
-Vercingetorix
-Vercingetorix
"Necessitas non habet legem." -St. Augustine
i had an argument with a friend about this. although what napster is doing(in knowingly allowing people to trade copyrighted music on their system) is very wrong morally, I can see no real legal problems. they are not infringing copyright themselves, only making it easy for millions of other people to. IANAL but i dont think that it is illegal to say stuff like "we know they're pirating music" even though they are. i guess they might be seen as accomplices of some sort, but its not exactly murder. i guess the main thing that pissed me off was when my friend called me up when the injunction was served saying "HAHAHA NAPSTER LOST". took me over an hour to explain the difference between an injunction and a verdict because he wouldn't believe me. oh well
It's been said before, but the RIAA is just shooting itself in the foot. They need to be working with Napster or creating their own on-line music distribution/sharing system.
People would be willing to pay for Napster or a similiar service. People see the value in what they are getting. The RIAA should be taking advantage of this. But they are determined to squash online music distribution because of piracy fears. Ironically, this means that the only place people can trade music online is at a site that enables copyright infringement.
Don't forget that Friday is Hawaiian shirt day.
What. Gnutella, like the internet, is based on porn. The internet in my view and the Simpsons, is nothing but a way to facilitate 2.5 billion men's urges to get porn. And get porn they shall, weither it pay site or gnutella! PORN! PORN! PORN!. In fact, on Gnutella I'm quite disgusted by the amount of MP3's and other crap I get when I do searches for my porn. I think someone should make a plugin just for finding porn on Gnutella. And BTW, you switch a few letters, and Gnutella easily becomes Gnitalia.
Written with much love,
Bongo
The Badnews Bear
The company definitely does have enough mindshare to keep their file sharing service running as is, and open an online CD retailer service to compete directly with companies like CDnow and Amazon to complement their file sharing. This could help effectively invalidate RIAA claims that Napster is hurting CD sales. Napster should get their VC's together and do it. With the mindshare that they have, they can post impressive revenue and prove their argument that free sharing of copyrighted MP3 files is not inherently evil, but actually helps CD sales, and that people who use Napster do indeed buy legit Music CDs.
Yeah, what he believes in - money. Napster, Inc. is no better than the RIAA. Probably worse, since artists get no kickbacks for Napster (whereas they get almsot no kickbacks for CD sales). No one in the higher-ups at Napster's corporate structure wants free information, they want the information to be _theirs_. If they could make cash, Napster would sell out to the RIAA in a second if they offered enough (in fact, they've said they want to work with the RIAA to ensure copyrights are protected).
Windows 2000: Designed for the Internet. The Internet: Designed for UNIX.
On a side note, I was impressed with the Cagary Library's approach to filtering: it's optional (parents select it when registering their children for a card). Much better than enforcing it for everybody (not that I like censorship in the first place).
Bill - aka taniwha
--
Leave others their otherness. -- Aratak
While the RIAA may not be the best model, it certainly stands for one thing - copyright protection. Even that Linux kernel which you find dear is protected under the same copyright. "My enemy's enemy..." and all that: the RIAA stands in defense of basic copyright. Not even software licensing or anything legally questionable, but simply the copy protection part of copyright that's been at the heart of copyright law for many many years.
While I don't like the RIAA's business decisions, it's the same as if Microsoft were forced to defend their copyright. Of course we would want them to win; our beloved GPL defense rests upon the same things that Microsoft's EULA rests upon. While we may not like Microsoft as a business, I'd find it hard to condemn Microsoft for defending its copyright. Same with the RIAA>
Free BeOS, runs from a Linux partition
Ah, my favorite argument. So, with your highly developed logical skill, please explain why you decide to protest this by downloading the MP3 for free and giving the artist $0 instead of $2 or $3?
RIAA wants to protect physical distribution monopoly. RIAA wants control of digital distribution and has started down this path by seeking control of Napster's fate. However, RIAA cannot enjoy physical distribution margins in the digital distribution space. That's monopoly abuse.
But what is scary, RIAA could lobby for mp3 sniffers, or state controlled ISPs, or...I'm not even going to think about it. Umm, like maybe the USPS will get the monopoly on email accounts and ISP access for the 60 something million U.S. households. U.S. Postal Inspectors would have a field day!
This CAN very well happen if the internet community doesn't figure out how to resolve these historically signficant conflicts, such as the one surrounding digital distribution of music.
I haven't been following the Napster case very much so I apologize if this is common knowledge. I did notice in the RIAA response that Leon P. Gold of the firm Prosauker, Rose, LLP. is in the list of legal counsel for the RIAA. It is interesting to note that Leon P. Gold is the main attorney that the MPAA hired in the DeCSS case. Small world, eh? After reading those DeCSS depositions and trial transcripts, by the way, you can see that our rotund friend Leon can get quite nasty.
It is about illegal distribution. Distribution of copywritten materials without the consent of the copyright holders is illegal.
...I still maintain that this is more a control gaining tactic than a protection of rights.
(as it is the individual user who is actually committing the act)
If the RIAA was fully committed in protecting artists interests, they would be prosecuting the end parties themselves.
IMHO, this case sets a dangerous precedent for the computing industry in general. For example, if I write a security paper theoretically outlining a system deficiency along with sample source code, should i be held liable for the damages that some script kiddie inccurs by use of it? I'd imagine that it would not be long before security papers stopped showing up on the net and systems would gradually be produced that were less secure.
What are your thoughts?
I hate to say it, but Napster has not played its cards well. It picked fights with people who are more equipped than it. Now, it's in court and in trouble, doing damage to personal autonomy and freedom of speech.
It should have played the "Microsoft Java" card - and done what Microsoft did with Java. Make partnerships. Pretend to play along. Pretend to be friendly - all the while dragging its feet, and ever-so-slightly pushing the bounds of that friendship.
Sure, Microsoft ended up in court over Java, too. But it was a diffent battle - it was a battle over standards, not a battle over freedom. Had napster "played friendly" with the record labels, instead of confronting them, they would be in less heat now, and still doing what they've been doing.
pt
Will the real Richard Stallman please stand up?
i have a rather large collection of music,which i have taped off the radio.how is downloading music different from taping music? i realize that most people don't know about tapes today, CD quality is what they expect, but how's it different? couldn't you burn onto CD without from radio?
Guns are legal, but you can use them to kill people, and some do. Alcohol is legal, but you can use it to kill people, and some have. Napster is a FILE SHARING PROTOCOL. It is not their responsibility to make sure everyone uses it properly any more than it is the responsibility of the gas station you buy beer from to follow you around and make sure you don't drink and drive. Napster can serve to distribute music for those with no other good means, or it can be used to break the law. Just like my tire iron can help me in a break down, or it can be used to break down someone's skull. Tire irons seem to still be legal.
. html
You don't think the RIAA has been essentially stealing our money for years? Or the artists? They take something like 90-95% of record sales profits, for doing nothing more than providing a distribution channel (one that is arguably WORSE than the internet in terms of efficiency). Unless the artist has one ASS-KICKING record deal, the only way they can make cash after the advance is by touring. If 1,000,000 people download a new album, none pay for it, but 20% like it enough to go see a show, that is 200,000 * (price of ticket, let's say 25 bucks) = 5,000,000 dollars (minus venue charges) the artists have made from using the internet as a distribution channel. Compare that with 500,000 people buying the album at Sam Goody (*shiver*), with 5% royalties from the record company, we end up with 425,000 (assuming 17 dollar cd price). Some of wich has to still pay back the advance the record company has given them. So again 20% go to see a 25 dollar show. Total is 2.1 million. However the record company ends up with 500,000 * 17 - 425,000, roughly 8 MILLION. Who loses? The artists, and the consumers.
Don't bitch about how the poor artists are getting the shaft, they in general stand to gain a lot more buy using the free distribution channel. If you love music, you should be ABSOLUTELY PISSED OFF at the RIAA and be happy they are finally getting shown for what they really are, money grubbing exploitive fuckheads.
I don't think it is right that people can download artists work for free, but the arguement that the artists are losing cash on the deal holds no water.
Read this link before you flame me:
http://www.arancidamoeba.com/mrr/problemwithmusic
what truly sickens me is that the sum total number of plaintiffs is 6, the five companies that control the entire recording industry: sony, emi, seagrams, bertelsmann, and time-warner...and frank music corp.
yet for some odd reason, we continue to let these massive corporations decide what music we can listen to (on a large scale)
-dk
-dk
Dream with the feathers of angels stuffed beneath your head.
Thanks. Feel free to steal it.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Look, I dislike big corporations as much as the next guy... but the fact is that Napster is used mostly (not exclusively) to pirate music, and that's bad. Yes, the RIAA needs to see the writing on the wall that digital distribution is the way to go and they can't gouge consumers... But that doesn't mean Napster is a good thing! They're both in the wrong.
Pirating music is not a right. You're rights are not being stepped on. Maybe you bought more music because you heard it on Napster first... so what? It's still not a right. RIAA is bone-headed, but they are not wrong on this issue.
It also alarms me that people get this issue confused with the DeCSS issue... DeCSS is demonstrably not used for pirating (and isn't necessary). DeCSS is about control, and using your own property as you wish. Napster is about making money for themselves and their stock holders, not freedom.
The enemies of Democracy are
But is that a good law? You seem to assume it is, but there is room for disagreement.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
To make theft, make an owner; to create crime, create laws.
from The Disposessed by Ursula Le Guin
- - -
augi666
Could someone please explain to me Napster Inc.'s idea on how it makes money? All I remember was a memo from their offices a while back making one of their goals 'destruction of current CD distributors, e.g., Tower'. Is this company just so chock-full of idiocy that they jumped into a product with no viable method of making money? Or are they such megalomaniacs that they thought they would be the forefront of a music 'revolution' in which artists would require their services to be heard?
P.S. If you're on napster right now, go get the song 'Megalomaniac'. Pretty damn good.
You are more than the sum of what you consume.
You are more than the sum of what you consume.
Desire is not an occupation.
Very thorough! I wonder if I could hire one of those lawyers the next time I get a speeding ticket?
Let us not forget though, the Napster case isn't about Napster, it's about _all_ of the Internet. Do you think that http will be the next attack? We all know you can download mp3's from the web! And oops, someone emailed me an mp3... I suppose we'll have to do away with email next...
-- A hundred thousand lemmings can't be wrong!
1. You can only request certain songs, not all the songs that are available on a CD.
2. No, I don't believe that people would stop using Napster if CDs were "more reasonably" priced.
Mmmm.. Donuts
Sausage King of Chicago
microsoftword.mp3 - it doesn't care that they're not words...
Has anyone had any success getting to the website recently? Also, essentially what I'm looking for is a real world snail mail address for them, which I remember seeing in San Mateo, CA once a while ago, right?
From what I can remember about lawsuits involving CD-R, casette tapes, and VCRs, the law is that if their is any legal use for a product, it shouldn't be taken from the public. That is why CD-Rs, VCRs, casette tapes, bongs and guns are still availible for sale. For the same reason, Napster's service is legal. Morality should not be part of a country's policy, and is a whole other, more deeply involved field.
====
Crudely Drawn Games
or freenet...
or any of the others.
-------------------
-------------------
This is my SIG. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Ethics naturally arise as a consequence of society's self-interest, the desire of a civilization to keep itself coherent in the face of the wildly conflicting desires of its members. Ethics arise as a way to lay the groundwork, however implicitly, for people to interact with each other in the gray areas. But they don't come about in a vacuum. Ethics are defined by a consensus of the self-interests of the people who follow them.
The upshot is, whether or not you believe piracy is wrong, if nearly everyone does it (and your 20 million people, though less than 10% of the US population, would probably comprise a majority of those people interested in online music) then it's ethical. People are saying, in effect "We don't care if artists are getting what they consider a fair share, and we sure as hell don't care if the record industry does. We want this music online, and you'll give it to us."
In the face of that kind of pressure, the only option is to change the way we do things. There's no value to arguing over it in the courts - the markets will out.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
Wait just one second here. Hasn't Napster already been through enough. I mean, sure it is getting more media coverage than before, but people are still going to be flocking away from it just because they think it might be against the law.
To put Napster out of business, even if not permanently, would do a serious disservice to the online community's reputation. While the RIAA claims that their clients are being harmed right now, and therefore Napster should be shut down, it is also true that Napster has a right to be providing it services, pending a court verdict. Either way the court decides, action must take place after the verdict, and after the judge has had time to make up his mind.
--
Bad spellers of the world, untie!
Well, the only dispute I have with this argument, is the fact that (almost) every piece of software has some sort of EULA that strictly forbids copying it. According to some, copying the distribution media is OK as long as you are the only owner of the software, or only use it on one machine at a time, etc...
I've yet to run across an audio CD with an EULA attatched. When that day comes, I won't copy that CD (Yeah right)
I wouldn't lie...just ask me.
Not only does the RIAA want to control digital music, but I suspect that the RIAA quietly wished it had total control of MYMP3.com. This distribution model is the best protector of copyright infringement. That is, 'best' in the sense of 'not perfect,' because there will never be 'perfect'. And the MP3 format is most likely here to stay regardless of the most likely outcomes.
Once there is an IP ruling, this will give RIAA some leverage concerning MYMP3.com. On the flip side, the value of MYMP3.com increases significantly because these other distribution channels will be significantly dampened.
The IP ruling gives the labels hardball leverage in negotiating a deal with MYMP3.com. Labels obviously would want to seize control the site at the expense of the MP3 shareholders. ...Faced with realistic extinction prospects, MP3.com would supposedly be more willing to give into a generous distribution revenue sharing arrangement, including board seats. But MP3 should not underestimate the value of its equity, given any IP ruling.
Disclaimer: No one knows what is going to happen, but we know it's not going to happen overnight.
Well, they have a good point when they say that if the court ruled they are likely to win (and apparently the court did?, otherwise there wouldn't be an injuction), then the injunction should go into effect. I guess I missed whatever Napster's justification for the stay was, but I'll bet anything that it was really lame.
There are some assumptions in here, though. This document most certainly does have spin. (I'll explain later.) The funny part, though, is here:
Wow! I can't believe they admitted that! Assuming that "sampling" isn't just a euphemism for "pirate the whole album", then it sounds to me like they are admitting that if people heard the music ahead of time, they wouldn't want to buy it! Holy shit! Am I misinterpreting this? It sounds like they fear try-before-you-buy.Oh, as for the spin. Right after that, they say that if someone can get one free song, then..
They also mention earlier in the document: Their point is that Napster isn't just competing with CDs, but also with the record company's "legitimate online" sales.Oh the bias, the bias! Don't you see what is wrong with this? I'll tell you: the record companies are not offering MP3s-for-pay. They are trying to sell music in goofy proprietary formats (the SDMI precursors, like Microsoft's Mediaplayer format) with bizarre conditions that inhibit Fair Use. When they say they are trying to get consumers to accept for-pay digital music, they are being very misleading here. Intelligent consumers will never accept what they have been trying up to now, because the record companies have been acting in bad faith! I do not want to buy music in a closed format! I guess we're going to have to finish crushing the MPAA in the DVD case before the RIAA realizes this error.
If the record companies offered download-for-pay music in a real standard format (e.g. MP3) then this argument would pull a lot more weight. As it is, though, it is bullshit.
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
RIAA quoted on page 28, how Napster can block unauthorized music. The flaw in this is that every music that has to be traded on napster has to be approved. if i wanted to share the mp3 of the trax i just rawked up 5 minutes ago, I have to go through process of having napster approve it. the other flaw in this is that the protection uses artist name and music title. what stops me from distributing metallica's song under a new free artists name? nothing! hence, napster is right in maintaing that they don't have the technology to block all unauthorized mp3s. i am very disgusted at the paper.
Time does not wait.
First of all, if you havn't read jms' post do it now. It's the best analysis of the case I've read thus far. However, there are some possible "issues" presented here. IMHO, I'm far too young to ruin my give-em-the-finger-and-go-have-fun-years diving into any legal speghetti bowl, but here goes:
As far as the RIAA's use of the AHRA statute, they're going in the wrong direction. Don't know what butt crack they looked in for the idea of trying to exempt a computer and its digital contents from the devices under the shield of AHRA. They should instead notice WHO the AHRA is protecting. 1008 allows the CONSUMER to basically do whatever they want with the media FOR THEIR OWN PURPOSES after they have GAINED these rights (i.e. bought the CD, whatever). What is taking place on Napster is different. The actual consumer is not copying a recording for their own purposes. The person on the other side of the country who reqeusts that particular song is making a copy. This person is not at all under 1008 because they are not the consumer of the media, and the file is not being copied for the consumer's own purposes.
My attention span sucks and I doesn't want to hear the rest of the points I had to offer on the legal thing, so I guess I'll throw in a moral $0.02 for shits and giggles.
I'm very ambivalent towards this whole huge Napster-RIAA terd. Flush the damn thing and stop gawking at how big or discolored it is. (Yeah- you know you've done it before). I don't know everything about the RIAA, but I know enough to dislike their motives. But when it comes to what's going on in Napster I have some grudges. Basically people are getting things for free and they know it and don't want it to stop. EVERYTHING has a price these days and that's how it should be and that's what gives more to those who put more in and that's what makes the world work (MODS: -1, OFFTOPIC). People sit there saying "Joe-Flow is SOOO dope! I just got his new song off napster." But it doesn't hit home that Joe-Flow might not be able to make anymore dope songs if he or his studio don't get paid (Although I wouldn't mind seeing a lot of fake-ass silly wappers go flat broke). I know we're a long way from that point, but it's an inevitable end to the hill we're on. Yeah, the people who truly love music enough to do it for less money will, but those are few and far between. This kind of free-trade system is it's own downfall. Napster thrives on what artists create, but exploits them. Doesn't even take a rock scientist to put two and two together. Music should not be free! Napster may find a way to make it legal for now, but is it right, or even smart? If a way can be found to make music free while its makers are still rewarded for changing and inspiring the way people live, then let it be done! And there are people trying to do that now, but it will be hard to find a happy medium. The speedy exchange of digital info is invariably the future of basically everything, but I don't think Napster is doing justice for music in THE arena. Before your panties get all knotted about Napster getting shut down or the RIAA being a bunch of pigs, think about it. Don't fight for Napster. Don't fight against the RIAA. Fight for the people who make the music you listen to and enjoy... oh shit... that is what this is all about... right?
Like the Pope said when he saw the greedy Napster people and the greedy RIAA people fighting each other: "Jesus Christ!"
When curse words are no longer rude and profound, I will have to find another way to express myself.
I don't know about the average person, but Napster and it's cousins (or children, or brothers) have caused me to BUY more CDs than I would normally have bought. I hate the MP3 format. It's lossy, and to date I can't play it in my car or my decent stereo without buying a portable player with a horrible DAC. So I buy the CDs I've discovered via Napster and it's kin. I can't preview any CD I like at new record stores (I can preview used ones, but the major record companies don't see a dime of my cash from them). I can't return new CDs I buy that I end up hating, so I didn't buy new CDs before. Now I do, because I can preview the songs via these programs. Not everyone buys the MP3s that they pirate, but these people wouldn't have bought the CDs in the first place; they would have copied them via tape. Same quality, MP3 = decent tape quality. Therefore, minimal $ loss for the record companies, and at least a reasonable $ gain due to their retailer's non-return and non-preview (unless it's top 40 *gack*) policies for new CDs. The hand that feeds you and all that good stuff.
Right. No, your other right. No, the other other right.
I just read through the arguments against Napster and want to focus on their 'allowable' copying suggestion...
Just say I had a load of copyrighted material, I don't have to use the original names, I can use what ever I want and then use a non-napster route (i.e. IRC) to inform the rest of the world that, for example, music by "Tenniebopper" was really another name for "Britany Spears".
Lawyers don't do technology and it shows. Neither do music publishing execs!!!!
Why is it that a CD costs twice as much as a tape? Is the intellectual property encoded withinin somehow more valuable than it is on a tape? It's certainly not about media costs, because a CD is much cheaper to produce in quantity than is a cassette. Even if the media costs were relevant, the recording industry has already made it clear that when you buy music, you're buying some sort of existential right to their IP, not the media. So, really, it's the same "product."
If I buy a tape for $7 rather than a CD for $16, can I freely download the whole album as mp3s? Can I copy a friend's CD with a burner and not live in fear of the RIAA's secret IP police? (After all, I wouldn't want to actually _listen_ to that tape... ick!)
So, anyway, why is it that the recording industry sells the same "product" in two different packages, and the more popular package costs twice as much as the other. Wait, I think just answered my question...
Perhaps it's because the RIAA is collection of left-handed bastards* out to screw the public. I, for one, will be happy to see them die, die, die!
*"Left-handed bastards" is my brand-new catchy cut-down. If you desire to use this wonderful new string in print or digital communication, please remit a licensing fee of $2. The fee will be $4 if you elect to use my phrase in conversation. However, you may record it on a cassette tape royalty free.
-rev. j.a.j.
From the brief: "Thus, as one Napster user posted on the Napster website: "We all know it's illegal. We just don't think it's wrong." Frackman Decl., Ex. K, at p. 8. This view subverts the very purpose of copyright law, to the long term detriment of the public." What total BS! What this shows is thar the RIAA is subverting "the very purpose fo copyright law, to the long term detriment of the public." (Madison, US Constitution, Article 1, Section 8)They've be doing this for years by pressuring Congress to extend the length of copyright to 95 years for works for hire, and life + 75 years for other works. The whole purpose of copyright is "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Art... for limited Times". That is some misinterpretation of the Constitution. 95 years is not a limited time, it is longer than the normal human lifespan. How in hell will this promote the progress of music if the person/corporation can milk that one work for 95 years, they'll be dead before they have any 'motivation' to do anymore works. If this isn't a perversion of copyright then I don't know what is. No wonder that Napster user feels that they are doing no wrong. Secondly, Napster doesn't facilitate stealling of the Intellectual Property. What politicians and MS do is stealling IP, they take other peoples ideas and claim them as their own. Copying an MP3 isn't stealing, it's copying. One is not claiming to have created the darn thing. IP can only really be copied, thus any scarcity is artifical. Ideas are free and pleantiful, music has always been that way. Well until now that is (if the RIAA gets its way), it's the media and the cost of the performance that is (well should be)charged for. The music (the idea) is free, I actually don't need anytype of device but myself to hear a song. You see I can hear the song in my head, or sing it myself. Now that the media cost is gone, the performance cost is all that's left. That can be handled by well paying to see the artist perform. MP3s are merely ideas, totaly medialess, just like the ones in everyones (well maybe not)head.
Ever looked at HTML?
Refrag
I have a website. It's about Macs.
Ever download a file bigger than 100k or so with gnutella? It ain't gonna happen unless they fix the protocol. You don't know if you're downloading from soneone on AOL or some guy on the college resnet. Just the searching traffic will saturate anyone using a dialup.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
First of all, kudos to the "Napster is just a search engine" crowd. Based on your reaction, Last Home Networks is proud to announce our revolutionary new product, 666ster.
While most programs of it's genre are only useful for trading crappy, incomplete Xing rips from CDs scratched to oblivion, 666ster does oh-so-much more. Using our revolutionary "HyperSatanShare technology(tm)", you can share child porn, snuff films, photos of little children being sacrificed to whatever dark lord you desire, as well as software that violates the GPL, all thanks to our exciting new software.
How can we get away with it? Simple! We justify it the same way geeks and slashdot readers everywhere justify programs such as Napster! You see, 666ster and Last Home Networks don't actually store or transmit the morally reprehensible material on our servers. We simply give you, the user, a full featured search engine for finding the material of your wishes.
The next time you're looking for full screen MPEGs of people being savagely and mortally beaten, fret not! Thanks to the power of the internet and 666ster, your hideous, terrible urges can be satisfied in the time it takes to click your mouse. Download it today!
(Please note: The above message was a joke. If you don't get it, that's just too bad. Last Home Networks is entirely against the activities mentioned above. Except for the part about GPL violating software... yum!)
Only on slashdot can a posting be rated "Score -1, Insightful".
666ster? come on, if you had just waited you could have just used my much better suggestions.
"Calling EMACS an editor is like calling the Earth a hunk of dirt" - Chris DiBona
Ignore any file not ending in mp3. Wait until someone tries downloading NUDEXXX14.EXE and infects their computer with BO or netbus.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
I don't think you do finally get it. Copyright law makes a careful distinction between commercial and non-commercial uses of music. You are authorized to make copies of music for yourself or to share with other people for non-commercial purposes. It is legal to make a copy of a cd and give it to someone. It is illegal to make a copy of a cd and sell it to someone. So what most napster users are doing is legal. The fact that they are giving music to strangers rather than friends is beside the point. Does this hurt the artists? Is it unethical? This is hard to say. People who use napster usually do end up buying the music they like. As numerous people have posted and numerous studies have indicated, Napster users buy more music than people who don't use Napster. I think you are misinformed when you think people don't abide by the napster license. People for the most part are abiding by the napster license because they are not publicly performing or selling the music they download. They are merely redistributing it for free. They may not know they are authorized to do this. They may think what they're doing is illegal. But they are within their rights. The lawyers on both sides of this issue know that the only thing napster is threatening is the recording industry's stranglehold on popular culture. The recording industry feels that it has earned this stranglehold. So when the recording industry or the artists they have lured to their side tell you that you are stealing from them by copying their music, you can remind them that copyright law disagrees.
Napster is a tool, like a baseball bat or a crowbar. It has a legitimate, very important, and good use. However, it's very rarely actually used for that. And that's not the fault of the manufacturer, it's the fault of the person who is using it. Even if the manufacturer knows of that use (and continues operation knowing full well that use), so long as they aren't encouraging it, and so long as they stop it when it's brought to their attention (DMCA), they're not responsible. The user is breaking the law. Target them! You can't outlaw file sharing over the Internet! Think of all the First Amendment problems you'd have with that (not to mention negating one of the fundamental purposes of the Internet)! And how can you possibly outlaw Napster without outlawing everything down to FTP and e-mail? Metallica took the right action. And Napster proved themselves ready and did their duty under the DMCA quite properly. If anyone else has a problem, they have to do what Metallica did. There's no other legal recourse.
Normally in battles involving the RIAA or MPAA, standing up for the little guy who is protecting his first-amendment rights against the evil corporation is not only the attractive option, but the correct one. After all, the MPAA and RIAA are both strongly corrupt organizations, and both were primary motivators behind the worst bill passed since the CDA: the DMCA.
/. (and probably most people in the world) won't ever create something of their own, chances are they will work for a company that does. Now, with everyone in the world downloading your company's software, music, movie, etc. for free over their cable modems, how is that company going to make money? The typical /. comment is that it doesn't affect the offender. However, when your employer suddenly tells you that you are going to be laid off because they can't afford to pay you due to piracy over Napster2002, you'd probably see things a little differently. Suddenly, you can't put food on the table because some pimple-faced 13 year-old is too busy saying that Napster2002 is a form of expression, and deserves to be protected, while he rationalizes away his daily 2GB of downloads.
However, in this case, things are considerably different. Not only is standing up for the RIAA the correct thing, it's absolutely necessary.
Our legal system operates quite heavily on the concept of precedents: basically, when Congress doesn't dictate exactly what constitutes an infringement and what doesn't, the Courts are responsible for applying the (admittedly vague) laws on a case-by-case basis. When a Judge reaches a decision, that decision will be used as the basis in future decisions of similar nature.
Now, let's take a look at what happens if Napster wins: a service which is almost entirely used for illegal purposes is given the green light to continue business as it sees fit, without bothering to request permission before facilitating the mass-distribution of copyrighted works. If Napster wins, every court decision involving piracy from now on will probably reference the Napster decision. It wouldn't be too long before a service similar to Napster is created which facilitates the transactions of video games and other software (akin to a centralized Hotline), and based on the Napster decision, such software is protected. Soon, you would be able to download any image, movie, software, or song for free. Sounds almost utopian, right?
Wrong. Despite the fact that most members of
Anyone who is really backing Napster at this point needs to give up their myopic view of the world. Yes, the RIAA is an evil corporation. But this time, they aren't attacking free speech. They are defending copyrights. You may think it's all fine and dandy to steal other's work; however, if Napster wins it would be the biggest case of chopping off a nose to spite a face in the history of the world - eventually it will come back and bite you in the ass... hard.
Given a legal system based on precedent, allowing Napster to win is a very, very dangerous one indeed.
I usually use this free service hosted by BCL Computers to turn PDF file into HTML files. The result is simply amazing.
Napster guys are still just kids, and they were even more so when they started. The CEO is 19, isn't he? Face it, Napster isn't in it for any higher ethical purpose. They're not much unlike any warez group and if someone thought they were, it's high time for them to be disillusioned. Any fine speech they may have on their front page now is just hypocritical, probably written tonque-in-cheek.
I think the point of the whole Napster uproar is that RIAA is a battle they can never win, instead of thinking of new ways to relate to new technologies, as they should be doing. Even if they get Napster to shut down, there's Gnutella and the likes. There'll always be something more, something that is harder to track and harder to shut down. And people will find it. It'll never succeed to stop the distribution of mp3s as long as making them is as easy as it is now. Digital watermarking might be the future. I hope not, though! In a perfect world RIAA would understand that it's over for the traditional copyright and think of some other way to make their money.
They have some valid points. I mean come on, very few people who get on napster are going to download just unsigned bands or whatever.
So artists should just shut the hell up and work for free?
That's what you are basically saying. The cost of producing an album is irrelevant, the cost of recording an album is irrelevant. The cost of promotion, advertising, etc. is irrelevant.
They should just give it away for the cost of duplication... i.e. for free.
Seems to me you're the one who needs to realize the truth.
If the RIAA was able to legally turn Napster's headquarters into a smoldering obsidian crater, it will not stop the users of Napster. Thanks to the variety of open Nap-like servers (such as OpenNap) the quantity of music available through the Napster protocol will continue to rise, even if Napster closes down.
I was one of the millions of people who downloaded Napigator for the first time in the last week. There were NINE TIMES as many music files available through the open servers as through Napster's own server. This figure will continue to grow.
What's better is that the open servers have a better selection of indepdnent, non-RIAA-sponsored and free (speech and beer) music. I was able to find the Warlock Pincher's cover of "Back in Black" for the first time, after scouring the Net for months, and scouring local record stores for years.
What's the RIAA going to do? Sue everyone? We can say now (albeit with only one data point) that for every Napster server that the RIAA takes to court, fifty more will pop up.
In the final analysis, I think we all know that this is going to end up before the Supreme Court, and it'll be two or three years before it's resolved. Is the AHRA applicable? Is the DMCA constitutional?
Hell, this doesn't affect me anyway; I'm Canadian, and I can't photocopy my ass without the RCMP coming after me.
--
www.kitchengeek.com -- Nosh for
I haven't really used ghostview much, just 'gv', and I always browse a document with zoom factor 2 and antialiasing--which brings me to another question. That ghostscript uses Type 1 fonts, or no? Is it possible to use those same fonts that gs uses to render ps/pdf in X11? Or should I even bother, considering how horribly unreadable it is (even with antialiasing enabled) on my 800x600 monitor?
the real at&t mix
--
...with Napster doing this as a business, it seems fair that the record companies should get a cut...
Oh yeah, hey, good idea: the record companies should get a cut of Napster's profit - hmmm, let me see, that would be about -$1bazillion. Good idea.
Seriously, I support the idea that if Napster is actually making money then they ought to pay the copyright holders, whoever they may be, a part of it. But until they manage to make money, requiring such tribute would just be a way for RIAA to set it at an unreasonable level and choke off Napster's air supply (where have we heard that before?) and perpetuate RIAA's precious monopoly on famous artists. Exactly how high a fee does the RIAA deserve when you let your friends listen to the music you own?
--
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
[01:24] aard, I've got a bone to pick with you.
[01:24] actually read what I posted, and think about the implications.
[01:25] Hmm?
[01:25] Napster *as a corporate entity* *encourages* pirating music from bigtime bands.
[01:25] And even if they didn't, they don't do a damn thing to stop it.
[01:25] That is what makes napster evil.
[01:27] They do do a damn thing to stop it! They do everything they are required to do under the evil DMCA. When transgressions are brought to their attention, they take action. Solid, absolute, well-prepared action.
[01:27] * Moonwick giggles
[01:27] This is the same requirement as held by e-mail, ftp, newsgroups, etc.
[01:27] are you implying that they aren't aware of the rampant piracy that takes place on their server?
[01:28] How can you possibly outlaw napster without outlawing those? Napster isn't doing anything or giving anyone capabilities that don't already exist in those protocols.
[01:28] because that'd be the only way I can see them not doing soemthing, based on your statement.
[01:28] NAPSTER IS FUCKING ENCOURAGING PIRACY!
[01:28] If they choose to ignore it, it's not their job to police it. One of the few positive-from-ISP-point-of-view parts of the DMCA.
[01:28] You tell em they do everything they can do to stop it. I laugh at you.
[01:29] s/em/me/
[01:29] They are only required to take action if it's brought to their attention.
[01:29] hahaha
[01:29] and you're going to tell me that they're blissfully unaware of all the piracy that takes place using their service?
[01:29] Oh, and another thing. The law has ALWAYS stated that it's the job of the copyright holder to prosecute copyright violations.
[01:30] What does the awareness have anything to do with it?
[01:30] which is why the RIAA is sodomizing napster in court.
[01:30] haha. Would you please stop contradicting yourself?
[01:30] I'm not.
[01:30] First you tell me that they only have to do soemthing if it's brought to their attention. Then you ask me "What does awareness have to do with it".
[01:31] No, you fail to understand. The copyright holder has to investigate copyright infringement. NOT A THIRD PARTY. This includes Napster. Napster is not required to say "You can't infringe on metallica's copyright." They're allowed, so long as it's their network. But that task falls upon Metallica's shoulders.
[01:32] This world is full of spineless people who can't come to terms with the fact that piracy and encouraging/facilitating piracy is illegal.
[01:32] Uh, where do you draw the line of facilitating piracy. You seem to think it's somewhere between Napster and FTP. Where?
[01:32] All we need is a legal precedent to rule against napster.
[01:33] AIM allows file sharing. AIM can be easily configured to share all of my MP3 directory. If eveyrone does this, is it AOL's concern or the people actively doing it?
[01:33] If napster did soemthing to prevent piracy fromt aking place on their network, I'd be all for them.
[01:33] This isn't about file sharing. This is about blatantly alowing and encouraging piracy.
[01:33] That's the last thing we need, seeing as how bye-bye http ftp pop3 irc (insert any TCP protocol you can think of here)
[01:34] Napster's offenses have taken place on a corporate level. They must be punished because they have allowed and encouraged piracy through their service.
[01:34] They are doing something. They are doing exactly what AOL does on their networks. Exactly what ISP's do on their networks/hosted sites/message boards. They do ABSOLUTELY NOTHING until the one person who has a right to complain does.
[01:35] And the RIAA has complained.
[01:35] They filed for an injunction. Yet napster fought that.
[01:35] And God only knows how it got blocked... but it did.
[01:35] They have not encouraged it in a legal sense. Perhaps they were snickering behind their desks at what would result, but they don't have a message on their webpage "STEAL MUSIC FROM RECORDS BY CLICKING HERE TO DOWNLOAD"
[01:36] * wrath_ finds this entertaining to watch
[01:36] And the fact that they fought it. Doesn't that tell you somethign about their eagerness to disobey the RIAAs desires?
[01:36] encouraging piracy doesn't need to be anywhere near that blatant.
[01:37] So is it a crime to make a already apparent piracy easier?
[01:37] Who ISN'T eager to disobey the RIAA. $20 a CD? If nobody else smells a monopoly plot...
[01:37] Alright, are you admitting that what napster does is illegal? Because I detect a blatant change of subject here.
[01:38] The point I am making is that you can go join #mp3search and perform the same act...
[01:38] Yes, but it needs to exist in a real sense. Making a crowbar and proving it's the absolute best crowbar in existance for opening crates should not get you in legal trouble if it's also found to be the absolute best for cracking windows, even if you knew it before you marketed it.
[01:38] The RIAA's monopoly is an entirely different matter,a nd is one that I'm sure me and you would agree entirely on.
[01:38] But napster just made it user-friendly
[01:39] No, napster is not illegal and should not be shut down. And if it is, it'll be mere months before there is no longer an IRC for us to argue in.
[01:39] Wrong.
[01:39] IRC is not a corporation.
[01:39] You can't ban a protocol.
[01:39] Just like you can't ban OpenNAP.
[01:40] Yes you can. You can ban both. It just removes the target.
[01:40] no, you cannot ban IRC.
[01:40] You can shut down a corporation, however, which is what I'm advocating.
[01:41] It's not the software or idea I'm against. It's the company encouraging and allowing for the use of that software to accomplish illegal things.
[01:41] Yes, you can make running an IRC server or client illegal. Of course, this would require a law. Which is different than a law suit, but the possibility is opened by legal precedent. Which is what is being risked.
[01:41] Making a crowbar and proving it's the absolute best crowbar in existance for opening crates should not get you in legal trouble if it's also found to be the absolute best for cracking windows, even if you knew it before you marketed it.
[01:42] goddamnit. Stop ignoring my main point.
[01:42] But if you made it with the intent to break windows, then it is
[01:42] Napster, Incorporated has condoned piracy, and done nothing to stop it. Napster, THE CORPORATION AND NOPT THE SOFTWARE, must be punished.
[01:42] No. Intent is irrelevant (from a legal position, because it's impossible to prove and does not change whether or not a law was violated).
[01:43] It's easy to prove that napster has done nothing to prevent piracy from takign place on their service.
[01:43] If napster's only use was illegal, you could prove intent. However, the fact that it does have a legal use changes that completely.
[01:43] sigh. Would you stop bringing up the software?
[01:43] You keep saying that, but I don't see AOL preventing me from sending warez as e-mail attachments or over their AIM network. What's the difference there?
[01:43] For the last fuckign time, the problem is with the company.
[01:44] Good question. Sicne you've proven yourself unworthy to be trusted with a file transfer tool, let's make it illegal.
[01:44] Happy?
[01:45] You keep saying the company isn't doing anything to prevent piracy. But you keep not acknowledging the fact that A) They're doing everything they're required to do absolutely and with 100% efficiency. When Metallica complained, they took swift and complete action. They aren't required to take any action until they recieve a complaint (as per the DMCA as well as legal precedent in copyright activities) and B) they're not doing any less
[01:45] than any other network that allows file sharing.
[01:46] napster too swift, completely ineffective action.
[01:46] er, took
[01:46] or rather, any other company that possesses a network that allows file sharing
[01:47] Ineffective? On the contrary, they prevented all but the best of registry hax0rs from getting back in without a format.
[01:47] That threw me for a loop. I wasn't expecting them to be THAT thorough, but they were.
[01:47] people who immediately posted instructions on how to ciurcumvent the problem on the internet.
[01:47] An IP ban would have been so much nicer.
[01:47] but regardless.
[01:48] IP bans don't work. 90% of napster users are on dynamic IP's.
[01:49] ultimately, what I'd like to see out of this napster thing is better terms for purchasing music.
[01:49] I wouldn't say that many people are on dial-ups
[01:49] And posting instructions for circumventing napster's block? Obviously. That's inevitable. What more could napster have done? Made it HARDER? Not bloody likely. And it is against napster's agreement to evade the ban, and napster is actively searching for and removing anyone they find that violates any part of the agreement. Therefore, they did all they could in the metallica case.
[01:50] Not all non-dialups are static IP's. Usually that's a more expensive paid service. And most universities are dynamic too.
[01:50] there's not much point in discussing this further. We both agree that the RIAA needs to be broken up, that's the important thing.
[01:50] We also agree that legal avenues for obtaining music suck, and need to be expanded.
Besides, how do you get the people who *don't* use napster to get mp3's, which is a good deal of the population as well? You aren't even considering the mass amount of people who use chat channels, to get these mp3's. Sure, I've done the mp3 thing myself, but the copyright law is a joke considering enforcement
Looking at your record, I'd could reasonably prove that you use mp3's that you didn't buy, but I am unable to know which ones due to you and those you deal with due to you working in places I can't follow
-dev_seph, supporter of piracy, the one whom laughs at the DMCA being an enforceable excuse for a law, and supports abolishment of the GPL, a joke in the world of software
I would _gladly_ fork out as many as 25 hard earned dollars each month to use a Napster or a similar service. I would hope the cost wouldnt be that high, but If push came to shove and it was a quality service I would pay it. And Im sure Im not alone....I could see an all you can eat, flat rated music sharing service like this turning into the biggest cash cow the recording industry has ever seen.
Think about it: Napster (or whoever) could charge for the service...most of which would go to artists and lables for royalties (just like radio). On top of that Im sure a banner ad system would be implemented. They have your zip code...they know the bands you like...sounds like the perfect opprotunity to sell concert tickets to me- Ticketmaster would be jizzing their pants at such an arrangement. Not to mention all the other crap artists love to sell and we love to buy.
I would urge Napster to explore options like these...as they just might be able to turn this thing around for everyone involved.
Thers all kinds of ways to make money off something like this...even if your a record lable or an artist. Anyone who doesnt see that is just not looking hard enough.
Everyone is going to download that 4 gig VOB file and not the 200 meg mpeg4 rip :)
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
How nice of you to imply that our Founding Fathers were Communists.
How nice of you to assume (despite a reasonable amount of evidence to the contrary) that I'm an American... Also, whilst you may have some belief that a group of jurists from the 18th century somehow foresaw the momentous developments in technology, and the implications thereof, I do not have that faith.
Your comments about control of information being the only way that value is generated do not hold up to scrutiny.
Then give an alternative.
Cheers, Nick.
-- O improbe amor, quid non mortalia pectora cogis!
Oh, did I mention I usually travel without a CD drive? Or that I use my CD at home for other things while I listen to music? Or that it's easier by far to do a batch download than to sit around recording mp3's?
And, from a legal perspective, I expect my fair and legitimate use of Napster to vindicate it against even an order of magnitude of abuse by others.
Besides, the most interesting aspect of Napster's case remains the claim that not-for-profit individual music-sharing is legal. It's a stance I would agree with, completely consistent with the common-sense behavior of people on a day-to-day level.
By the way, I like the idea of Gnutella, but not the reality of it - I just never have found the relatively obscure musics I listen to there.
Well, most of that is not a Napster issue. I'll take each of your paragraphs one by one.
"And how many users are you going to get under this unenforceable law? You can't just arrest thousands of people just because of somebody's complaint that they feel a pinch in the bank. Sure, it could be the user, but the cost of arresting, seizing and legal costs would exceed whatever Lars sold himself to get (probably at least tenfold)."
This unenforceable law? You make it sound like the law is to blame. Which it might well be, but that's irrelevant. As for arresting people on account of someone else's complaint, no, you arrest people for breaking laws. Clearly, the people using Napster to pirate music are breaking laws, but Napster is not clearly breaking any law. And when Napster is gone, many of those people are going to continue clearly breaking laws. You don't stop someone from breaking into a house by making the crowbar illegal. You put them in jail. It's inefficient and costly, but that's how society works, and if you have a better idea, I'm sure the government's all ears (maybe). As for how much it costs, or how hard it is to enforce, I don't know how much they considered (or wished to consider) that issue when they made copyright legislation.
"Besides, how do you get the people who *don't* use napster to get mp3's, which is a good deal of the population as well? You aren't even considering the mass amount of people who use chat channels, to get these mp3's. Sure, I've done the mp3 thing myself, but the copyright law is a joke considering enforcement"
Definitely not relevant to the Napster issue directly, but indirectly, it's support for keeping Napster. There have been twelve arrests (that I am aware of) made for people distributing warez over EFNet. That's how you get people distributing over IRC. Same way you get people distributing over Napster. However, illegalizing Napster would mean illegalizing IRC in the same line of reasoning. That's not possible, nor is it fair, and it's a clear First Amendment violation. And it would obviously require the illegalization of just about every file-sharing protocol and program and every company that owns/makes/distributes/supports one. AOL can't possibly afford to check every e-mail attachment and browse every file sent via AIM.
"Looking at your record, I'd could reasonably prove that you use mp3's that you didn't buy, but I am unable to know which ones due to you and those you deal with due to you working in places I can't follow"
Prove? Unless you intend to acquisition my hard drive, I find it highly unlikely you'd be able to prove in either direction. You won't find me on Napster, and you won't find me in any music distribution chans on IRC. Well, not today anyways. Where I think you're going with this is that you want to find a way to catch me breaking copyright law. You have it backwards. Companies need to go into IRC chans just as those looking for files do, find those who are violating copyrights, and then report them to the FBI and their ISP's (and perhaps file a suit if they can get an identity by legal means on their own). The ISP would then have to take action as stated in the DMCA. And the FBI can handle further investigation, if any is necessary. If people intending theft can get access to the files, so can people protecting their copyrights. Just as Metallica did. It's the job of the copyright holder to take measures to protect their copyrights, not Napster. Napster's only responsible for assisting when asked. There's no place immune to investigation. And the more obscure the place (the harder it is for investigators to discover), the less people with illegal intent will be able to find it.
Perhaps, the copyright holders should get together and create a task force that investigates and prosecutes Internet copyright violations for a meager fee. This seems like a good and thorough method that benefits every law-abiding citizen.
Universal Music Confirms Digital Download Trials
We're just tired of paying 16 bucks for a piece of plastic when less than half of it goes to the artist. A lot of the money we pay (or paid, I guess) for CDs goes to making you buy more CD's. The artist only gets a tiny portion of the check. So, the RIAA's members are getting rich and the artists (most of them) aren't. There are almost 300,000,000 people the the US and about 100,000 of them are rich rock stars. That's what, .003% of america. And only about 1000 people in the US are richer record execs. How much more money are we going to give them?!? Jesus, this is just getting old. Paying for music is dead. Bands will have to make money on live stuff. It's time for things to change. It's revolution time. Screw the past, it's the year 2000 for christ's sake. Let's do something NEW!
Cool! Amazing Toys.
Incorrect. But don't feel bad; Lars made the same error in reasoning in a new interview in the San Francisco Examiner.
Digital artifacts are not being transferred away from one party toward another. They are being duplicated, such that both parties now have the artifact.
This attitude is, frankly, beginning to wear a bit thin.
The digerati-post-copyright, its-not-your-fault-you-don't-understand thing, that is. Excuse me whilst I generalise wildly from your position to encompass some of the things that annoy me most.
On the one hand, you're attempting to persuade people that digital distribution is the way forward, and that physical movement of information is destined to go the way of the dinosaurs (cf. Nicholas Negroponte et al.); that the net.economy holds information as its most valuable commodity, and has potentially unbridled potential - because the only natural resources required are ingenuity and graft (cf. .com stock billionaires etc.), and the only barrier to entry is setting up your dialup connection.
At the same time, you're attempting to undermine the only, currently effective means of protection available to intellectual property - copyright. Napster exemplifies copyright violation writ large, nay, bloody huge.
Napster is, from an ethical standpoint, unsupportable. Most everyone who uses it thinks that they're doing wrong. Those who do seek to justify their positions do so in ways that would make most ethicists blush.
It is an interesting thing to consider that -- given the hypothetical of a corporation conducting a business that profits from an immoral traffic, and attempts to defend itself by deliberate inadvertance -- I feel many /.'ers would cry 'foul', until the N-word contextualises it.
All the time that Napster stays in business in its current form, the notion of intellectual property becomes eroded. We are creating a generation who believe they have an entitlement to take ... excuse me duplicate whatever they want, and [cannot|do not wish to] pay for, within the digital domain.
The RIAA itself may represent a cartel of sorts, and may have some morally reprehensible aspects of its own, but - proverbially - two wrongs do not make a right.
Napster is a parasitic response to a problem; the problem is, of course, technology advancing at too fast a rate for economic models to keep up. There is no reasonable framework in place to support micropayments, oft-touted as the 'magic bullet' to cure the problem. There is no reasonable method for artists themselves to exercise control over their work, nor technology available to enforce that.
Napster is the technological chimera that is filling the gap between the advent of the possibility and the maturity of the model; it leverages the technology irresponsibly, feeding off the human desire to have for free what one should have paid for, and the negative public opinion towards the major labels. It gives back nothing to the artists, and in doing so it lines its pockets.
In the real world, Alice wouldn't mind too much if Bob fed her BMW into a 'car copier', and got one for himself. As you say, no-one _really_ loses (assuming Bob would otherwise have been able to afford the car).
Unfortunately, if you're going to be consistent with your rhetoric (God forbid), you're going to realise that the same does not apply in the digital economy. The only way that value exists in such an economy is through control of information: it is in the gradients of information flow that value is added ... I might pay to know what you know, or to hear your music, or whatever.
The concept of unlimited duplication is absolute anathema to this concept. The idea that everything should be redistributable without limit, in some kind of pseudo-Utopian way, is actually the digital equivalent of forcible redistribution of assets - Communism for the Net Age, anyone?
How to deal with these issues is a hard question. I don't have the answers (although I have some bits and pieces). What I do know is that Napster is not the way forward. A concept of intellectual property is vital to a realistic, future digital economy. Napster undermines this from one day to the next, and in doing so it threatens to sabotage the potential of that economy.
(Flame: -1, anybody?)
Cheers, Nick.
-- O improbe amor, quid non mortalia pectora cogis!
Is a service where the availability of the music I wanted wasn't hit-or-miss the way it is with Napster. I'd love to free up a couple of hundred megs that I'm using to store music files now, and just stream the music from a server that I've subscribed to, whenever I want it.
In this day and age, it's silly that I still go down to Tower records and buy bits on a plastic disk. It's almost as silly as buying water in plastic bottles when I have potable water piped into the house from the city waterworks.
What the RIAA (or better still, ASCAP and BMI) should offer, is an akamai-style network of music servers, all of which offer up their ENTIRE catalog, for a fixed monthly/yearly fee, which would vary in price depending on whether I'm an individual user, or I'm playing the music in public venue where I'm charging admission.
BTW, I absolutely would NOT pay for any service whose distribution method includes buggering the sound for the sake of detecting piracy. Watermarking is Right Out.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I think all along, those of us who've been downloading illegal (and they are) mp3s from napster knew what we were doing was illegal. I mean, when you download Photoshop for free, you know what you're doing is illegal.
Well lets say one day some warez group gets sued by Adobe. The warez group has good enough lawyers to possibly make the judge decide that its a right to be able to 'share' programs no matter what the author says. and so on.
what would happen? anyone who's ever downloaded warez would suddenly have so much to say about morals and rights and what should be free, hoping their little comments would contribute towards getting free software always.
its a selfish purpose.
well some bands are saying 'go ahead, download our songs. its fine with us.' that's just like free-as-in-beer software being available. doesn't make Photoshop anymore free just because Gimp is free.
Anyway, I'm rooting for Napster in this just as much as the next guy, but not because of any moral reasons - I just want free music.
--
when the rain comes, they run and hide their heads. they might as well be dead.
Napster is good for finding obscure, out-of-print, and otherwise rare music, as well as live stuff by taper-friendly bands like the Tragically Hip or the Grateful Dead. Also, some artists do release their music to the Public Domain. And From a d/l perspective, there's nothing wrong with obtaining an mp3 of something you have on cd already. And not every mp3 is music (e.g. New York Times commentary), nor is every mp3 copyrighted.
Historically incorrect, and a logical contradiction.
You cannot steal something that is not owned. Copyrights are not just protected by copyright laws, they were created by copyright laws. Before copyright law, the right to reproduce musicians/authors/etc. work was not an owned property, therefore could not be stolen.
The US Constitution, for instance, specifically authorises the creation of copyright law, "to promote the progress of Science and the Useful Arts by securing for limited times to authors... the exclusive right to their respective writings..." - not to prevent infringement of any pre-existing rights.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
Why doesn't the RIAA buy napster? It would not be much, and then they'd control it......
but I guess a new one would start, but...
.sig
Fellowship 9/11
The RIAA on the other hand, will try to shadow the true facts of Napster, with the contradiction of previous claims or conduct. Keep a consistant stance and the court will think you must be correct.
Prove your opponent a liar, and better things will come.
Whoops, slashdot killed all the nicks since they were between 0x3C+0x3E's in that IRC log. Oh well, I'm sure you get the drift, even if you don't know who's saying what. I didn't notice on the preview! If you want to know that badly, contact me (aardvarq on AIM, ICQ, EFNet, etc).
Who said napster's just a search engine?
If your network was advertised as a pornography distribution network, then it would be perfectly legal in itself, even if end-users decided to distribute copyrighted or illegal porn on it.
If it was advertised as an illegal kiddie-porn network, that's different. Yes, Napster may be snickering behind their desks about what this is causing the MPAA to have to go through, but that's not illegal. They are not, however, encouraging users to violate any law. And lack of discouragement is not encouragement. And lack of discouragement is not illegal, so long as it's not impeding the copyright holder's ability to actively police illegal distribution of their work (hence the DMCA).
Who cares if Napster wins or loses? What's going to happen as napster-like software becomes more common with the advent of high-bandwidth connections?
In the distant future, (heh) when everybody in a technologically-advanced location is able to transfer gigabytes of data across the country in a moment and for a minimal cost, what will the Recording industries do then?
I predict that there will soon come a true "Information Age," where information will be so easy and inexpensive to propagate, that there will be absolutely no way to stop its dissemmination.
With the wide availability of fast internet connections, the feasability of wide-area shared data repositories are becoming (and will become) quite commonplace... right? So what happens when Big Evil Corporation can no longer police or control the dissemination of its electronic information?
All computer-based information, be it somebody's "art" (i.e. music) or somebody's hard work and talent (i.e. software) is nothing more than a string of 1's and 0's, that can be duplicated and redistributed at a low (and, in my hypothetical rant, at an eventual zero) cost. Encrypted or not, built with a pop-up liscence, whatever... it still boils down to easily-replicable 1s and 0s.
So, in the future, maybe businesses and people who deal in electronic information be forced to assume that once their particular information, product, or artwork has been put into an electronic form, that product is available to anybody at nearly zero cost.
Then the question becomes, how would they make money? My opinion is that the music artist would make money with live performances, or with music released to television or radio distributions before they release it in a recorded media format. In the case of software, people would be paid based on the speed at which they could produce somehting, or people would be paid to fill a software void that hadn't been filled yet. We already see an example of the possible business model with open-source software.
Overall, I think we're moving into an age where information becomes plentiful and not "worth" anything; rather: time, service, and conveinience become the main things that draw the consumer dollar. Like water. For the most part, water is free. You can walk down to the pool and get some. But people still buy packaged water, and people pay a fee to have it pumped from a central location into their homes. People who live in an area where water is scarce might pay a high price for the same water that is freely available to somebody who lives by a lake and owns a well. It would be a complete upheaval compared to the way we do things now, but that's one possible way I see it happening.
And I suspect that when that day comes, there'll have to be a great change for the RIAA, et. al.
Just musing. I'd be very interested in the opinions of the more well-informed and econmically-savvy than I. Apologies for my spelling.
-Mikey
"by sharing your files on, and downloading files from Napster you are breaking the LAW. "
Not true if I am downloading music from cds which I have purchased in the past... And this would be AMERICAN law wouldn't it? If I download in Zaire, why should I care about your American law? Scoff all you like, there are societies where possessions and profit are almost meaningless concepts. "Go live there?" you might say...I think I would rather build such a place HERE AND NOW.
"The law that has existed to protect artists for many years now but that with the digital revolution, appears to have been thrown out the window."
If the law protects artists so well, why do so few artists profit in the face of the rising profits of the RIAA? The point of copyright is to allow an innovator/artist to profit for a reasonable amount of time from their works. Now we have efforts in place to extend copyright to mean that some entity will profit *forever* from a work. This is CONTRARY to the original intent of copyright. If the artists own the copyrights [which IS the intent of a copyright] then why haven't they profited from them in the past? Because the record labels do the profiting. They garner the control of copyrights and profit from the sale of music to the exclusion of the artist. The artists, if profitable, are generally profitable from concerts and merchandise sale *not the the music which they have copyrighted*. This is a gross generalization, but so many people want to define my rights in an environment which exists outside of national and therefore legislative boundaries and so many are getting self-righteous about copyright. Why should I bow to your LAW? Your LAW locks up hackers for years *without trial* while *denying them bail*...an act that is ILLEGAL, yet our court system enacted such activity. We have police officers who are *permitted* to execute black citizens and are found to have *committed no crime*. If killing an unarmed black man who's fumbling for his wallet is not a criminal activity, why are you getting so HUFFY about MP3 downloading?
Talking about the LAW is always a funny thing because it works so differently depending upon social and economic factors. MAYBE IT IS TIME TO REDEFINE THE LAW...MAYBE THAT IS WHAT WE ARE NOW DOING ONLINE.
IT'S CALLED CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE AND WE HAVE EVERY RIGHT TO PRACTICE IT, JUST AS THE RIAA HAVE EVERY RIGHT TO HIRE LAWYERS TO TRY TO STOP US.
THE LAW IS NOT WHAT IS WRITTEN IN BOOKS IT IS WHAT SOCIETY DEFINES IT TO BE.
What country should determine the laws of the internet? It should be the US? The US Recording Industry? The MPAA? How are any of these organizations, even the United States, qualified to dictate online usage for the entire world.
The real problem is that the online community needs to begin to define its *own* laws.
I find copyright law one of the most reasonable laws outthere; not in the least because the basis is the same almost anywhere.
How about reducing copyright to the origional term of 14-28 years?
So.... in 2005, 14 years after Linus laid the foundation for Linux, Microsoft can take the code and incorperate it in their software? And already do that with many of the GNU tools out there? Is that what you are suggesting?
Why *can't* we create a montage of planet of the apes and the origional startrek?
For the same reason Microsoft can't take GNU code and add it to their code base.
Our culture is held hostage to 75 year copyrights.
That's 75 years after the death of the author. It will be interesting to see what happens at the end of the next century with GNU code which had many authors.
-- Abigail
I don't understand. You mean to tell me that this isn't a black and white issue? Am I to believe that this isn't a case between a huge, evil, immoral corporate giant and a small, cute, helpless, company that has never even crossed against the light? I hardly think that a complex issue like rethinking intellectual property laws should require us to consider that there are no good guys or bad guys, only people serving their own interests.
Slashdot is no place for unbiased reporting.
</SARCASM>
--
Why can't I moderate something "Wrong" or at least "Grossly Misinformed"?
As such, assuming the music was not registered for renewal, anything before 1985 would be public domain, and anything before 1995 would be within 10 years of being in the public domain..
If we assume that the companies registered everything for an extra 14 years. (Not a given, after all, 90% of music loses money, and why throw more money after bad), then anything before 1972 would be in the public domain. And anything before 1982 would be within 10 years of being in the public domain...
Mmmmm. Starwars in the public domain, joining Santa Clause... Makes my mouth water.
The cold, hard truth is that they are right. The document is well-written and undisputable. It doesn't matter that the RIAA is evil. The fact is, they are in the right. We should keep that in mind and pick our battles more carefully.
We do and say a lot of things behind our protective monitors that we would never do otherwise. Downloading copyrighted music via Napster isn't any different than stealing it from the music store.
We must respect evil, and we must make evil respect us.
Diamond also held that MP3 files contained on computer hard drives are not digital musical recordings. 180 F.3d at 1076-77. Thus, under Diamond, a computer is not a covered device, and a copy made by one Napster user of an MP3 file residing on another Napster user s computer hard drive is not a copy of a digital musical recording, and is not covered by Section 1008. 17 U.S.C. 1001(4)(A).
So....if an MP3 file is not a copy of a digital musical recording, WHAT THE HELL IS IT???
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
If the pizza was shared, the Mafia wouldn't have been so interested.
Yes, Napster should win the trial and we should be happy about this, but we should want them to loose the injunction. Why? Napster is a greedy corporate entity, so we want their users to switch to non-corperate file sharing systems. This would happen if Napster was shutdown for 6-12 months, but finally won their case. Actually, we only want them to win their case to make it more difficult for the RIAA to attack Gnutella and Freenet.
Seriously, the consumer (and artists) will only win if the RIAA and Napster kill each other. The logical way for this to happen would be for the RIAA to get an injunction which lasts long enough to make Napster a minor player in the online music world, but for Napster to ultimatly win the court case.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
1 - Napster doesn't really do anything new. You can request a song at most radio stations and tape it, or get a copy from a friend. Napster is just over the Internet.
2 - People wouldn't bother using Napster if CDs were more reasonably priced. Local and indie band CDs that I buy are usually ~$5. RIAA type CDs are 15-20, usually 17 around my area. They could easily sell these CDs for 10 even after promo, videos, production and failed artists even if they paid artists a reasonable amount (most get about the same as a teacher) and still make a big profit. At 15-20, there is often 300% return per CD even factoring the rest of the costs, including failed artists
I find it rather ironic that you deride the argument constructing abilities of others by posting web pages , when according to that very same link, your argument suffers from the Fallacy of the Undistributed Middle. Granted, Kodak is NOT responsible for the pictures taken with their film, Sony is NOT responsible for what people record with their VCRs (or walkmen for that matter). Nor should they have to be. It is a very convincing argument that service/media providers should not be held responsible for the content of their users, but you fail to establish that Napster should be considered in the same category as these other providers. Napster is different because it not only made its user base aware of the fact that they were committing illegal acts of software piracy, it ENCOURAGED them to do so while it profited from it. This would be like Kodak advertising special, enhanced "Kiddie Porn friendly film" or Sony releasing a dual-tape deck VCR under the advertising "This will really piss off Blockbuster!" 1 month before they went into court. Service/media providers should not be held responsible for the use of their products, but on the same token, they cannot be allowed toencourage the illegal use of their products to boost use or sales. THAT is what seperates Napster from the rest, and inevitably it will be what gets it shut down.
Again, please construct an argument. Napster is a filesystem over which users share files containing sound. It turns out that, given a filesystem, users will share copyrighted sounds. Really not Napster's problem any more than it's Kodak's problem that child pornographers use their film. I am strongly in the camp that says that the use of a medium where monitoring activity is possible should not lead to a mandate to monitor activity. Digital camaras should not be required to transmit their images to the FBI, phone switches should not have pre-installed taps and Napster should not have to monitor it's users file sharing transactions in order to prevent copyright infringement. These are all, as far as I can tell, the same issue: should the medium provider (profit-making or not) be required to sanitize and/or monitor it's usage?
You make an excellent point that I had never even considered. The RIAA's interpretation -- that Section 1008 only protects copying done with Section 1001 equipment and media -- is obviously an incorrect interpretation, because Section 1008 covers both digital and analog equipment and media, while the rest of the act makes it clear that only digital equipment and media are covered by SCMS and subject to royalties. If it was Congress' intent that only activity using AHRA-restricted devices and media were protected by Section 1008, then why does Section 1008 protect activities using analog equipment and media, when there are no "covered" analog recorders or media?
You ask a good question though. Why is it good public policy to allow all non-commercial copying, instead of just non-commercial copying onto "covered" devices?
In general, it is bad public policy to collect taxes or royalties on a product or activity, and at the same time declare that activity to be illegal. It would be one thing if the Congressional purpose of this law were to impede non-commercial copying, as, for instance, a punitive tax levied on illegal drugs is designed to discourage the drug trade by allowing the IRS to go after convicted drug traffickers for "tax evasion", but that was clearly not what Congress was trying to do. Congress was not trying to discourage or impede consumer use of digital audio hardware and media. On the contrary, the AHRA was promoted both by Congress and the RIAA as "enabling legislation" that would break the legal gridlock, and bring digital technology to the masses.
I believe that Congress created a flat exemption for all non-commercial copying in order to avoid the problem of "tainted" copies.
For instance, if the RIAA interpretation were correct, here would be some of the consequences:
1) You buy an audio DAT, pay the royalty, and copy a phonograph record into the DAT. This would be legal.
2) You take the DAT you just made in step 1, and upload it onto a computer. You then use a digital audio processing tool to remove the surface rumble and needle clicks and pops. You record the cleaned-up results on a second audio DAT, on which you have also paid royalties.
Now, is (2) a legal or an illegal activity? When you uploaded the copyrighted work to your computer, you transferred it from a "covered" device to a non-covered device. Under the RIAA's interpretation, the copy on your computer would now be an illegal copy.
How about the resulting, cleaned-up DAT. Is that legal or illegal? Under the RIAA's interpretation, it was made from an "illegal" copy, so that would presumably make it illegal.
Back to the issue at hand -- Napster.
3) You borrow a CD from your sister, and use an AHRA-covered, SCMS compliant CD player and AHRA-covered, SCMS compliant standalong CD recorder to make a CDR copy of that CD, on an audio CDR on which you have paid the royalty.
If anything, (4) is CLEARLY covered and protected by Section 1008. Even the RIAA seems to agree on that.
4) You purchase a blank Audio CDR, paying the industry royalty. You now go onto Napster, and download 74 minutes of music, which you use to fill that CDR.
Is this legal? You have done, in essence, exactly what Congress authorized. You have purchased a piece of digital audio media, paid a royalty on that media, and filled it with copyrighted music.
Under the RIAA's interpretation, the reason why (3) is covered, but (4) is not, is that in (4), the use of Napster -- a non-AHRA covered technology, is considered illegal by the RIAA, and, therefore, the CDR you made is illegal, even though you paid a royalty on it!
If this doctrine were to be accepted into law, then it would be impossible to determine whether any given digital audio recording was legally or illegally acquired. This would be bad public policy. Hence, the blanket exemption on all non-commercial copying. The public benefit is that there is no such thing as a "tainted" copy.
As for your comment about "your days as a software development are numbered", I remind you that the royalty provisions and resulting public exemption on copyright infringement only applies to audio recordings. Title 17 Chapter 10 ONLY applies to musical copyrighted works, not to computer programs, and not to audiovisual works, like DVDs.
As for the third argument, I see no cause-and-effect relationship between the two. After all, the MPAA designed and implemented CSS at a time when copying of DVDs was impossible.
I gotta ask this...did ANYONE ELSE notice that if you click on the "What costs goes into making a CD" that it takes you to 3 different links and ends in a final webpage of 10 PARAGRAPHS...that STILL DOESNT ANSWER THE QUESTION????? I read it all the way through...yes...the Cost of making CD's have gone down...yes...the cost of advertising has gone up...yes...there's lots of factors involved in producing a CD...but NOWHERE is there an estimate or rough guess on how much it costs to make a CD. Anyone out there know the REAL ANSWER?
What bothers me about this whole napster thing more than anything is all the people who think its Ok to download music and not pay for it and then hide behind the "RIAA is BAD".
/moral obligation to distribute it for these people and not compensate them. Even if the RIAA makes 2$ for the artists 1$ the artist still gets something, with napster they get nothing.
NEWS FLASH: There are many small record companies and musicians/creative types should decide who/how there music/creations should be distributed. Its not your right
Image your company spends thousands promoting a new band only to have sales lost to napster. That sucks.
I think people should be personally responsible for there own actions and to that end I see more strict recording and copyright infringment laws coming soon.
The service whos stated purpose is the anonymous piracy of music is on shaky legal ground. (did you read the pdf?) They use the diamond player case as precident. If Napter inc. wern't trying to make a profit off others work it wouldn't be as big a deal.
Then I'm all for it.. Visionaries like Stallman have been questioning copyright for the last 20 years. Highly internet literate people have also been questioning the use of copyright.
But we are a minority, too small to even have the potential to be dangersous.
But napster is letting tens of millions of people get, create, distribute, and trade artistic works. Take that away, and they'll question why, and those tens of millions might be able to rearrange the whole edifice of intellectual property.
Copyright, in england, was origionally used by the crown for censorship.. The 'copyright' office would own title to all books, and distribute a 'copyright' to a bookprinter, so they could publish it. Publishing a book without having a copy right was a serious crime..
Then copyrights were used by the printers guild to lock out competetors. They would call ones who printed a manuscript, 'pirates'.
It was almost a century later that the right to control a work got switched to the writer/artist.
So write senator Hatch and tell him that he is the man!
Why would I do that? I do not even live within the US or any of the nations it stands over.
The law is outdated, ambiguous, and it is restricting the entire digital entertainment industry.
Regardless of how outdated, ambiguous or restrictive a law is, its still the law. Just because we don't agree with it does not mean that we are not legally obliged to abide by it until we can get it changed. Breaking the law until the policy is changed is still breaking the law, regardless of the intent of that person(s).
The RIAA knows damn well that they need to control napster, not shut it down. They're just turning up the pressure before they acquire it. We all know that if the RIAA shuts down napster then the entire community will move over to other services (gnutella) - so their only chance is to grab Napster now, before its too late.
Of course, as soon as they start changing Napster, and people don't like the changes, then they get the same problem, but at least they'll have some control if they grab the company now.
The whole issue now is what price will they pay? That's what this is about...
Cyano
Don't like my sig? I don't either.
Honestly, I wouldn't mind copyright laws so much if they were reasonable... I'm advocating either removing copyright entirely..... Or,
How about reducing copyright to the origional term of 14-28 years? Keep it at about the same (pre-DMCA) strength, but make it shorter.. What I dislike about the current copyright is the terms. They make me and everyone else feel helpless in front of our culture, when we want to get into things that are modern.
Why *can't* we create a montage of planet of the apes and the origional startrek? Why can't I create a montage of I Love Lucy and Star Trek, where the Enterprise fights it out with 60's american culture? See my signature.
Our culture is held hostage to 75 year copyrights. The only ones who might get a chance to explore my culture it will be my great grandkids, and they won't care. Just as I don't care about the only culture I can freely use. It's too old, too alien. It *predates* the great depression! And they keep on extending copyrights retroactively!
Personally, I think that it might be too late to just reduce copyrights a reasonable term. I'd prefer that instead, as copyright *is* a relatively known quantity. It's a really bad kludge, but the other kludge's I seem much worse.
There are a couple of big holes in the RIAA's argument. For one, they sight a case saying:
element satisfied where "the very nature of" the product "would suggest infrigement to a rational person". [page 15 of the PDF]
The thing is, that decision no longer applies. If it did, Sony would never have been able to put out tape decks with two bays. In fact, the judge there decided that as long as a single legitmate use exists the product is legal.
Further, the RIAA called Napster's argument that it would be put out of business irrevlant. However, when looking to get an appeal, Napster had to show irrepable harm would be caused by the injunction. I think being put out of business is very revlant to the trial. Again, the RIAA looses a leg.
What gets me is all the studies that the RIAA pulls out of their hat saying that Napster harms music sales. Not one of them is put out by an independent firm. All studies that say Napster harms CD sales were comissioned by a record company. That's hardly evidence in my book, and the RIAA's case is based heavly on that. (Score, Napster 3: RIAA 0)
If we assume that the Napster does infringe on the RIAA's copyright (lots of salt here) then we open up a whole new realm of law. For one, the RIAA would then be guilty (in my book anyway) of copyright missuse: they are trying to use copyrights to gain infulence in a totaly different market. That's not what copyrights are for, in fact a company found guilty of copyrigth missuse looses the right to enforce that copyright. (Napster 4: RIAA 1)
It's also clear no one working for the RIAA understands the technology involved. If they did, they would never have claimed that "Napster excersizes a substantial and ongoing control over its service" You can pick that claim apart just by talking about OpenNap servers. If you don't bring those up, then you have this argument: if the RIAA can't list everything they hold the copyright to, how can Napster know what's copyrighted? Further, how can Napster control the content when they can't even control the file format they supposedly recognize (honestly, who here dosn't know how to get Napster to send non-MP3 files? gnapster can do it by default, there are patches for the Windows version.) (Napster 5: RIAA 1)
The RIAA's claim that the file name can be used as a filter is just wrong (oh look, "Faith Hill" becomes "[Authorized Name]"). They're stupid for making it. (Napster 6: RIAA 1)
Now, I'm not a lawyer and none of this can be taken as legal fact, advice, or speculation. All of this is my opinion . Use of this opinion is granted for by the author with the understanding that by using this opinion the person using said it incures all responsibility for any consequences and the author is released of all responsibilty for its use.
This may have been brought up before, if so, sorry, but I am wondering why no one has come out with a site that users (like us) can download any song they want, and the site's advertisers (god knows there are enough of them out there willing to waste money on porn sites and the like) pay the record companies so much per song downloaded. Even at a dime per song, they would make a killing. The technology is there, and we all know that we would put up with banners for free music. Seems to me this would solve both problems. If there is a VC out there reading this, remember where you heard it first.
Obviously the RIAA seems focused on going after Napster. It's reasonable to beleive that once they stomp Napster into the ground (and they will), that they'll go after the next most popular file sharing program (imesh, gnutella). While some of these are more difficult to control than others - they'll give it a shot.
Regardless - my point is what will it be next? Are they going to can IRC and AOL as well? They each make file sharing extremely simple... With AOL you can forward around an attachment without even downloading it forever - and they're the net's largest ISP.
Is it simply that they go after the people who make it easiest?
As someone already claimed I was wrong with 14/28 years...
http://www.loc.gov/copyright/docs/circ1a.html
Circular 1a
United States Copyright Office
A Brief History and Overview
.....
May 31, 1790
First copyright law enacted under the new U.S. Constitution. Term of 14 years with privilege of renewal for term of 14 years. Books, maps, and charts protected. Copyright registration made in the U.S. District Court where the author or proprietor resided.
If the Libray of Congress isn't a definitive source, I don't know what is.
I am sure that your place of residence has similar laws. Anyways, this is a case about American technology companies and the copyrights of RIAA artists. Oh, by the way, they can be from any country!!!! And of course, if they are selling music in America, you can bet that they pay their dues....so this law does involve you, if you want to continue to do online business with American companies. You know, you can always use the napster like trading service in Europe, or west bumble fuck, or wherever. I am sure that there are a few in Europe, Aussieland, or Asia. But the point of this, is that it is setting a precedent for the future. Senator Hatch told the big (US) recording companies that "they must make this [digital distribution] work". In other words, the RIAA needs to stop bringing lawsuits up against digital entertainment companies. If not, congress will intervene. Which means that they will change the law if they have too. But, US law makers would like to avoid that if possible. Lazy old men, what can you do. And again, I go back to what I was saying in my reply. It is not illegal for you to trade music, just as long as you don't make money. But is it legal for a company to help you trade music? It is a gray area. Not black and white like you think. Oh, and the US state Mississippi finally outlawed slavery in the early 1990's. Don't tell me that if I wanted to own slaves back then I could have, just because it was still a law. I will admitt that this is a rare instance, but this is not an issue of fighting against a law anymore. Napster and other forms of digital distribution have become entrenched into the daily lives of people through out the world. You can't just say, "stop that...don't do that anymore". It is here and it will continue. This is one of those rare cases in which the world has to change with it. They must find ways to adapt to it and stop trying to contain it. Make secure CD's, find better forms of encryption. Do whatever has to be done. So, my question is this, if you feel so strongly against American laws, then why do you continue to use American companies on the Internet? Simply use a local company. If you live in Fiji, I am afraid that you are SOL though.