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Universities Refuse To Ban Napster
sachsmachine writes: "The Harvard Crimson is reporting that MIT, Stanford, Duke, and UNC are refusing a Metallica request to block Napster, and that Harvard will likely do the same. Nice to see our institutions of higher learning sticking up for online freedom ..."
[Updated 14:07 GMT by timothy:] fredder adds another small evidence of persistent sanity: "I received this email from the powers that be at Duke University this morning:
'Duke has declined a request from the attorney representing several music performers to ban access to napster.I do wish to remind all students that your license to use Duke's computing networks is predicated on legal use only, and that copyright infringement is not a permitted use.
Tallman Trask III'"
It's more than a little ironic that in the same town that the RIAA and MPAA are based in, a state-sponsored school is refusing to kowtow to them.
thad
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
To a university or institution, it's a problem of resource allocation. You have to make sure that each user can get a fair share of the bandwidth. So naturally you limit the throughput for network hogs to give others a fair chance. On the flip side, the same technology can be used to assure that a bandwidth intensive application can get what it needs. I remember that they originally wanted to use the ATM network so they could carve out a portion and set it aside for video conferencing.
Actually, it would be expensive. I heard that the real reason they refused to block Napster at our school is that they would have to have the routers actually perform non-routing ananlysis on packet headers, and that would be too expensive (we'd need more hardware).
What was requested was that the ports that Napster uses be blocked at the schools' firewalls. I don't know what ports Napster uses, but there may be other, legitimate uses for those ports. They will not punish the students who may or may not be using Napster without any hard evidence that copyright infringement is actually taking place on their network.
rm
Sci-Fi Storm
This is completely false. Separate Titles of the US code lay out remedies and penalties associated with patents and copyright, and they differ considerably from the remedies and penalties for crimes such as vandalism or theft.
Why don't you go read the code in question ? It's on the web. The site I use is:
uscode.house.gov
You might want to download the entire document of Title 17, in which case this page is the best:
uscode.house.gov/download.htm
Today 600 people are going to post an uninformed post to this story. That's because all of them think the US Congress actually gave Metallica and those other artists a complete monopoly on what is done with a song they record. None of them read Title 17, Chapter 1, sections 106 through 115, especially the various secions whose titles begin with the phrase "Limitations on Exclusive Rights:", and looked very carefully at the different privileges a copyright of a sound recording gives you over a written work.
But you can be the first, Old Man Kensey!
And if you can show me where it says that I am violating any privileges the US government has handed out, when I transfer a copy of a sound recording to another individual and don't receive any money for it, then I will buy you a steak dinner (or equivalent, if steak isn't your thing). I'm serious about this. Be careful, because all the places where it says that you can't do something, it generally says "as allowed in secions 106 through 115" or something similar, and those sections include the "Limitations on Exclusive Rights" parts.
i hate the GPL, and i loooooooooove napster
copyrights, trademarks and other legal hurdles have historically only impeded technological progress. i hate them all. information is best when free in every sense of the word. but people are too wrapped up in protecting their own interests than doing something for the greater good. so you can't fault me for hipocracy, i am a firm believer in 'piracy'.
"I hope I don't make a mistake and manage to remain a virgin." - Britney Spears
So the same with the GPL. We'll happily ditch the GPL if those we're fighting against will remove their restrictive licensing schemes. I'll ditch Napster if I can get a fair shake when I go to buy a CD.
Your analogy doesn't hold water.
I/O Error G-17: Aborting Installation
Well, sir, TOUGH SHIT. It's your intellectual property, it's YOUR job to defend your rights to it. Not the Universities. Not anyone else's.
Life sucks.
- A.P.
--
* CmdrTaco is an idiot.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
Um, actually, I don't support copyright violation. I _also_ don't support the supression of a legitimate means of data replication and transfer simply because _some_ people are using it thusly.
When the RIAA forgoes that little hidden piracy fee on audio tapes and actively starts to enforce copyright on recorded music by going after the individual violators, then they have an ethical leg to stand on. While they're attempting it this way, they can go hang.
Remember, Xeroxes aren't illegal, jut some uses of them. No matter _how_many_ xerox users are using them for print "piracy", xeroxes remain legal. Period. The same argument applies to Napster.
It still amazes me that a group that worships the virtues of the GPL (which is a binding contractual agreement to which the originator of a work provides for it's exact usage, forcing the user into terms he may or may not agree with) are so quick to rally around the open violation of copyright laws.
... well for the recording industry and yes, the artists, copyright laws are their bible in a way, and when someone breaks them, they have the right to try and stop it.
... it's about theft, plain and simple. If you don't believe it, read through the court documents describing how the original board characterized their application. Here's a hint, they made NO MENTION of independent artists ... their main goal was to allow users to find ANY song they want and download it for free. Where do people hear songs they want? You guessed it, the radio. How many independent artists are played on the radio? You guessed it again, zero.
... make your own, but to blatantly break the law and then act like it's you're right, this just makes you look like a scolded child throwing a temper tantrum, not to mention the fact that at this point, any credibility your argument once had becomes negated.
... the "freedom" to rip someone off is not one of them, no matter how upset you are that CDs still cost $16.
Look at it this way. The GPL is your bible, it's your life and when someone breaks it, you're quick to jump down their throats
What will you do when Napster/Gnutella becomes a trading ground for those who decide the GPL is obsolete and distribute programs that purposely violate it? You'll go ape shit and you know it.
Sure the RIAA is the devil, but hypocrisy on such a mass scale doesn't fall short of being satan himself.
Napster is not about freedom
If you're so unhappy with the status of the commerce of art, stop buying it
There are plenty of worthy things to rally around folks
Metallica has forgotten what it is like for the majority of musicians (not to mention they don't give a f*ck for their fans anymore).
At one time Metallica was a struggling band of real artists. They scrimped and they saved and they hired a lawyer to sue the pants off of their record company so that they had the rights to own their songs, they had the rights to redistribute those songs as THEY saw fit, and they basically had the right to do whatever the piss they wanted.
The thing they foget is that not all bands are fortunate enough to have fans support them long enough that they can 'fight the power' hard enough to actually become the power themselves. Metallica's insistance that they 'own the rights' of their music, the way the RIAA member comanies own the rights of their artists music, has made them see things from the RIAA's perspective. Suddenly they forget that for years and years they fought tooth and nail against companies like those that made up the RIAA and decide they need to fight tooth and nail for the 'rights' of the RIAA itself.
Metallica was and is one of the biggest disappointments of my generation. They went from a 'f*ck the system, our fans are the best' type of band to a 'f*ck our fans, give us your goddamned money you worthless bastards' type of band. They have become everything that they once mocked. They are living proof that if you once succumb to the entrallment of success, you will never be able to remember what idealisms had made you fight for that success in the first place.
Sorry if I sound bitter, but watching your heros slowly turn into your enemies is a very disturbing event. And when you see the anger they feel towards those that once admired them, well, how can you feel happy about it.
If only Cliff were here. He'd kick all their asses and ask them what the f*ck they were thinking.
Bite my yammer.
-----Original Message-----
From: Office of the Executive Vice President and Provost
[mailto:EXECUTIVEVP7@LISTS.PSU.EDU]On Behalf Of Executive Vice President
Sent: Wednesday, September 20, 2000 5:56 PM
To: EXECUTIVEVP7@LISTS.PSU.EDU
Subject: NAPSTER and COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL - VERY IMPORTANT NOTICE!
Dear Penn State Student,
As you may have heard, computer programs like Napster and computer networks have made copying copyrighted material including music and videos easier than ever. The press has reported this phenomenon widely and there has been considerable discussion of it in the Penn State community. You should know that copying of copyrighted material without the permission of the owner is a violation of state and federal laws as well as University policy. The University regards these violations as a very serious matter.
The University has done initial scans of its networks to determine the use level of programs like Napster. These scans do not examine the content of a particular computer in any way but do determine traffic characteristics. The scans suggest that some students may be making extensive use of Napster and other programs that can facilitate illegal copying of copyrighted material that belongs to another person, group, or company. There is also evidence that computer viruses have been transmitted in the process that owners may not be aware of.
Although it is not the intent to curtail legitimate use of such software, the University has an obligation to ensure that its networks and computers are not used to violate the law or University policy. While some seem to take violation casually, the penalties for copyright infringement are serious. All users should be aware of Penn State's program of continuous review of network traffic to identify copyright violations, viruses, or other unsanctioned activities.
If you are responsible for a computer that is attached to the Penn State network in any way, your use of that network is subject to such review. If the review uncovers symptoms of problems discussed above, you will be contacted for further review of your network use. Assistance will be available to eliminate any problems that exist. This will improve network performance for all network users. If the University receives notice that you have used the University network to infringe copyrighted works, your account will be suspended.
Appropriate use of the Penn State computer network and respect for the copyrighted works of others will help to ensure continued access to the widest possible array of software for all University users.
Sincerely,
Rodney A. Erickson
Executive Vice President and Provost
PS: For further information or questions, contact the Center for Academic Computing (helpdesk@psu.edu), Computer and Network Security (security@psu.edu), or your local campus computing organization. Students in the Residence Halls can contact ResCom (rescom@psu.edu).
The only time schools will defend themselves in suits is when the vision of the school is in danger -- a good example is the anti-affrimative action cases against Univ. of Michigan, as the school believes it has every right to use affrimative action in application processes.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
From the Princeton article:
"If you know there exists a use of a program which is infringing on intellectual property, how can you ignore it? Princeton is choosing to overlook a problem that they know exists," he said. "Its response seemed like a summary without a discussion of what is right and what is wrong." -- Howard King, Metallica/Dre's lawyer
Note the "... a use of a program". He didn't say "the use". So, we can assume that there exist other, non-infringing uses of the program. Doesn't that kind of hold up the test for Fair Use? Granted, the non-infringing uses have to be proved significant (I believe that's the wording), but I wonder how hard that can be.
Disclaimer: IANAL
There is one in particular, the author's name escapes me at the moment, but he IS a musician, who argues why Napster is a great thing for musicians
John Perry Barlow, lyricist for the grateful dead, co-founder of the EFF.
Scuttlemonkey is a troll
And MP3s must be illegal ones? I have two MP3 right here. One ripped from my own CD (perfectly legal). The another taken from Napster (illegal). Same artist. Same song. Enforce your ruling, but don't take what belongs legally to me. Come on - I am sure you can do that!
Lars: Ban Napster
University Administrator: Is Napster illegal?
Lars: Well, not exactly...
UA: Well then, push off. We don't censor the members of our communities except where required to by law.
Unfortunately, there's been a trend towards hiring business-types, not academics, as University administrators. Nobody could ever quite put their finger on why that was a bad idea besides saying that "they don't understand the culture of academic freedom." Here's a fine example.
The lesson: when your school solicits input into hiring their next president/VP/dean, tell them to go with an academic.
Greg
As far as the bandwidth concerns go: I just graduated last year and what they did at my school was block napster on the Academic line, the feed for the Academic buildings, and let it go on the Residential line. This way you could get all the bandwidth you needed from the lab machines for doing work. The dorms were generally a little sluggish, but no one does real work from a dorm room anyways(IMHO) Matt
Refer to the front page of the Technique (the school newspaper for those not around here). They basically said that blocking Nappy was unfeasible and the students would figure out a way around it anyway. Also, it wasn't their place to do that, though if they were informed that a copyright violation was occuring, they'd crack down.
The Blaster Master Fighting for Truth, Justice, and Evil Pie since 1979
I can't be the only one completely fed up with this whole Metallica vs. Napster issue. Metallica played here recently on their summer tour at an outdoor venue...it is amazing that they (Metallica) were not running around the neighborhood at the venue trying to charge all who live close by, simply because they could hear the music.
It has come to our attention that the protocols known as IRC, HTTP, FTP, and SMTP can be used to transmit files which contain our copyrighted musical works. We request that you immediately ban access to these protocols to prevent further copyright infringement.
Listeners and artists alike lose by things such as the DMCA and warning labels because both put limits on getting music from musicians to listeners. But then again, I guess the RIAA represents labels, not artists, so this doesn't bother them.
Just because we're not in Massachusetts doesn't mean we don't count! Really! Hey...hey! Is anyone listening?
Cornell has a somewhat lengthy policy that equates to 'You can use Napster for illegal stuff. If you do, they might sue you. We don't think it's a good idea to do illegal stuff. Otherwise, enjoy!' They are more concerned about saturating their uber-network than anything else; practically enough, the network administrators say it is their responsibility to make sure the network is okay, and your responsibility to make sure you're obeying the law.
From Cornell's IT Policy on Napster:
"Cornell routinely monitors network usage patterns. Interfering with the ability of others to use network services violates university policy and can result in termination of access to university network services."
Nowhere in the university policy do they indicate that they have any intention of actually policing what you do with the network. They have busted a few people for running huge MP3 servers, but if those kids choose to break the law and do it in such a manner as to have huge neon signs pointing to their flagrant abuse of an academic network, they have it coming...
from our friends at emeidapro.net on the seminal Betamax case (relevant quotes bolded below): "The Supreme Court heard the case in January 1983, but did not issue an opinion until its second term, after additional oral argument. In January 1984, the court overruled the decision of the Ninth Circuit by a single vote. In a memo of June 17, 1993, Justice Byron White said that he was "not at all convinced that Congress intended each home recorder of copyrighted works to be an infringer, whether he records sound or video." In the court's opinion, "The sale of copying equipment, like the sale of other articles of commerce, does not constitute contributory infringement if the product is widely used for legitimate, unobjectionable purposes. Indeed, it need merely be capable of substantial noninfringing uses." Quoting the District Court with approval, the court went on to say, "Whatever the future percentage of legal versus illegal home-use recording might be, an injunction which seeks to deprive the public of the very tool or article of commerce capable of some noninfringing use would be an extremely harsh remedy, as well as one unprecedented in copyright law." Even when an entire copyrighted work was recorded, the District Court regarded the copying as fair use "because there is no accompanying reduction in the market for plaintiff's original work." Additionally the Court stated, "A use that has no demonstrable effect upon the potential market for, or the value of, the copyrighted work need not be prohibited in order to protect the author's incentive to create."" That would seem to suggest that Napster should not be banned, eh? The public should not be denied the tool, as long as it is possible to use it in a legal way, regardless of the actual uses of it. This is the Supreme Court of the United States speaking here, sounding just like the geeks who can never quite articulate this position as well.
I'm beautiful Medford, MA, Tufts University has been following everyone else's trend and had stopped banning Napster. However, they have fixed the bandwith on the residential network such that it is separate from the administration's network. Now, due to the fact that many people are using Napster, it takes longer for a webpage to load than it would with a 24.4K modem. We've got a bandwith cap of 15megs (per router, I think it is), and people are starting to get frustrated. It's ridiculous...
First winter rain-
even the monkey
seems to want a raincoat.
-Basho
"Any college radio station worth their salt wouldn't play Metallica or Dre to begin with"
Thats the point! By playing nothing but these two bands for an entire weekend it gives each station the ability to direct attention to what is going on with Napster. You don't accomplish a thing by not playing them. You could even create some false commercials for Napster being the sponsor of the all Metallica & Dr. Dre weekend!
Please, some college radio people somewhere, try this! You'll have CNN and MSNBC on the phone immediately!
-pjc
Broadcasting LIVE from a Bonus Room Over the Gara
Another article in the Daily Princtonian says that Pricneton University refuses to ban Napster as well.
"Of course, the record industry will sue the starving student for theft of copyrighted works. Perhaps they will take payment in "Top Ramen" ;->. "
:(
I agree that the music industry is more interested in the deep pockets, and dealing with organizations, rather than individuals.
However, if they pursued criminal charges against a student, that could be far worse than "top ramen" penalties. Even if there was no fine, and no jail time, having a criminal record (that won't go away if they're >18 yrs) in an area dealing with intellectual property could make it very difficult for that stupid to get a job in IT in the future. Which means they're eating top ramen for the next 10 years
-----
D. Fischer
ShoutingMan.com
The primary problem with Metallica is that they lost their one true moral and spiritual leader at a critical juncture. Cliff (the bassist for a long time) was killed in an bus accident during the "Master Of Puppet" tour. Cliff didn't want Metallica to become a 'pussy band' (his words). He felt the music was art, and that it shouldn't be done for money. If they made money doing it 'their way' then that would be OK, but selling out was not an option to him.
Unfortunately, shortly after his death Metallica had a huge surge in popularity. I believe with everything in me that Cliff would have kept them grounded in reality. But the fact that they took a relatively unknown bassist (yes I know Jason played for Flotsam and Jetsam, they were and still are one of my favorite bands) to replace someone that had 'been there all along' and projected him to nearly instant super-stardom didn't help much. All that happened is that they have decided to go for whatever they have to do to get more money.
This is reflected in the first album done without Cliff's songwriting skills (the black ablbum, even though Cliff was dead for Justice, he had written a lot of the songs). The music is more 'poppy' and more radio influenced. And slowly Metallica de-evolved into a completely 'show me the money' type of band.
Metallica is a sad and frustrating subject for me. My boyhood heros have all turned bad. What to do, what to do.
Bite my yammer.
I agree. After all, the RIAA only speaks one language: money.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
I work at the computing center for Purdue and our Assistant Director has stated that they will not ban Napster or any other service for that matter (e.g. porn). However, they caution us because if anyone comes with a court order they will not fight for the students. So he says if we want to hang ourselves we're more than welcome to.
---
Excellent point about where the money goes. A small artist or independent label sends most around %60 of their revenues to the distributors. If you doubt this simply email Orchard(www.orchard.com--if I remember right) or another distribitor and tell them you're a band looking to sell cds retail. See what kind of chunk they take. Still, I dunno if I'm with you on the distributors being members of the RIAA. They might be, but check the facts first. Even if they're not members, the companies that are still have very powerful reasons to fight technokogies like Napster. Its not that Napster cheats artists on copyrights--it only cheats them on royalties--, but rather that digital distrbution technology like Napster and Gnutella make a recording label an anachronism. Under the current and almost outdated model, the recording company presses the cds, wrangles with the distributors and retailers, promotes the artist and so on to varying degrees. The varying degress are that if you're a big act you get a lot of support, while smaller acts actually pay for a lot of the above services. So, in exchange for the services of the company, the artist signs over the copyright, and gets a whopping %10 of profits if any as a royalty. So, the record company risks a small amount of money on an artist--$10000 or so to press 10000 cds plus marketing costs--to gain %90 of any profits. Moreover, they own the right to the work. This is an ugly system as the many blues and soul artists screwed by their labels in the 50s and 60s can tell you.
Now we have technologies like the web, Napster, Guntella and who knows what else is on the horizon. Its easy to see Napster having two levels of service: the free music and a music subscrption service. Artists deal directly with Napster, cut out the label and take their own careers into their hands. They assume a little more risk in exchange for keeping their copyrights. It'd also be easy to see Gnutella begin extended to cover subscription sources as well as free ones, or some new technology doing that. In order to release a work all an artists would have to do is pay somone one to set up a site, or do it themselves. This should come in drastically under $10000, provide unlimited copies of the work while keeping the work under the artist's control. So, yeah, these technologies cut out the middleman in a big way. They cut out the need for either a distributor or a recording label.
That link should be this.
You are confused. You do not have a right to pirate anything. Your statement is a kin to saying you have a right to rape, murder, or steal. You do not. You could chose to do these things and they would be illegal. Piracy is illegal, thus you do not have a right to pirate.
Troy
Yeah.. just for the record, uiowa.edu publically stated last year (when a bunch of schools (UIUC) decided to ban napster) that they would never ban any service for any reason. so ha to all you illini. (TRIEBE, BARTH) -luth
I am currently attending "Bowling Gren State University" in Bowling Green Ohio. The draw here (or one of them..) is the popular culture program. I cannot prove this, but i suspect that the campus never banned napster because of this focus and the fact that it really adds to the fac that we have the largest collection of popular music (which pretty much includes eerything from Bach to Crass) in the USA outside of the library of congress! Just a thought. -Thomas Orrow "I am not a teacher; only a fellow traveller of whom you asked the way. I pointed ahead--ahead of myself as well as of you" -George Benrard Shaw
Enough napster, get back to work on those short stories!
I got it as an email. My roommate heard something about it on 9-20 as well (he just mentioned he say some paper or something). I tried digging through ADCS comp. facilities site, and haven't been able to find it, I'm really not too sure where these policies would be found.
http://www.resnet.umn.edu/html/policy.ht ml
This one doesn't explicitly state 'don't use napster' but it does say "no illegal content" which would include downloading mp3s from albums one doesn't own.
I seriously doubt that. These Universities are the ones smart enough to realize that this minimizes their risk. If they do nothing and are sued, they have an easy case that it isn't their responsibility to police their students. However, if they *DO* try to censor their networks, they are safe for the day, but suddenly set precedent for ensuring legal use of their networks... Then they suddenly become liable for future infractions. When the next "big thing" comes along and the RIAA wants them to block it if they don't/can't/won't, they are really in trouble.
Still, it is good to see some universities not being bullied around so easily.
More importantly - why should any large university pay attention to what any rock band have to say! It's not like Lars is a member of the alumni that donates money... Maybe if Lars and the boys bought some new football jerseys or marching band uniforms for the colleges they can get the recognition that they're looking for.
[Connection closed by foreign host]
The following is an excerpt from the University of Chicago's IT acceptable use policy.: I believe that a few important issues are raised in that policy. Universities are academic institutions, with educational goals at the heart of their existence. Network access is believed to further that mission in obvious ways. Now, the nasty part of Napster is how much bandwidth it can consume, especially if a user's computer is serving as well as receiving files. On a single computer basis, even moderate use isn't a heavy bandwidth concern, but when you consider the aggregate total bandwidth consumed by all the computers with Napster installed, especially those which are unwittingly serving, then you have bandwidth usage levels which present a problem. Bandwidth usage at such high rates by Napster users can arguably be seen as interfering with reasonable use by others on the network. Sure, there are ways to reduce this problem, such as a limiting of bandwidth at the router, but nevertheless, other concerns remain.
Some will be quick to point out that much of the network traffic on a university network is not used for academic reasons. Indeed, I will be posting this comment via a campus network. But many universities, and as shown above, the University of Chicago, do accept some personal use, but they do make it clear that such uses may not overly consume IT resources or interfere with others using the IT resources.
So, I would ask, do universities have the right to pick and choose, as they seem to be doing? At quick glance, I'd say that they do... it's their network, it's their IT staff that have to deal with bandwidth bottlenecks and service outages. They foot the bill for the network (granted, with money in part taken from student's tuition payments, though aren't those payments made for the education, which the acceptable use policy is intended to aid, by keeping usage in line with the university's mission) so don't they get to make the decisions how it should best be used?
Based on the way most college students feel about Napster, I think it's pretty obvious that institutions of higher learning would be committing financial suicide by banning Napster or programs like it. It might seem extreme for a student to avoid a certain University just because they banned a computer program (because let's face it, if the students have a decent amount of brains they'll find a way around the ban anyway) -- but let's not forget that college students, in addition to often being crazy about music, are usually on the poorer side of the financial chain after tuition's paid. I mean, we're talking about people going to Harvard, here. If I went there and shelled out my dues to get in, I doubt I'd have much cash left over to buy CDs (or even food), even with an academic scholarship.
But then, that's a pretty pessimistic view. Maybe I'll just go for the bright (if somewhat naive) approach and cheer these institutions for their support of freedom. :)
and this shows it once again. hmmm, are the universities denying metallica's request on moral grounds or because they know students will be more likely to CHOOSE A COLLEGE THAT ALLOWS NAPSTER? we live in a democracy alright, but our dollars our the only votes that count. seriously, the RIAA has no chance, provided enough people decide they like Napster.
Internet killed the video star,
i could live a little longer in this prison
These organizations have been against EVERY technological of procedural development which might be perceived as any kind of change in information storage and dissemination since the invention of the player-piano roll.
And they have NEVER won. Not ONCE. There is NO development which they opposed that has NOT come into being to the betterment (and profit) of the community, including their members.
They don't abet ANYTHING. They only know how to obstruct.
How long are people going to support this bunch of utter and complete loser, this pathetic bunch of knee-jerk-offs.?
RIAA, MPAA, Luddites all, and about as effective.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
In the case of Harvard I can tell you that web access isn't adversely affected because our Napster traffic is small enough not to cause a heavy network load. And there's also a seperate UNIX cluster for Comp Sci majors who need to use a faster computing environment.
I've been wating for a new Metallica album since 1988 (the year Justice came out). The band that created albums under the name 'Metallica' since then just isn't the same.
Hypocracy is the ultimate vanity. Now watch me be sued for posting Metallica's lyrics on the web.
Bite my yammer.
I know this will blow your mind, but not all mp3's are illegal. Some artists even encourage Napsterizing their music.
If Napster had started as a file-sharing community (as opposed to an MP3-file-sharing community), would it have run into these legal problems?
Yes, only it would also be facing lawsuits from the MPAA, the software industry, and major book publishers as well.
a binding contractual agreement to which the originator of a work provides for it's exact usage, forcing the user into terms he may or may not agree with Some facts about the GPL. The GNU folks don't care what you use their software for. In fact, in using GPLed software you don't have to agree with anything. Then there's copying. Since GPLed software is copyrighted, there is no other way to distribute it legally other than agreeing to the license. The agreement is so that you who are giving the the software to someone, give the recipient the same rights to use and give the software to someone else.
I propose a strict ban on publicly available computer equipment at university and college campuses! Hopefully, the recording industry will soon get what they deserve.
Not to rip you, but it always makes me laugh when I hear people say that artists can't release music via conventional means. Plenty of underground artists release cd's without any help from anyone. Now given, they aren't marketed like a cd released from a Big 5 label would be, but they still sell a lot of copies. A band like the Pumpkins, who have had several albums released in the past, have enough of a fan base that they could release a cd by themeselves and people would eat it up. They would also probably have no trouble touring on it. And I highly doubt that they wouldn't have enough money to front the costs of recording, duplication, etc.
They want something for nothing. Rather than do the legwork themselves and hunt down each and every pirate out there, they turn to the universities and expect help for free. If they want the universities to do them a service such as set up or restrict their 'net services in whatever manner that M&D prefer, they should at least offer to pay for it.
Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.
- W. Wriston, former Citibank CEO
Of course, the record industry will sue the starving student for theft of copyrighted works. Perhaps they will take payment in "Top Ramen" ;->.
They'll go after the deep pockets. And if they force the university to block Napster, then they've done far more damage then suing a single student. At some time, these instituions may be forced to take action to block "services" like Napster to save themselves.
a cambridge man, right?
Another Brown student (first year) exulting to have Napster back!
Online_freedom == Linux; Universites has always been the domain of free software such as Linux since the beginning of time. The ideals of Linux emphasizes freedom ...freedom to tinker, to create, to share code. It shouldn't be a surprise to us when online freedom, such as a case like this, is promoted in universites.
I could be wrong, but who cares! I hate listening to Metallica's whines anyway...
Though I am an employee of the University as well, there are several prominent additional reasons why "banning" Napster simply would not succeed, and these by no means constitute official University reasoning:
1) Napster traffic simply does not constitute a significant portion of network bandwidth usage.
2) Firewalling Napster's ports will do nothing to block access, since other implementations steadily growing in popularity among "free OS" users like OpenNap dynamically allocate ports.
3) Ultimately, blocking Napster will not deter the most frenzied "pirates" from obtaining what they wish through other means, such as web/ftp/irc.
Btw, UNC doesn't support piracy, just privacy. =)
---
have you ever been denied a position, promotion, or raise for no reason other than because you are a white male?
---
Nope. Although I have seen someone hired in for a higher position who clearly did not have the skills necessary to do the job. I know - I had to train her.
Despite the fact that I liked her as a person, the main reason she got her job was because she was a hispanic female.
Racism is racism - giving someone an unnatural advantage is just as bad as pushing someone else down.
I understand that white males are underrepresented in the penal system, but are you so sure that's just because we're also underrepresented in the drug using/selling and violent crime communities?
Of course, that's not a politically correct thing to say, but so be it.
- Jeff A. Campbell
- VelociNews (http://www.velocinews.com)
- Jeff
No I'm not some RIAA lobbyist or something. Just hear me out a second. The stance that the universities mentioned is the correct one to take with regard to conduct. That is to say to their students "Okay. y'all are adults now. We're not your mommy. If you do something that violates the copyright law, thats your business, deal with the consequences." However, there's still some reasons why universties are banning Napster. At the University of Michigan, Napster was banned long before the copyright issue came up. I don't know if its still in effect or not, but the reason for our ban was bandwidth. We had a whole mess of students getting into Napster early on and running as servers as well as clients. Well, a lot the Intenet charged on in to share jukeboxes, bringing the network to its knees. So, just because your U. doesn't give into the RIAA, don't take Napster or Guntella for granted. They might find other reasons--valid or not--to ban them.
Actually, I think it is more of the "trying to be Politically Correct" and anti-facist guise that universities have to conform to, less they get endless protests and lower admissions from students who honestly feel that their attending of University is to expand their mind and make decisions on their own (in, of course, a nicely padded environment courtesey of their parents).
Of course, you're always subject to being disciplined by the university, but that's part of the learning process.
Speaking of freedom-of-whatever at college, I remember that at one time people used to go into the computer labs and download pornography onto their 3.5" floppy disks (this is around 1995). Nobody cared, but it made me just think: remember when you actually had to REALLY search for that stuff on the internet? Damn, now you can't read your email without being exposed to it.
--
Never hit your grandmother with a shovel, for it leaves a bad impression on her mind...
I submitted this story last week and it was rejected.
Read it and be amazed.
'Reasonable efforts' does NOT mean denying the general public the right to use a tool. This debate is similar to the old Betamax decision, when VCRs were being presented as doing nothing but copyright violation.
In the Supreme Court's opinion (who should certainly be qualified to judge copyright issues), "The sale of copying equipment, like the sale of other articles of commerce, does not constitute contributory infringement if the product is widely used for legitimate, unobjectionable purposes. INDEED, IT NEED MERELY BE CAPABLE of substantial noninfringing uses." Notice that it doesn't actually HAVE to be substantially used in a non-infringing way, just that such a use has to be POSSIBLE. Quoting the District Court with approval, the court went on to say, "WHATEVER the future percentage of legal versus illegal home-use recording might be, an injunction which seeks to deprive the public of the very tool or article of commerce capable of some noninfringing use would be an extremely harsh remedy, AS WELL AS ONE UNPPRECEDENTED IN COPYRIGHT LAW."
And for all those napster users who defend their right to use napster by saying they would never have bought the album, well the courts agree with you. Even when an entire copyrighted work was recorded, the District Court regarded the copying as fair use "because there is no accompanying reduction in the market for plaintiff's original work." Additionally the Court stated, "A use that has no demonstrable effect upon the potential market for, or the value of, the copyrighted work need not be prohibited in order to protect the author's incentive to create.""
What a coincidence, i'm doing a group paper in school about the napster case and we just happened to interview the network administrator here about it. He basically takes the same stance as the other universities on napster and other file sharing programs: "Hear no evil, see no evil." Also, the university respects privacy a lot and won't actively monitor network activity from students or faculty, unless they get a complaint , but even then, it's on a case by case basis. God bless America :>
I don't think that's going to accomplish much - the mp3s are downloaded from other client machines, not from Napster.com. So you slow down song searches but not the actual mp3 traffic.
This might work better for mp3.com, which actually does host some mp3s through Beam-It and so forth.
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
are private...
i would think it's a difficult path for a public school chancellor to walk down -- to say either "we'll LET our students FREELY pirate music on our networks" and "we'll CUT OFF OUR STUDENTS FREE ACCESS.
does a public university have a right to regulate our network traffic??? I think so -- we may pay for our tuition, but the school is subsidized by the government and is intended, as are our networks, for "educational use" -- downloading music on napster is certainly questionable proper use. ("Hey! My school won't let me run a BUSINESS from my WEB ACCOUNT THERE! WHAT THE HELL IS THAT! I PAY FOR THE NETWORKS! I SHOULD HAVE FREE ACCESS!" may remain our example that there are certainly TYPES of USE that are DISALLOWED across the board -- and don't make the university any less of an institution dedicated to learning, freedom, etc.)
regardless, no-one has a "RIGHT" to napster or free (as in speech) internet access -- so i would imagine that by banning napster access, you're not being "PUNISHED" or "CENSORED".
that said, i do think our university (UC Berkeley) implemented the WORST response to napster -- they capped ALL network traffic at 5kbs. This, as you can imagine, caused numerous complaints by people residing in the dorm (where we have "free" broadband) complaining that since they "ESSENTIALLY BUILT THE NETWORK WITH THEIR TUITION" that they were entitled to A) service as fast as could be provided and B) the use of napster.
The reason that the cap was implemented was in fact because napster use was preventing normative use of the network by people clearly engaged in educational use. that is, the people using napster (which is EXTREMELY QUESTIONABLY an "EDUCATIONAL" use of the networks) were CURTAILING the use of the people using the netork properly -- now, as far as i can tell, this is a VIOLATION of our use agreement, and so certainly these users, be they downloading LEGAL music or not, deserved "punishment" by having their napster access cut off. instead, the university decided to implement the unfortunate policy that affected all users across the board (which sucked, but at least people using the network in a proper manner had a pretty much guaranteed bandwidth, so it wasn't crippling -- although we do have people who need to do things like watch broadcast/archived lectures, and i'm sure this was a pain for them.)
regardless, i suppose i should make clear that i would NOT support a university caving in to corporate interests, whatever my feelings about napster (over)use on a university network may be, i don't like at all the idea of a corporate request (a letter from metallica? yeah, right.) for a university to remove access privileges -- and i find it unfortunate that much of the dialogue following this (we had an article in our campus newspaper last week) has centered around the issue of "napster" and "free access to networks" rather than the more pressing issue, i think, of corporate power grabs of internet "property" -- which one would think that our school, given it's history, would have a compelling interest in. (but nope, seems like everyone wants to download pirated music, graduate EECS, and get rich.)
fisfhcuerk.
Ok, obviously the universities aren't required to police the online activities of their students, but how the hell do you justify pirating music (not the only napster use, i know that, now hush) as "academic freedom" and "access to information"?
You don't. But in any truly free nation, you are innocent of any crime until you have been proven guilty. Simple use of Napster does not necessarily mean music piracy, so Metallica has no right to ban Napster, thereby punishing innocent people right along with the ones who are actually committing crimes. The US legal system was founded on the now somewhat cliched saying that it is better to let ten guilty people go free than to punish a single innocent person, and for Metallica to think they have a right to supercede that system is nothing more than hubris. They certainly have a right to their money if they want it, but that right is outweighed by the right of innocent people to not be punished for things they did not do. And that's the only fair way to do it, because while Metallica can always make more money, you can't "un-punish" an innocent person when the damage is done.
Coming from a school where most of the classes require some (if not all) work to be done on or based on the web, knowing I'm paying $30k and I'm not gonna be able to do my homework because a bunch of slackers who won't be there next semester because they're d/ling music truly pisses me off.
This is a legitimate concern, and a good question. Unfortunately, I don't know the answer to it. I do know that the students who are downloading music are paying just as much for the network access as you are; keep that in mind. Also note that you're paying no small amount, judging from your post (you wouldn't happen to be at RIT, would you?) At that rate, your college should be able to afford the necessary bandwidth upgrades. It should also be possible to establish some sort of bandwidth-limitation/traffic-shaping system, such that a portion of the network would be guaranteed reserved for student work use, with harsh penalties for using that portion of the network for any other purpose.
----------
Finally, a some people with a clue about how the net is supposed to work.
It should not be up to carriers to 'selectively' ban services and protocols. Not at all. They are providing network access. Period.
From what I can recall, Napster started sometime last year. I've been playing and sharing mp3's on my campus local network since I was a wee little freshman back in '97. I "stole" my share of Metallica songs. Why weren't they getting hopping mad then? Ok, that's a silly question. But seriously, even if all universities started to ban Napster, there's still the local area networks, which, last time I checked on mine, had plenty of gigs of mp3s along with gigs of pirated software. Someone has even made a search engine for our campus to make it easier to find what we are looking for. Maybe my school is not normal? I think this issue is getting beat to death. Could someone please nuke the RIAA?
I attended a school that I assume will take the same stance as these four and when I left in June there was no blocking of porn or anything else on the Internet. There were policies forbidding using the network for any illegal (or even commercial) purposes, but you were free to access any host on the Internet that would accept a connection from your machine.
Our local Usenet feed did not include newsgroups that catered to the trading of bianries, but I believe that was largely a result of the school's desire not to spend more $$$ on disks for the news server, though they may have been avoiding having actual porn on a server that they administer.
NU blocked napster several months ago, theoretically to reduce network traffic that was clogging the university's network. Are our NU students simply more mp3 hungry than those at every other university? Less copyright sensitive? Is our networking substandard? What!? My university in the grip of corporate control? Never. drlemur
Being quite *familiar* with porn and having been at MIT for the past few years, I can definately say that no porn is blocked there. The usenet feed is complete -- alt.sex.stories, alt.binaries.erotica.watersports, etc... And web traffic is definately not stopped. I even had the pleasure of being involved in the operation of a porn repository at one point on campus, with free access and the domain name porn.mit.edu. That story, however is a bit more complicated, since the site was forced to shut down, not because of school policy, but because the distribution of copyrighted material was reported and verified by the copyright holders, so while the school was not threatened with legal action, it was in the best interest of the site operator(s) to cease.
Who is General Failure? And why is he reading my disk????
Actually, the GPL is there to help prevent the alteration of an application such that somebody does not alter the app without going through the proper channels and put the app back in the public, such that the app in question has a ton of different versions all called the same app doing who knows what. GPL is more about consistency and keeping things ordered. That is peoples beef with those that alter a GPL program.
This is different that copyright in the respect is people are not taking Metallica songs, changing the beat, lyrics, mixing them up, and then releasing them as the original. Imagine getting Sandman that has eminem mixed in but it is still call Sandman. Soon, newbies to Metallica think the Eminem mix of Sandman is the original when in reality it is not.
so you see, THAT is the complaint with GPL. GPL is not about distribution or copying. THE issues with napster et al is about distribution and copying, NOT alterations.
1.
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Sunny Day Real Estate formed in 1992 with Jeremy Enigk on guitar and...
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The tie-dyed rock 'n' roll sideshow known as the Grateful Dead was kn...
4.
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Voted Most Likely To Self-Destruct, Alice In Chains have surprised al...
5.
Jerry Butler Artist Page
With his ultra-smooth, coffee 'n' cream vocals and his urbane stage presence...
6.
Jerry Jerry & Sons Of Rhythm.. Artist Page
7.
Jerry Lee Lewis Artist Page
If anyone gave Elvis a run for his money in the '50s, it was Jerry Lee Le...
8.
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[silent]
Yeah right.
You can still use scour.com or idrive if napster doesn't work.
I was amazed how King totally avoided even thinking about the actual law. I mean really, what color is the sky on his planet? The law specifically states that the plaintiff must provide the ISP with specific circumstances. Don't lawyers read the laws anymore?
When I think of Howard King and the RIAA, a quote comes to mind:
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
Ok i dont mean to troll here, and yes i probably will get modded down for this, but why does this post get a +4 informative?? I mean my god, how redundant can you get. This poster is just repeating about 10 posts below, but construed slightly differently.
What if I think Jim Crow laws are illegal? Is it wrong to continuously and continually break those until they're repealed? What if I think it's wrong to ban [pick your race/gender] from attending public school? If I, being of the banned race/gender, force my way in as an attempt to get those laws repealed, is that wrong?
Seems to me that much was done in the way of breaking laws of the early century that DID do a lot towards the cause...
Just a thought.
] D
For Internet2-connected schools, traffic between the schools doesn't go through commercial transit backbones (of which, by the way, AOL isn't one).
Internet2 backbone (Abilene) won't ban Napster or anything else for a number of reasons, including technical infeasibility.
In many schools Napster traffic is 20-40% of their total traffic. Some of the schools might decide they don't want the burden on their networks. These schools will likely adopt a non-techinical solution (don't do it, or risk expulsion) for a number of reasons, of which the main is that it's so easy to run similar protocols very stealthily.
"Big" schools aren't bandwidth-strapped, so there's no reason for them to do anything regarding Napster use unless they get into a serious legal trouble.
-- Stanislav Shalunov
Yeah. except for that minor problem of being under a contract to ONLY make the CD's the record company says they can make. Smashing Pumpkins can NOT make a CD w/o their permission. If their current contract does not expire for years, Napster/MP3 are the only way for them to get music out w/o violating their contract. That's why it's called a "record contract". IF they did convince the label to make the CD they wanted, the label would own it, and they didn't want that either.
universities and isps aren't the police. do your own dirty work!
The RIAA would never win this. There's a clear precedent at the ISP level that, boiling it down, says that "general knowledge of infringement" is NOT sufficient grounds for an injunction or damages against the ISP. Preventing such violations would require a use-inhibitive and cost-prohibitive level of monitoring by the ISP of its customers' every move and action, which no-one wants (except, of course, the RIAA perhaps).
Now, if a University became notorious for thumbing their noses at a copyright holder even when given _specific_ infringement notices (ie, which student infringed on which copyright), THEN the copyright holder could (and probably should) go after the University.
I know NCSU (from which I recently graduated) has a well established use policy, and procedures it will take upon violating that policy. But, like UNC and Duke (d00k and Orange County Community College, as we're fond of calling them), NCSU will almost certainly never ban Napster. The traffic is shaped down to reasonable volumes (max 10% of the off-campus traffic, I believe). NCSU has a vested interest in researching, understanding, and contributing to the Internet, and blanket censorship of such a major and emerging technology would be contrary to this interest.
Personally, I don't use Napster much anymore, and much of that use was to get songs I already own on CD in MP3 format. Napster isn't the final or best answer to digital music issues. But it's not a unilaterally wrong answer, either.
Xentax
You shouldn't verb words.
Ok, I'm a student at Kansas State and I personally can't wait until we ban napster traffic. As one of the few law-abiding students on campus my bandwidth has been seriously getting shot to hell (speeds of 20k/sec are getting frequent as a highpoint... I'm even getting 5-6k/sec). Do I have a serious interest in the legal issues surrounding Napster? Yes. Do I care about academic integrity and freedom of information? Very much so. The problem is that bandwidth is being used almost exclusively to download copyrighted music at most schools. This alone is more than enough reason to, if not an outright ban, severely restrict access to Napster to allow, if for no other reason, bandwidth for academic purposes.
USC (Southern California) - one of the first 3 universities to be threatened by the Metallica lawsuit - even allows a certain restricted use of Napster on certain machines. When they originally decided to ban Napster the legal department stepped up and said NO! - But not for matters of "Student Online Freedom" - If the University bans Napster, it opens the door to lawsuits from students, faculty, third parties etc. who are pissed off that the university isn't banning another site as being offensive, or bigotted, or whatever. Personal freedom is not the reason, protection from frivolous lawsuits is.
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
Here's a link to that article online, for anyone interested.
Good judgment comes from experience.
Experience comes from bad judgment.
Eric
--
Be who you are...and be it in style!
Ben Masel: 51,282 votes for US Senate in the Wisconsin Democratic Primary
Does my URL really make it that difficult to guess?
You don't. But in any truly free nation, you are innocent of any crime until you have been proven guilty. Simple use of Napster does not necessarily mean music piracy, so Metallica has no right to ban Napster, thereby punishing innocent people right along with the ones who are actually committing crimes. The US legal system was founded on the now somewhat cliched saying that it is better to let ten guilty people go free than to punish a single innocent person ...
Oh, you mean like, say, a gun owner should be left alone until he actually uses the gun to infringe upon the rights of others? Gdon't go out and kill people by themselves, just like Napster doesn't go out and get illegal copies of music by iteslf. And guns have legitimate purposes, such as target shooting and self defense, just like Napster has legitimate uses. So we should punish the law-abiding gun owners in advance but not the law-abiding Napster users?
Simple use of a firearm does not necessarily mean murder, so the government has no right to ban guns, thereby punishing innocent people right along with the ones who are actually committing crimes.
Sounds right to me.
Merde, il pleut encore!
"Completely false? Copyright law explicitly recognizes the right of a copyright holder to sell, license or transfer their various rights. Anything US law recognizes can be done with property, the copyright code recognizes can be done with rights to a work." ." ." Fight this insidious piece of marketing propaganda aimed at scaring us into giving huge amounts of money to the copyright holders, as well as giving up rights without going through the channel of our representatives in the government. We can stop them.
No. Copyright law doesn't "create property." Lars Ulrich's privilege, that he has complete control over the making of money from the song "One", is simply created wholesale by Congress, just like the right to pick up a welfare check under certain circumstances, or the right to pick up a check for not planting tobacco if you are one of a certain class of farmers.
If Congress takes my real property, they have to pay me. But Congress can declare that they won't pay people not to plant tobacco, or that they are canceling patents and copyrights, and they don't owe anyone anything. Just because a bunch of people who were making a lot of money off of the copyright/patent system started using the words "intellectual property", doesn't mean it is property.
After all, how can I buy a CD, which then becomes mine, and do anything with it that results in stealling from some guy I never met ? I can copy that a thousand times, and sell it, I'm not taking any real property from Lars Ulrich. What I am doing is analogous to starting a mail delivery service in competition with the US Postal Service; the Federal Government took away my right to do that, so that the US Postal Service could make enough money to guarantee delivery to remote areas and better service everywhere. (I think it was a great trade.) We used to do the same thing with Ma Bell and the telephone service -- that wasn't such a good deal, so we canceled it, and we didn't own Ma Bell anything for taking away her monopoly "property" any more than we'd owe Lars money if we quit dealing with him. (Personally I think the current trade of thousands of peoples individual, and largely unexercised, rights to copy things and sell them for extra reward to those who create new stuff is working out great.)
So US law doesn't treat the privileges that copyright gives you the same as real property. If you steal real property, that is covered under Title 18, in the criminal code. But if you operate a business that Congress has reserved for someone else, that is a different matter. The way Congress dealt with it (pretty clever, I think) is to get the US Attorneys and prosecutors largely out of it, and allow the people who wrote the work to seek money in court. This way only those copyright privileges which are worth it are enforced, which is efficient.
"I said nothing about transfers of a single copy of a single work. But let's be clear: making a copy and transferring the copy is not a "transfer", it's making and distributing an unauthorized copy. So ripping MP3s from a CD and making those MP3s available on Napster (or MP3.com) doesn't fall under the exemptions in section 109."
I'll say something about transfers of many copies of a CD from one person to another: it is completely legal so long as I received no compensation. I can buy a Metallica CD at Tower Records, rip it to mp3's, and email, ftp, or otherwise give those files to thousands of people, as long as I don't do it for money. Congress has never (yet) given away my right to do that. You correctly note that in some places a "transfer" refers directly to a transfer of the copyright, as in when a musician sells the copyright the studio, while I was using "tranfer" as in the middle initial of "ftp". So ?
The copyright holders have to show that I am violating the privileges congress gave them; I don't have prove that every file I transfer, or every photocopy I make, is legal. That's why the fact that you found one exemption which didn't apply to non-commercial mp3 trading doesn't really mean anything. The burden of proof is on them.
Here's a hint: look at section 107. I'll quote verbatim the first half a paragraph (all emphaisis is mine): "-STATUTE-
Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include -
(1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature . .
Wow. By the second sentence they already got that commercial nature thing in !
Now what follows is vague and difficult to interpret. There is a reason for that: congress wants the "fair use" provision to allow you do to all the normal things you would do with something you bought, and not allow the copyright holder to charge you once to get it and then again to use it. They are afraid that if they explicitly spell out what fair use is, the big copyright holdrs will invent a medium where the normally accepted use falls legalistically outside fair use, then congress will have accidently granted them the right to control how the works are used instead of how money is made from them. And the essential conflict of this whole napster/mp3 thing is that that is exactly what the RIAA and friends want to do; they want to sell you something for a limited use, so you have to buy more of them, like a company making cars that break after 80,000 miles.
You say "No fair citing "fair use" either -- wholesale reproduction of a work is generally not accepted as fair use."
Come on OMK! "Generally accepted" ? Microsoft Windows is generally accepted. The point of my post is, screw the "general acceptance" that says mp3's are illegal -- show me the law! Where is it? Are you claiming that steak dinner ?
Here's my summary to my longest slashdot post ever:
Copyright holders of music have not yet bribed out of congress a restriction on the non-commercial sharing of music files. But they want it. They have before them an example of how copyright holders of computer code mostly succeeded in getting privileges not granted to them by congress -- this is the software piracy wars of the late 80s. It is legal to make a copy of your windows95 disk and give it to friend to use, so long as he is not using the OS to make money, as in for a job or at a company. The big code copyright holders launched a huge campaign against this. All of the court cases that went to trial always dealt with a company having multiple copies to make money with, or someone selling copies of the code, but with a big publicity campaign they managed to convince the average American to buy more copies of software than they needed to. So the big music copyright holders are going for a repeat play.
But you can help me stop them, OMK ! Challenge people who say that mp3's are illegal. Post responses to those stupid slashdot napster defenders who make the argument "It's illegal but justified because . .
In all honesty, and this is after spending half an hour grovelling through google finding references to the Audio Home Recording Act, I'd say: wait a year, ask again. It could be misleading to point you at the actual law when prime movers of that law now repudiate it and act as if it doesn't exist. I think fair use is going bye-bye where not explicitly sanctioned (musicians: explicitly permit fair use of your recordings, if you own the rights!). To tell you the truth about fair use at this point would be misleading- losing those rights is basically inevitable. You'll still be paying a tax on stuff like DAT tapes, though, and CD-Rs labelled for music copying (perhaps all of them, I'm not certain of the exact accounting)
Granted that Napster can be used for legal purposes... granted that Napster often IS used for legal purposes... there is still the legitimate issue of bandwidth.
As pointed out previously, Napster accounts for a *huge* amount of university LAN traffic. A system administrator who is perfectly Libertarian might have to shut down Napster access for no other reason than to protect the network's mission-critical traffic: supporting academic research and administration.
Bandwidth management is the answer. There are plenty of tools out there that will allow an administrator to allow Napster (and whatever other traffic types that may be a problem) to peacefully co-exist with mission-critical traffic, dynamically scaling back Napster to tolerable levels whenever the mission-critical applications are in demand. This stuff has existed for several years (disclaimer: I work for a company that makes bandwidth managers, and yes, we DO classify Napster, thus enabling system admins to keep Napster around when they otherwise would be forced to squelch it). There simply has to be the will to use these tools (and the budget).
Look on Napster's website. They even have a FAQ on the bandwidth issue, what to do about it, and where to get the solutions. Students should tell their administrators about this FAQ when presented with the bandwidth argument.
Yes, I would. In my world it's far more important that people get involved. You can modify your beliefs on the fly. My first political action was in support of the Conservative party and NAFTA. Needless to say that my political beliefs have changed, but I think that having gotten involved was an important first step.
I don't think that what I believe is the gospel truth. Even libertarians have stuff to say that's worth listening to (if only to think about why we think what we do).
------
If you believe in political freedom and freedom of action, then your real test is when you're faced with the most fucked-up, morally-repugnant, stupid demagogue you ever believed could exist. If you can understand giving him/her/it the right of freedom of speech, then your are firm in that belief.
Supporting their beliefs, on the other hand, is an entirely different matter.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
Cornell University sent the following to all students late Friday afternoon.
[The gist: Don't violate copyright laws, and don't abuse the campus network.]
-------------------------------------------------Subject: Network Capacity and Policy Issues Arising from the Use of Napster and Other File Sharing Programs
-------------------------------------------------
From: Vice President/Information Technologies
To: Cornell Students
Date: 9/22/2000
-----------------------------------------------
Napster, Gnutella, iMesh, CuteMX, Scour Exchange, and FreeNetfile - applications like these are sprouting up all over the Internet. They are designed to let people easily exchange music, movies, videos, and other files over the Internet. But they're not as harmless as they might seem. Here's what you need to know about these programs:
FILE SHARING APPLICATIONS AND COPYRIGHT ISSUESProviding or obtaining copyrighted material-music, movies, videos, text, etc.- without permission from the rightful owner violates the United States Copyright Act and several university policies. While it is true that a number of artists have allowed their creative works to be freely copied, those artists remain very much the exception. It is best for you to assume that all works are copyright-protected except those that explicitly state otherwise.
If the university is notified by an artist, author, publisher, or law enforcement agency that you are violating copyright laws, the relevant offices within Cornell will investigate the complaint. If appropriate, action will be taken against you in accordance with university policy. In some cases, violations of University policy could result in suspending your NetID. Additionally, you should be aware that you could face liability for damages of up to $30,000 per infringement under the Copyright law itself.
----------------
NEGATIVE EFFECTS ON NETWORK PERFORMANCE
File-sharing applications such as Napster, Gnutella, iMesh, CuteMX, Scour Exchange, and FreeNet, can generate so much network traffic that they adversely affect network performance for users who share the same local network. Use of these applications is most widespread among students who subscribe to ResNet, Cornell's Residence Hall Network Services although many students who use EZ-Remote to get to Cornell's network also download these programs.
CIT will be continuously monitoring the network traffic situation as it relates to the use of these file-sharing applications. Users on Cornell's network whose usage hinders network performance and interferes with others trying to use the network for University work will be contacted. Action to maintain network integrity and performance will be taken where necessary.
This is not only a matter of network etiquette. Interfering with the ability of others to use network services violates Cornell University policy and may be grounds for suspension of your Resnet or EZ-Remote subscription, or result in other appropriate sanctions.
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COMPUTERS ACTING AS SERVERS
File-sharing applications typically allow you to set up your computer so that other people can access files you choose to make available to them. While this might seem like a nice service to offer, there are some serious drawbacks.
Having your computer act as a server can burden Cornell's networks if your server is popular and does excessive, high-volume transfers of files. Some applications let you choose NOT to be a server, but others, such as Gnutella, don't. If you simply install the software and don't take the time to read any documentation, you may not even realize your computer is a server. Make sure you understand what the software does.
Note: machines acting as servers for materials which infringe copyright can and will have their network connections turned off in response to complaints.
Another serious problem with setting up your computer as a server is that you could be opening a security hole for hackers, allowing them access to your entire computer. File sharing applications differ in how much security they provide. Be cautious.
Thank you.
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RELATED UNIVERSITY POLICY WEBSITES
*Information Technologies Rights and Responsibilities
* Responsible Use of Electronic Communications
UC Berkeley will announce whether or not it will ban Napster sometime today (Friday)
Check www.dailycal.org for details
-Iso aka solaar
UMN? Shouldn't you be using GOPHER to transfer all of your files? :-)
(don't know how long that link will work, their web design isn't very efficient)
The president et al says they will not ban it until it is banned. Or so the newspaper says, and the newspaper is known for it's less than superior journalism (including how to write a sentence that makes sense). Their big point is that they will not presume that students are using the network for illegal activities, but students (by policy) can still get in trouble if they are "caught" copying copyrighted material. Like someone else mentioned earlier, I wonder how they would be caught?
While the university will almost immediately halt a user (by removing your net access) from running a game server or FTP server on their network, you can use napster all you want.
You can't use napster in the computer labs, though, as those are state computers and even more restricted.
We were one of the schools to get the infamous letter from the lawyers... both the student gov't and the residence hall association immediately enacted 'bills' to take an official stance against removing access to napster, although neither of them really control what happens on the network or university policy on such things. The RHA and ASWSU bills seem to more PR than policy oriented.
-nicole
Columbia is refusing to give in as well, saying:
... The University also does not block the use of any particular method of communicating or transferring information such as ftp, http, Napster, gnutella, e-mail, web drives, irc, etc., all of which can be and are used for legitimate communication and file exchange""
"Columbia University supports academic freedom and individual responsibility and does not preemptively review or monitor the contents of the files of its faculty, students, or staff that are accessible on the University network.
Isn't it nice when administrators actually get it?
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Mod up a post Rob doesn't like and you'll never mod again
schools are in cutthroat competition to attract the best students
Given the way the UC system did a slash-and-burn on the faculty in the early '90s recession, when state support was cut by 1/3, they have to have something to offer.
in the same town that the RIAA and MPAA are based in
Also the home of ASCAP (American Society of Composers, Artists, and Performers, IIRC). Some years back, the LA Times detailed how their copyright enforcement lawyer went around to businesses demanding a license fee for the privilege of having music on the radio. ASCAP claimed uncompensated commercial use of copyrighted material. I remember that many LA-area businesses had the yellow ASCAP window sticker, so as not be shaken down twice.
The clearance system sounds logical. It is not. It is completely arbitrary. -- John Bolton
Tough cookies, pal. Guess you'll have to put a portion of your immense fee to having somebody look for actual copyright violations.
God I hate lawyers. They are the scum of the earth.
Quotes from the recent past:
"If it comes down to me being killed by a cop for the crime of walking down the street or defending myself, you're gonna have a dead cop, and fuck your laws."
-- Ice T, after the "Cop Killer" rucus
"...they may harpoon us, but they ain't gonna pick us up on no radar screen!"
The DMCA is inconsistent with the legal defination of an Enhanced Service Provider...to paraphrase from a web site I visit( http://www.wickednews.net ) in their FAQ(Which is a quote from an O'reilly book I believe)... ISP's are legally defined as Enhanced Service Providers, aka those companies which provide a transport service of some type, but take no interest(or responsiblity) in that which travels over the pipe...they therefore cannot be held legally responsible for what is being brought over the pipe, so long as they in no way sensor the material or take any contol of it. An Excellent example is AT&T, who cannot be responsible for two Bank robbers planning a heist over the phone. An example of a Company not fitting this description is AOL, they do sensor their content, and therefore do not fit this description. This works as well for Cable modem and DSL access, its just an internet pipe, and by legal defination the sevice company cannot be held responsible for your world domination plans on your web site. The rights of an enhanced service provider are guanteed legally by the Constitution of the USA, in this country, therefore the DMCA should be struck down as Unconstitustional, ANY LAWYERS want to make yourself famous and strike this puppy down for us.
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
"It's yet to be established that this noncommercial vastly expanded fair use copying is illegal."
However, I think you should get some balls and exercise your rights to the fullest while you can. This philosophy of "I'll stop now not to piss off the people who are going to win anyway" is pathetic, more suited to some European peasant a few centuries ago than a high-tech modern person like yourself. If I had that opinion, I certainly wouldn't advertise it -- Jesus, aren't you afraid that your Mother or other family members might read this one day and see what a spineless little bend-over you are ? Why don't you at least pretend to have some character, so your children don't have to be ashamed ?
However, I think that making and distributing copies in order demonstrate the quality of a commercial recording facility is probably not non-commercial use. So you can't post high-quality sound recordings of copyrighted vinyl as avertisement for your business (if that is indeed what you were suggesting). I think the slightest taint of commercialism would be fatal. What you could do is make the cuts and post them on gnutella/napster without any reference to your self or your enterpise, as a hobbiest's effort. This anonymous strategy has two good qualities:
I believe Tech has also rejected the ban, informally.
25% Funny, 25% Insightful, 25% Informative, 25% Troll
Clearly, in light of, e.g., the Overlap Case, MIT was thinking
"Oh, thank god! Another Supreme Court case! We'll finally get some alumni donations again!"
-*- Any technology indistinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced -*-
AHRA specifies that any non-commercial use of digital home recording equipment for copying music is not actionable.
When did I ever say I favored gun control? I didn't say any such thing. Truth be told, I agree with what you've written here. Don't jump to conclusions so quickly.
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Here's the link -- Berkeley isn't blocking access either.
Nowadays, we should call this place SlashDMCA.org.
(getting ready to be modded down to oblivion.)
Marriage is considered capital punishment for the theft of a goat in some third world countries...
1) I own a cd and allow a friend to copy a song. No money changes hands...Isn't there a Federal (Supreme?) court ruling that this is permitted? Isn't this the core of the Napster defense (that I can't seem to find on their site).
2) I own many vinyl albums. Suppose person (b) owns the equivalent CD and has ripped all the tracks....I own my vinyl but don't want to go through the messy process of ripping from an album. If I aquire person (b)'s mp3's ripped from his legit copy, is that permitted use?
If anyone can respond with a legal cite (not just "yeah, that is/should be allowed") I'd appreciate it!
SuperID
As a student of Purdue, I would like to say that they are doing the right thing. No service has been banned, carnivore has not been installed, and students are left responsible for their personal actions. I know of 3 cases recently where students have broken computer laws, been caught, and been responsible for their actions. The university's only involvement was that by breaking the laws, they voided their housing contract, and were evicted. I do not feel sorry, because they signed a contract, and then broke it. This is how the system is supposed to work.
-- the computer doesn't want any beer, no matter how much you think it does. NEVER, EVER feed your computer beer.
Well, I was an undergraduate at Harvard until my graduation in May and I have to say this is a new spin for Harvard. Last year Harvard's Office of the General Counsel received a cease and desist bully-letter with no legal basis from the MPAA that a student (me) was distributing DeCSS which they determined was illegal, even though no legally binding court injuction in our district had been issued. Harvard got down on its knees like a two dollar whore for the MPAA and threatened me to force me to remove DeCSS from my own computer and to cease electronic distribution of this "illegal" software. University administrations are NOT our friends in this area. Perhaps Harvard's General Counsel's office has had a change of heart, but I am seriously doubtful. They have NO qualms about following the pack on these issues but they are too chicken shit to stand up for their students rights on their own.
The Big Schools have InterNet II, courtesy of federal subsidies, that is not rattled by mp3 music files. InterNet II is about 30 times wider than what other broadband users can get. InterNet II is also closed to only a 130 big schools and governemnt labs.
A prior post about UT Knoxville from 00/09/11. Hopefully, someone there will have some more specifics on the policy.
Visit DC2600
Eve Fairbanks says I drive a hybrid!LOL
On the contrary, they've already exposed themselves to a potential lawsuit, whereas complying would have left them in the clear. Several universities were named in the Metallica lawsuit; they all backed down and blocked access. These universities have refused to do that, even though on the surface they have nothing at stake.
Let's not confuse the issue here: if students can be shown to be using the technology to infringe, then the university has a responsibility to take action. Infringement is infringement, and for better or worse it is illegal. The issue is that these companies plus Metallica want to outlaw technology that can be used for infringement, which is ass-backwards. The business environment has changed, threatening to make them rethink their previously successful business models, and they're trying to get the legislature and the courts to change it back. It doesn't work that way.
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Give me liberty or give me something of equal or lesser value from your glossy 32-page catalog.
If Napster is shut down, the Universities won't have to justify thier stand -- no sense in blocking something that no longer exists! :P
--
We may not imagine how our lives could be more frustrating and complex—but Congress can. – Cullen Hightower
So it's not about money, but about controlling the music on their terms, eh?
Let's remember what sell out extrodinaire, Lars Ulrich, had to say about this whole thing when Metallica started this mess to begin with:
"We take our craft -- whether it be the music, the lyrics, or the photos and artwork -- very seriously, as do most artists. It is therefore sickening to know that our art is being traded like a commodity rather than the art that it is. From a business standpoint, this is about piracy -- a/k/a taking something that doesn't belong to you; and that is morally and legally wrong. The trading of such information -- whether it's music, videos, photos, or whatever - is, in effect, trafficking in stolen goods."
He is sickened by the fact that his "art" (and I use that term loosely) is being traded as a "commodity" even though that is what he wants! His music is traded as a "commodity" all the time by the RIAA! He just happens to get a cut when the RIAA is handling it. Its all "trafficking in stolen goods" to Lars! If that isn't about money I don't know what is!
According to Lars' logic, we should immediately shut down libraries and museums, because their systems of allowing the public free access to art, literature and music is "trafficking in stolen goods."
Let's not forget that Metallica has been burned by their selling out before. Remember when the Mighty Mighty Bosstones did a cover of "Enter Sandman"? Metallica hated that cover and desperately wanted to stop it from being released, but because they sold the rights to the song (a wierd thing for a band that doesn't care about money) they couldn't stop it, as the people who did own the rights didn't care (hell, they were going to make some money off of the Bosstones...)
Long story short--Metallica is all about the money. Lars so much as said it when they started this business. And they can claim that they aren't going after their fans all they want, but considering the lengths I had to go to to get this quote (it was not available on the Metallica web site, which is strange, considering that this is what they believe) i think that it is obvious what Metallica is all about. That quote shows them for the greedy ass holes that they are, and I think the fact that it isn't on their web site proves as much as well.
Brandt
the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, requires that ISP's take reasonable steps to put an end to copyright violations which they are made aware of by the copyright holder.
I just love the way some lawyers try to expand a law well past the breaking point. King told them "a bunch of students are using napster", not "Joe Johnson IP address 192.168.1.1 is offering Metallica songs on napster". In other words, he only made them aware of a potential for copyright violations, not an actuality. Thus the university is not required to take any action.
Otherwise, a single lawyer with a mail merge system could shut down the U.S. part of the internet: "Dear ISP, since you have users, there is potential for abuse of our copyright. Please stop your users from accessing the internet IMMEDIATLY or else!"
It seems to me that lately we have had a large number of corporations pushing around something called "fair use" because they have more money.
Some summaries:
Metallica, rather than endorse napster, and thus encourage the people who would buy more of their music (as compared with non-napsterees), they alienated 300,000 of their fans, even though lars claims that "it's not about the money" and "music shouldn't be free", basically meaning that he beleives the radio should be outlawed as well. It is not for me to decide how lars decides, but it is up to me to decide what I think of lars and I think he is not in a good state of mind. Lars wants to undermine fair use by making it illegal to have MP3's at all, even if he gets royalties, or if the owner of the MP3's has a metallica CD with the same songs on it.
SDMI is an acronym for the Secure Digital Music Initiative, and attemps to undermine fair use by making it illegal (or impossible) to have MP3 files on your computer, or to transfer them to another media (such as minidisk). SDMI has even spawned a hackSDMI website, where unsuspecting crypto experts are encouraged to do the dirty work of the RIAA.
CSS is a weak crypto that was easily cracked by a teenager. Even though it is the MPAA's fault for not getting a stronger crypto to put on DVD's, they blame it on anyone other than themselves.
DeCSS, a program that decodes CSS, has spawned lawsuits over the legality of linking, and the MPAA has gone so far as to sue 2600, even though none of the people who work for 2600 even own a DVD player. Of course, with the right equipment you can capture or copy DVD movies without DeCSS, but of course that has been largely ignored.
What this means is that whoever has the money has THE RIGHT to make you do whatever the hell they want YOU to do. Who has the money?
Corporations, metallica, Dre, MPAA, RIAA, and the like.
Who cares about their rights?
We do.
I would hope that you do the same, and do everything within your power to thwart the efforts of these people:
Mirror DeCSS
Put links to civil rights groups, slashdot and 2600 on your webpage
Put essays about why your civil rights must be protected on your website
Spread the word to all your friends, enemies and relatives
Write your governor, congressman, president, dictator, whatever, write the important people you know of and let them know how you feel about these issues
Write hillary rosen, lars ulrich, dr.Dre, as well as the other people pushing these lawsuits, and let them know how you feel about the issues
Get all of your friends, relatives and enemies to do the same.
Or else our rights will get taken away. Or else, as pastor neimoller put it so well, there will be noone left to defend you.
Kris
botboy60@hotmail.com
Nerdnetwork.net
Kris
botboy60@hotmail.com
Nerdnetwork.net
Old Man Kensey says "Like it or not, current US law treats intellectual property as property, with penalties for theft, illegal use, etc."
This is completely false. Separate Titles of the US code lay out remedies and penalties associated with patents and copyright, and they differ considerably from the remedies and penalties for crimes such as vandalism or theft.
Completely false? Copyright law explicitly recognizes the right of a copyright holder to sell, license or transfer their various rights. Anything US law recognizes can be done with property, the copyright code recognizes can be done with rights to a work.
Why don't you go read the code in question ? It's on the web. The site I use is:
uscode.house.gov
You might want to download the entire document of Title 17, in which case this page is the best:
uscode.house.gov/download.htm
The same privileges, basically, minus the rights of control over performance & display, and an exception allowing the recording of cover versions. Note that the exceptions to the exclusions to the right of display only apply if the viewers are in substantially the same location as the copyrighted work, and the limitations on exclusive performance rights do not apply to "performances" from recorded media (see definition of "phonorecord" in section 1) -- so you can't squeeze distribution of MP3s into the "performance and display" loophole.
And if you can show me where it says that I am violating any privileges the US government has handed out, when I transfer a copy of a sound recording to another individual and don't receive any money for it, then I will buy you a steak dinner (or equivalent, if steak isn't your thing). I'm serious about this. Be careful, because all the places where it says that you can't do something, it generally says "as allowed in secions 106 through 115" or something similar, and those sections include the "Limitations on Exclusive Rights" parts.
To quote a co-worker, "You silly poof."
I said nothing about transfers of a single copy of a single work. But let's be clear: making a copy and transferring the copy is not a "transfer", it's making and distributing an unauthorized copy. So ripping MP3s from a CD and making those MP3s available on Napster (or MP3.com) doesn't fall under the exemptions in section 109.
MP3.com was essentially a broadcast service. Section 110 covers "Limitations on exclusive rights: Exemption of certain performances and displays". MP3.com arguably does not fall under the protections here because it's a "transmission to the public". Even if you argue that it's not, there's still arguably an "indirect admission charge", namely the eyeballs you bring to their site that generate ad banner revenue (think of the cost-shifting argument against spam e-mail -- time and Internet access cost is a cost). And there's still the royalty issue per the final paragraph of the section.
If you can show me a section that grants an exemption that applies to MP3.com, or Napster, or ripping MP3s and trading them, have at it. No fair citing "fair use" either -- wholesale reproduction of a work is generally not accepted as fair use.
-- Old Man Kensey
Has no-one else realised that Napster is the perfect front for the RIAA? Whilst they present a pose of innocence to the world, headed by Shawn Fanning's oh-so "innocent" posturings, the truth is that they are an organisation funded by the RIAA for the sole purpose of letting them lobby the most restrictive of laws into reality. Shawn Fanning was nothing more than a willing stooge in the RIAA's plans to bring in a new tyranny of intellectual property laws. In return for paying him a large sum of money, the RIAA purchased his services as front man for "Napster", a piece of software knocked up in about half an hour by RIAA techies. He then started up the Napster company with the sole purpose of providing a music piracy service that was as blatent and as visible as possible, an aim in which he has done exceedingly well in. Now the RIAA has the impetus to get all kinds of restrictive laws but into place by a Congress dazzled by the "threat" that Napster poses to the music industry. And it's working like a charm, and everyone has been fooled. When the RIAA gets what they want, Napster will quietly fold, all involved will get their paychecks, and we'll be the ones living under the Big Brother regime that KKKlinton approved. And I suppose there are a dozen black helicopters circling your home/apartment/dorm room/cave. Damn, I've seen some conspiracy theories before but damn....
For a while, the University of Texas at Austin (50,000 students---biggest population of any school in the country) had Napster blocked, but since about 2 weeks ago, it has become unblocked. There was no explanation for it on the site that previously stated that it was blocked, but I would assume that because it was only blocked because it was bandwidth intensive, UT would not want to be marked as a school that objects to Napster on account that the RIAA doesn't like it. No complaint here!
How about my freedom to charge you $5,000 for my music if I so choose? Or my close source IDE? Or my freedom to sue your ass for violating my IP rights? Whether you believe patents, IP laws, or closed source are "bad", continuing to break those laws is not doing much to help your cause.
True, but I was going on the basis that they were dumped from their record label.
Writing in from Brown to say that my school, all though it has not been asked by King to close down napster, closed it down last year. BUT, it was not because of legal issues; it weas taking up more than half our bandwidth! As of eariler this week, however, napster is back up. The head of computing stated that if we had the bandwidth, it never would have gone down in the first place. I am glad to report that it seems Brown is another great school that will most likely stand with its peers and laugh at the RIAA and all its minions.
That simply is not what the opinion says. In order for Napster to use this argument and refer to this opinion from the Supremes, Napster would need to show not only that the technology can be used in a legitimate manner (as you suggested), but also Napter would need to show that the majority of the actual physical use of the technology is legitimate.
</BLOCKQUOTH THE POSTER>
Sorry, but the decision only says widely used, which does not equate to majority use.
You also state that Napster cannot prove majority legitimate use. Since the RIAA has admitted it cannot provide a "catalog" of its copyrighted recordings, it makes it difficult to prove that the majority of the use of Napster is infringing
Despite this, you also ignored another statement from the opinion:
<BLOCKQUOTH THE PARENT POST>
Additionally the Court stated, "A use that has no demonstrable effect upon the potential market for, or the value of, the copyrighted work need not be prohibited in order to protect the author's incentive to create."
</BLOCKQUOTH THE PARENT POST>
A while ago,
Many of these Universities have leading edge legal departments -- full of fairly smart people, to say the least.
The recent prosecution of an *individual* for sharing files is almost admitting what many have said from the beginning -- it's not the pipe or the software that commits crimes, it's the individual.
If this can be proven, Lars, Metallica, RIAA may be in for some major corporate lawsuits, and even class action lawsuits for denying individuals access to their software and internet, not to mention a reasonable expectation of privacy (netcop should watch out, too).
Hopefully this will come to pass. I'd really enjoy seeing these bastards get wiped out for violating our civil rights.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
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... It was that sort of thing).
:>
I don't deny that this sort of thing happens. I am curious, though, how you are so sure that's why she got the job.
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Trust me, it was pretty obvious. It wasn't because of the way in which her skills fit the job at hand (not that she was without skills, but you'd expect a minimal amount of knowledge - imagine a Windows tech not knowing where to find the Start Menu without being told
I hesitate to go into too much detail because she is a nice enough person, but the fact is that she had absolutely no skills to justify the position she was given. It's not her fault, I suppose.
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What about compensating for an unnatural disadvantage?
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Depends on what you mean by compensation. If an employer is breaking current laws on discrimination, that's one thing. But it's quite another to promote people. For one, people who may never have had the unnatural disadvantage are rewarded, while people who were not responsible for those kinds of disadvantages are punished. That's like punishing someone for a crime they did not commit, so that you feel better for not catching the criminal.
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And while we're at it, am I to assume that you favor 100% taxation of all inheritence?
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No. I believe that whenever possible, people should be left alone and allowed to maintain responsibility for their own lives. If I work my entire life and save my money intelligently, I should be able to decide where to put my money. If it's to fund the education/lifestyle of my kid, that's a good thing. I shouldn't be penalized. I would hope in turn that they would do that for their own kid.
I'm just annoyed at the idea that it's society's responsibility to equalize people. In this country you have freedom to make a better life for yourself, but you don't have any sort of guarantee that it will be given to you. If someone goes out of their way to harm someone we should step in, but otherwise refrain from promoting or demoting people based on anything other than their merit.
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As a matter of fact, I am. Every stat I have ever seen indicates that within each of the black, white, and latino demographics, drug users/sellers make up the same percentage.
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If this is true, then it should be stopped. But the answer is to punish ONLY the bad cops/lawyers responsible and say "Start punishing people based on their crimes", not say "You need to start arresting more white people so it doesn't look so bad". When you do that, how is it morally any different than what they're (supposedly) already doing? What kind of message does that send?
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I just have a hard time with the idea that white males are at a disadvantage in the US.
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Depends on how you look at it. Are we as a group living in poverty? No. But are we as a group being unfairly blamed for the actions of very few and being told that merit is second only to political correctness? Seems that way.
Racism is racism. It sucks either way. It's even worse when one type is villified, while another type is actively encouraged.
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Of course, none of this has anything to do with Universities banning Napster....
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Nope, I guess it doesn't.
- Jeff A. Campbell
- VelociNews (http://www.velocinews.com)
- Jeff
Has no-one else realised that Napster is the perfect front for the RIAA? Whilst they present a pose of innocence to the world, headed by Shawn Fanning's oh-so "innocent" posturings, the truth is that they are an organisation funded by the RIAA for the sole purpose of letting them lobby the most restrictive of laws into reality.
Shawn Fanning was nothing more than a willing stooge in the RIAA's plans to bring in a new tyranny of intellectual property laws. In return for paying him a large sum of money, the RIAA purchased his services as front man for "Napster", a piece of software knocked up in about half an hour by RIAA techies. He then started up the Napster company with the sole purpose of providing a music piracy service that was as blatent and as visible as possible, an aim in which he has done exceedingly well in.
Now the RIAA has the impetus to get all kinds of restrictive laws but into place by a Congress dazzled by the "threat" that Napster poses to the music industry. And it's working like a charm, and everyone has been fooled. When the RIAA gets what they want, Napster will quietly fold, all involved will get their paychecks, and we'll be the ones living under the Big Brother regime that KKKlinton approved.
It is our right to pirate music, but on the other side it is the music industries right to take action. The actions they've taken I don't agree with however.
---- http://www.opedog.com/
Neat. I would have expected to see the Ivys cave in order to grease the palms and wallets of record company executives.
Maybe the Ivys, but not MIT. :)
The bottom line is that the long term "reasonable steps to put an end to copyright violations" would be monetarily and technically non-trival and unreasonable. So let the Mr. King and his buddies do the work.
And I agree; Napster itself should not be punished for this. The users who use it illegally should be punished. It's almost as if I were to get drunk and go driving, hitting a pedestrian, and so the pedestrian sued the car maker because it allowed me to break the law. Absolutely rediculous.
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Oxford's response would most likely be:
"I say, one of those horrid greasy beat combos have asked us to ban something called Napster. Well, I don't know what it is, but if 'Metal Liker' don't want it at our university it must be a favourable item. Request denied"
--
Listening for the sound of the coming rain...
I'm overjoyed to hear that these well known universities hdave decided to not be bullied by the RIAA. If they choose to not support their students, well, so be it, virtually every college student is over 18, and therefore a legal adult. They can make their own choices.
College is about learning, not just about facts, but about life and ourselves. Yeah Napster can be used for bad things, but it can also be used for good things. I use it to find live tracks of bands that I can't hear on the radio anyway. And I don't use gnutella, cause it just doesn't work for me, I dunno, maybe gotta try harder.
They point is, that colleges shouldn't be bullied into becoming the parents of their students. They already have parents, and they are old enough to accept responsibility for their actions.
Those who don't know me, probably shouldn't trust me. Those that do know me, DEFINITELY shouldn't trust me.
Ouch. So what you're saying is that UCLA is knowingly allowing (a mostly) illegal activity in order to gain competitive advantage (or parity) with other schools.
This would look really bad if it were established in a court of law. As a Bruin alum, I just hope they don't get smoked on this too bad.
Mmmm.. Donuts
.. these people like members of metallica, Dr.Dre, their lawyers, the RIAA, etc, are completely ignorant of how the internet technically works. They have no idea why the notion of "Banning" napster is infeasable.
You can't just turn off all of FTP. Or NFS or any other internet protocol, including Napster. They are all the same, built atop IP, which was designed (more or less) to resist changes to it's network infrastructure (aka, nuking one of the nodes). These protocols aren't services. They are simply methods of communication over a medium.
Now, you CAN turn off the Napster Centralized servers, which would achieve the effect they are looking for. But for things like Gnutella, FTP, etc, Turning off the entirety of servers would be akin to corking an infinite number of holes in the hull of a sinking ship. The ONLY way to really turn off [insert protocol here] is to turn off the internet.
So there I was. Naked. In a refrigerator. With a potroast on my knees. Smokin a cigar. That's when it got REALLY weird.
read this. It explains things pretty well.
Lars Ulrich, as quoted in the 10/12/00 edition of Rolling Stone:
"I'm so over this Napster business by now - it seems so four months ago."
When windows costs $89 just for the upgrade (98) and CDs cost $20 for some worthless one hit song with the rest a bunch of sleepy thrid rate shit I see no reason no bother. There are very few "artists" left who are actually hurt by piracy in any appreciable. And if that means that Matallica can't make their Porche payment or get that solid gold house I won't be crying in the rain (it is raining).
Respond to s
Give me a break. Napster is doing nothing more than stealing and so are those college kids. It's disgusting!
ASCII a stupid question, get a stupid ANSI!
When the record and film industries go after someone they sue, which is a civil matter. Nothing goes onto your record unless you perjure yourself. (or if you happen to be the president, that won't go on your record either)
Do you even know anything about perl? -- AC Replying to Tom Christiansen post.
So you mean, they're actually holding you accountable to your claims and refusing to restrict access to a whole class of users? They're asking you to do the non-cost-effective job of policing your recently obsolescent copyright regime, rather than pushing that burden onto others? They're taking the stance that because they are not required by law to do this you can't intimidate them into it? And they're doing all this in the name of idealistic generalities like "academic freedom" and "access to information?"
Imagine.
Somebody's got their head in the sand, pal, but surprisingly it is not these Universities.
Kudos to these Universities for recognizing there's a larger issue here rather than just whittling away at users' access just because it's the easier, less risky thing to do.
-
-
Give me liberty or give me something of equal or lesser value from your glossy 32-page catalog.
Metallica's lawyer is arguing that the DMCA requires the universities to block access to Napster. For his argument to succeed, Napster must have no substantial use other than to violate copyrights. This is the argument the RIAA lawsuit hinges on, as well.
I suspect that, if Napster is shut down because it has no substantial non-infringing use - as Judge Patel has ruled - the universities will have a much tougher time justifying their stand.
If I were a Napster user on campus, though, I wouldn't expect the university to stand up for me if they were to receive a complaint that I'd been violating copyrights with Napster. That they refuse to block the service entirely does not mean that they'll refuse to take action on specific complaints.
--
Disinfect the GNU General Public Virus!
I believe that article only refers to ISPs removing unauthorized copyrighted content from their own servers when notified. It does not (or, at least, should not) extend to ISPs removing content from their users' computers, which is what would have to happen in Napster's case.
Refrag
I have a website. It's about Macs.
So where does the money come from that pays for Napsters's servers, data lines, and salaries?
If I own a store and I know that people are selling me stolen property and I sell that property to another person and make a profit off the two transactions, I believe that would be a crime. It would still be a crime if I did this and got paid a salary by the store instead of getting a cut of the profit on each sale. And it's still a crime even if 90% of the sales are legit when I KNOW the property is stolen.
So Joe copies Metallica songs that get transferred to Bob and somehow Napster gets money out of this to pay their salaries and equipment costs. Someone is profiting from the copying, and that's a copyright violation. Metallica hollers "Hey! Those are my songs that are being copied, and some of that money that pays your salary and equipment costs should be mine."
Where's the money coming from?
Who gets the money?
How come Metallica ain't getting any of it for their songs?
How come Napster will not block the posting of artists who say "Hey, no! You guys are getting money to help people copy my stuff"
Its *HIS* music, he can do whatever he wants with it. He may be a "greedy asshole" as you say, but its his legal right. Lars doesn't want his music distributed on napster and via mp3s where anyone with a cable modem can download a 256k rip of the album in half an hour. Thats hardly called trading.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
The other side of the issue is that Napster really does eat bandwidth, and that can be really irritating if you're one of the few who does not use it. At my school, Resnet (residential network; the branch of academic computing that gives people net access in dorm rooms) limited all Napster traffic to just 5 megabit up/down combined. My quake 3 ping times dropped by a third of a second after that.
The answer is better network management - you don't have to ban Napster to limit the bandwidth used for MP3s. The University of Wisconsin - Madison has developed tools which allow this type of bandwidth management. BTW, the King letter aparently made it there as well, but I haven't heard the response.
If you don't vote at all, then you're voting for whatever everybody else votes in. Think about it. I've worked for the Green Party for a few years. In the last city election, if about 2000 "disgusted voters" had bothered to come out and register their votes for someone other than the status quo (in a city of 300K people), it would have completely changed the results of the election.
It won't make a difference is a self fulfilling prophesy.
You don't like the DCMA? Go out, find the nearest candidate who voted/campaigned against it, Help in their campaign and make sure that they know why you're doing it . If a local candidate voted for the DCMA, then go out and work for his opponnent and make sure that both sides know why you're doing it. Better yet, offer to work on getting the geek vote out.
Whatever you do, get off of your butt and go do something about it besides talking to a bunch of other geeks who understand how stupid and backwards these laws are.
Those who are not willing to fight for their freedom don't deserve it.
-- Malcom X
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
Breaking news today: Regents of the University of California refuse to block Napster at any of the nine UC campuses.
Kevin Fox
Kevin Fox
I don't think companies or schools block napster by blocking ports. They can just choose to exclude specific IP numbers (IE the napster server IPs) from getting through the firewall in either direction.
Port hopping would be irrelevant.
Kevin Fox
Kevin Fox
Well, music is specifically covered by the AHRA - IIRC it states that all noncommercial analog duplication and distribution is legal. And all digitial duplication and distribution is legal provided that the system has a rights management system in place and that it's primary purpose is for audio recording (as opposed to, in the Rio case, a computer)
As for taping stuff off of tv, the Supreme Court covered that in the early 80's in the seminal Sony v. Universal Studios case. They decided that it was legal to tape shows for timeshifting purposes, and were aware of and had no issues with, people making libraries of stuff they taped.
So generally, taping stuff is not a copyright infringement, though IANAL.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
Really? Examining my URL, you'll find I've got myself a UMN account. Its an alumni account, but my student account is sstill good through the end of next week. I've received exactly no notification that napster use was prohibited. You wouldn't happen to have an email or a URL from OIT, NTS, or Mark, would you?
Exactly.
--
"What do you want me to do? Whack a guy? Off a guy? Whack off a guy? Cause I'm married."
What everyone doesn't get is that sharing mp3s is not really illegal. Those morons just say so, but if they can't get Napster and they didn't arrest us for copying tapes years ago, they don't have a case against us now. I think something is cool, I share it. It is just like inviting those people over to my house and playing the music for them, or letting a friend borrow my CD. The RIAA just has to face the fact that life is tough and we don't need them anymore. I will go to the concerts of the bands I like and they will get their money...and if they sold a CD for a reasonable price, I would certainly support them that way. I am not scared at all...download my mp3s!!!! Bigredlinux
the word you're looking for is civil disobedience.
Whe one person breaks the law it's a crime.
When millions do it, it's civil disobedience.
But sometimes just one person can get the ball rolling. See: Rosa Parks.
========================
63,000 bugs in the code, 63,000 bugs,
ya get 1 whacked with a service pack,
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
Perhaps I'm being silly here, but personally if somebody asked me to block a service, I would say no not because I am interested or wish to become involved in the political and freedom issues for my users... I would not block it because it would mean having to put an extra rule on my distribution layer networks which could hurt the performance. Who cares about restrictions of freedom of speech, when freedom of packets is at stake here? Increased latency! Lower throughput! DISGUSTING!
Actually, it turns out that only a fairly small percentage of college students go into the IT industry.
Trees can't go dancing
So do them a big favor
Pretend dancing stinks!
...from www.betanews.com Senator Hatch Disapproves of Government Stance on Napster Tuesday - 5:36 PM ET In what may be a surprising announcement to some, if not all persons in the United States, reknown Senator Orrin Hatch has stated publicly that he refuses to endorse the DOJ stance on Napster. Acording to the Newsbytes report, Senator Hatch sent a letter this week to the federal district appeals court expressing his distaste for the way things are going, saying "Given the importance of the issues to be decided, I think it important that the Court be under no misapprehension that the brief (filed by the Justice Department's Civil Division and two other agencies) necessarily expresses the views of the Congress in this matter." The DOJ quickly declined to comment on the matter.
Please forgive me if this seems a little off-topic, but Im sick of hearing so many people buy into crap without researching both sides of an issue.
There are some really good articles in this month's Wired about the whole peer-2-peer developments, and they focus on the Napster debate. There is one in particular, the author's name escapes me at the moment, but he IS a musician, who argues why Napster is a great thing for musicians. He argues that in the long run, Napster could be a more moral way of distributing music and reimbursing the creators than the RIAA...
Another article is an interview with the lead Napster lawyer (the guy who took on M$ for the government) and after reading that, I dont think the RIAA has much of a chance.
No, I do not work for Wired :) but this month's issue is a must-read on this topic.
The ivory tower has never had to reach so h
the DMCA!! Man, It seems that the DMCA is involved in half of the slashdot articles these days. And it keeps getting better and better.
King, the attorny representing metallica claims, that:
the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, requires that ISP's take reasonable steps to put an end to copyright violations which they are made aware of by the copyright holder.
You just think the DMCA is harmful here because King is lying through his teeth. While the DMCA includes some heinous provisions about bypassing access control devices, it also grants a fairly broad immunity to ISPs against copyright infringement. Universities act as ISPs for their students. While ISPs must stop specific infringements they are made aware of, you can't just say that some unidentified users might be infringing some unindentified copyright. Unless King has been smoking some bad crack, this can't seriously be his legal strategy. I'm sure he just said that for the reporter.
So he says if we want to hang ourselves we're more than welcome to.
Nice to see a step in the direction of individual responsibility for once.
The Divine Creatrix in a Mortal Shell that stays Crunchy in Milk
The House Between - Original Sci-Fi Series
UCLA is one of the top 3 competetive public universities out there. I can't IMAGINE UCLA having problems recruiting anyone to their school.
If a school want's to block Napster access only for the reasons of bandwidth, then fine. But until the RIAA has the balls to try and make a major ISP block Napster, then they should just keep their pants on.
--I assume full responsibility for my actions, except the ones that are someone else's fault.
No, I'm at Stevens Tech. RIT... you wouldn't happen to know Alex Golden (from Everyone) would you? We're trying to go from dual T1s to something that has 15 Mbit capacity, I have no idea what it's called. We have an advanced network lab funded by at&t, so I have no idea why we don't have faster. The new pipe is being hindered by Bell Atlantic's (now Verizon) refusal to do anything until we sign an agreement that says they can shut us off instantly if the students are suspected of illegal activities. Needless to say the college admin is saying "fuck off"
I like the innocent before guilty thing, I keep forgetting that one, and it disturbs me that I do.
Napster in general annoys me because Napster is allowed on my campus, but Starcraft isn't. Diablo II is allowed, but Starcraft isn't. The entire campus playing Brood War wouldn't take up as much bandwidth as a dozen people d/ling mp3z. I just don't understand it.
--
Peace,
Lord Omlette
ICQ# 77863057
[o]_O
The Napster computer program allows for the sharing of MP3 files, including digital song files, between users. According to King's letter to Duke, "it is now estimated that more than 20 million users regularly commit copyright infringements through Napster by downloading or uploading copyrighted material, without consent of owners. Although Napster euphemistically refers to this activity as 'file sharing,' there is little doubt that this 'sharing' is piracy on a massive scale."
If 20 million people are violating a non-violent law, doesn't that imply that the law is utterly unenforcable and that the will of the people have spoken out against the law?
It's like a massive case of civil disobedience.
I think that our morals and ethics should be based upon those of our leaders.
Conspiracy theories are all well and good, but it assumes malice, prescience and intelligence on the part of the conspirators.
The malice I will give you, but prescience and intelligence are manifestly absent. These dudes couldn't find their @sses with both hands! Agent-provocateur conspiracies can also seriously backfire.
I have heard rumors that the way ndsu blocks napster is by looking for a certain packet sig, the napster seach protocol, and then zeroing out
the payload of those packets. No need to block ports or ip's, If you can't search for or index your songs, then you can't dl/host any. It does not bother me at all, I have my home connection for downloading illegal music.
The Harvard article cites the DMCA as a possible means of forcing the University to comply. This is because of the clause making ISPs responsible for copyright violations if they refuse to take them down when notified.
IMHO, reading this clause as requiring Universities to block access to Napster strikes me as clearly being a prior restraint on free speech. Hopefully the first ammendment still means enough for this to be an unconstitutional interpretation.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
the net admins, as soon as they start blocking one thing, instantly become responsible for all of the activity on their networks. I'll guarantee there aren't many college net admins who'd want to track down all of the pr0n copyright violations, illegal software pirating, napster use, etc etc etc.... they're busy enough with students who don't know the first thing about networking.
i was on the residential network support team at school, and believe me, we were up to our ears in crummy 3com windows drivers, shitty old hardware (yes we did support windows 3.1!) and students who didn't know how to install their NICs.
you mean nice to see them sticking up for the right to do illegal things if _you_ want to.
cheers
Sorry, didn't mean to imply you were for gun control. It's just that your argument was so easily and clearly extended to gun control I just had to spout off. :)
After re-reading, I can see how you thought my comments were directed at you, however, I had _INTENDED_ for it to be an arguemnet in the wild, extending your argument for Napster.
Again, sorry, I didn't intened to direct my comments at you.
Merde, il pleut encore!
My ADSL link peaks out at around 2Mb/sec, incomming. It cost me all of $75/month. (yeah, OK, I'm spoiled). Perhaps the University should just lease itself a handfull of ADSL links. (granted, the price that I get is a gift compared to most of what I've seen advertised elsewhere, but -- even so -- bandwidth is getting pretty CHEAP these days.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
Milwaukee School of Engineering bans Napster, and they only have 2000 students, with
I didn't even ask why, although the the 100 GB or so of MP3s available from students sharing their files on their Windoze machines kinda makes Napster pointless for a lot of songs...
you guys are both loosers. Its really f-ing simple. Me buy piece of shit. Me realize it is a piece of shit. Me leave it on my friend's front lawn. Ohhh "Intellectual Property transfer". If I use a bucket to shovel the shit then maybe its "Copyight violation". Oooh! Grow up and forget about the law. Take responsibility for your own actions, dumbasses.
Take this personaility test.
Not that banning access to napster would slow college students down all that much. As long as you can share files, you can share music, and university networks are geared toward sharing files.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Now they can't shut down Napster completely, they are sending letters to large universities (whose campuses, let's face it, are usually big warez networks) trying to let them shut it down.
Because, if the large universities ban napster, many large nodes of the Napster network are gone. It might then well be a network of slow dialup connections and cable-modems (which generally have low upstreams), hence making the network uninteresting because it is too slow.
Which is not going to work, hopefully, since they will need to sue the actual users, which is not the university itself.
Every expression is true, for a given value of 'true'
Unfortunately you can't stop it. Technically jaywalking is against the law in the US however just try and enforce it. You just cannot. As long as music is able to be converted into sonic pulses it can be copied and distributed in any fashion that the person wishes.
Freedoms and rights are the defacto condition of all men. The social contract hasn't been ammended to allow for the criminalizing of freely using music.
Respond to s
Though I suppose downloading Ricky Martin mp3's using Napster is quicker and cheaper than flying to Miami.
Though it's still nice to think it's a matter of them backing "free speech" by letting kids steal music. :)
________
How is this far off from ...
It simply prevents anybody else from copying somebody elses work, and THEN distributing and/or performing it in public.
Pretty far off. By attempting to copyright and/or patent something, you are attempting to deny others access to it. By copying or performing something publicly, you are not denying others their ability to do the same.
You may not agree with copyright law and find IP law "draconian", but the law is the law ... if you want to change it, change it through the proper channels, don't advocate the blatant violation of it.
There is a long tradition, especially in this country, of ignoring and blatantly violating bad and unfair laws. It helps bring the issue to public attention and put a spotlight on those involved. It often helps the public to understand why something is not right. Like when a woman is arrested because she won't sit in the back of the bus. It brings the absurdity out in the open where it can be seen by all. That's how change gets accomplished when you don't have millions of dollars to buy the attention and favor of the government.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
That's *exactly* what they want you to think!
Oh I know! I recognize this one! This is argument by confusing bullshit!
Let me explain it once again. REAL slowly this time:
Me click slashdot. Me click article with word "University" and "Napster". in it. Me immediately post explaining that I have been shitting on my friends front lawn for at least two years. OK now here is the difficult part: This is "exactly the same as Napster". File sharing OR Shit sharing? Copyrighted genetic materal, in biotech terms for you.
Did that clear it up for you?
Take this personaility test.
King, the attorny representing metallica claims, that:
Imaging forcing an university to actively censor its incoming mail or incoming telephone calls, just in case there is copyrighted material there.I dunno. Maybe this is a good thing. The more crap like this the DMCA can pull off, the more institution are going to stand up against it. On the downside, probably the main reason that they are against this, is that they are afraid that once they start blocking Napster, they might as well take on extra staff to block all the other web site which they will be asked to take down. Maybe this is a nice service that Mattel can start offering to ISP and Universities!
sander.
I read the article and cannot believe the gall of that King. A quote:
"I'm disappointed in the attitude [the universities] have taken, which is 'we don't know anything, we don't have any responsibility unless we know anything, tell us who's infringing and then we'll take decisive steps,' " King said.
King, I hope you read this, however unlikely you are to, but it is not the Universities responsibility to police your so-called copyrights. They should not have to pay for the network administration it would take to block napster (not that it'd cost much, but they don't owe a dime, and it's the principle of the thing).
How do you figure your statement to be true? It seems to me that they are doing a perfect job of setting the bait and now reeling in the fish. Where is the lack of intelligence? They know what their interests are and they are defending them.
They aren't. If the RIAA goons show up with a court order due to piracy, the university will do nothing to help. But, amazingly enough Napster has legitimate uses too.
- I don't use Napster; and besides I haven't bought a music CD in years. (the radio is enough for me... *shrug*)
- Copyright infrigement is illegal even if you think current copyright laws are brain-damaged
Be that as it may, I am very happy to hear about the stance against banning access to Napster by the aforementioned institutions.Asking ISPs or Universities (or other) to disallow access to Napster is akin to charging the owner of a jewellery store as an accessory to a robbery because, "they display attractive, desireable objects in full public view thereby promoting theft"; or that someone is at fault because, "they dress seductively so they must want to be raped."
F U NE X N M? Son: "Dad... How do you spell 'hourly'?" Dad: "0 * * * *"
can you explain a bit further the 'right' to pirate music?
jon
-- http://www.cerastes.org
Well, I am glad that at least SOME of the major universities are willing to stand up and not cower.... One of my friends is attending FSU and they banned napster.. We got into a heated debate about whether the University is responsible or not. He said yes, I said no. I think that the students should be able to access anything they want online, however if they break the law and get caught they are going to get in trouble, the university isn't going to stand up and protect them. Sheltering your students from the outside world and blocking access to protocols and sites on the net is censorship...
It reminds me of the argument that if you make something forbidden people will want to do more, however if it's commonplace and open, less people are likely to do it or abuse it.
[Something witty and intelligent should have appeared here.]
{Traicovn}
Well people must think they are getting theif moneys worth otherwise cd sales would have dropped. If people are willing to pay $18 for a cd then the companies will gladly charge it. If people stopped buying cds you can bet they would cut the prices to get people back.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
I agree! Guilty until proven innocent, that's what I say!
Why is this troll modded up? I think the moderators are in the pay of the RIAA!
-- IANAEG - I am not an elder god.
My problem with blocking ports napster or anything else for that matter what i sstopping them from changing ports or better yet changing to a port that they do not want to block such as FTP HTTP Telnet DNS. Blocking will only cause them to find another way around the problem.
See the article in Berkeley's Daily Cal rag. Sounds like they're just following the precedent set by the original announcements from MIT, etc.
// zyqqh
Ah, their music's cool too. ;-P
Sure... I'll pass out fake coins that work in vending machines. You can do something illegal with them if _you_ want to.
Maybe the college radio stations at the 11 universities can program a "Rock Block" or "Album Side" weekend and play all the Metallica and Dr. Dre music anyone could ever want to hear... or record. This would assure both artists that those who wanted their music wouldn't use Napster to get it. Maybe that would make them happy. Not likely. -pjc
Broadcasting LIVE from a Bonus Room Over the Gara
It's not about stealing music. It's about the medium. When you spend time in an institution (in this case University) wouldn't you want your ability to communicate to be unencumbered? Do you want someone snooping on your line or denying you the ability to make a phone call because 99% of phone scams happen over the phone?
Was I stealing from The Smashing Pumpkins when I downloaded the tracks from Machina II-Friends and Enemies of Modern Music? Nope. The band and the people they designated allowed for it's release and what better place then Napster? They got the shaft from their label and could not release the music they wanted to via conventional means.
That's the reason I signed up for Napster days ago. That's the reason services like Napster should stay. In my mind it's not the intentions of the creators that count or the way the service is used. Otherwise them Beta & VHS guys should be jailed for the potential and the creators of USENET for the flood of binaries they never foresaw. Oh and lets not forget MS for allowing the AVI format to be extended by a few guys to make DIVX.
Bottom line. The medium should be protected the infringers should not. pingmeep
The reason behind metallicas hate for napster is because it was used to distribute some of their songs before they are officially relased. Its not about money, its about controlling THEIR music on THEIR terms.
Lets say you are working on some cool invention scheduled to be released next month. I break in and steal the plans and start making copies of your design. I bet you would be pretty pissed off to. But then again information wants to be free.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
<aside>
Why doesn't the most Wired Univ list ever cover off-campus pipe size (per student)?
</aside>
Regardless of how much you have (and we have an OC3) the best solution is not to say you can't use tool X -- that's a pointless cat-n-mouse circe -- if you use too much bandwidth here you get your bandwidth drastically limited at the border router.
It's a simple matter of fairness.
And, of course, if you do something that attracts packs of rabid laywers, that was your choice, and you pay the piper.
Shut up, be happy. The conveniences you demanded are now mandatory. -- Jello Biafra
Saying that it is the responsability of the university to prevent the use of Napster (which, as of last ruling, is not illegal) would be to indicate that it is the responsability of all ISPs to prevent napster packets from flowing on their networks. Once they convince AOL, UUNET, SPRINT, and all the other backbone providers to stop Napster packets, then the schools should follow suit.
The university holds LITTLE responsibilty for the students actions. If a student breaks into a pawn shop and steals a laptop, the university isn't responsable just because the student rode the school's bus to and from the heist. The connection that the school provides to the internet is a service. They have policies concerning their use which place the results of improper use right back on the student.
If someone could come along and claim the university is culpable for the student's use of a school service...
-Adam
The other side of this page contains the answers to everything you've ever wanted to know.
If they can make ISP's and Universities ban access to Napster because of the copyright violation going on, how long will it be before some software company, gets the same done for IRC, due to their software was illegally transfered over IRC, or they get a ban on NNTP, etc. I know there is a big difference in IRC, NNTP, etc and Napster becuase they weren't designed for the purpose of sharing files, but it happens, all the time.
Universitys who ban Napster will do so becouse of the bandwith it takes up and not from a legal notice.
Those who have not allready banned Napster will refuse to do so sence it dose not present a technical problem to them.
Universitys and Collages long ago "got it" in the legal harrasment department.
The whole idea of banning a peace of technology is fundementally banning intelegence and creativity. It is banning hard work. It is banning intelect.
That is something that a place of learning can not give in to. They need not understand Napster they need only realise someone is using legal powers to do something far worse than banning books.
I don't actually exist.
My University (University of Colorado at Boulder) has received a letter from Mr. King requesting that the Napster service be blocked. My school hasn't taken a side yet, however our Chancelor did say that he was open to ideas and suggestions about what to do. I'm glad that universities are taking a stand against this.
Since I suspect the answer is that at least some of these institutions do block porn, I have to wonder how much they can really be said to be standing up for 'online freedom' at all. They're not standing up for freedom unless they stand up for all freedoms.
Last school year, Bucknell University did block students from using Napster after realizing that the file-sharing program represented at least 40% of all network traffic and resulted in a total saturation of our T-3 at the peak of Napster's popularity here on campus. Since the staff and administrators at Bucknell care a great deal about their students' welfare, they worked hard to provide a legal alternative that didn't saturate our network.
Their final solution was entirely free (i.e. Bucknell paid $0.00); it involved setting up an iBeam server and coordinating with content provider Launch.com so that anyone Bucknellians can listen to a seemingly infinite amount of legal music beamed off of a dish on top of the campus' Computer Center.
______________________________
Eric Krout
If you celebrate Xmas, befriend me (538
Why am I not surprised?
The more I read Slashdot the more I wish I wasn't a geek. Where can I resign my membership?
mr.nobody
--Don't you wanna go where nobody knows your name?
Here are St. Cloud State University in MN Napster was banned last spring when the university cited bandwidth concerns.
...and I'm not sure we should trust this Kyle Sagan either.
But as a new freshmen hopping on the internet it worked perfectly, I noticed no speed problems, or no blocked access.
Maybe the campus reconsidered it's decision, I wouldn't know...
> keeping them longer then 24 hours if
> you do not own the source media is.
Incorrect.
Distributing them and/or aquiring them through unaproved channels (like napster usually) is what is illegal. NOT POSSESSION.
Not as far as I know. Possession of property gained through illegal means results in the confiscation of that property. If you go to a pawn shop and unknowingly buy a stolen car stereo, and the police find the guy who stole it and trace it through the pawn shop to you (and they will), you lose your stereo. Your only recourse in that situation is to get a refund from the shop owner. He could theoretically sue the original thief for the price he bought it for, but in practice pawnbrokers eat the cost of stolen property that's traced.
Like it or not, current US law treats intellectual property as property, with penalties for theft, illegal use, etc.
In fact, once you have a copy, Fair Use applies. This means you may use it. (In fact I think this is the most glaring error in software. Copyright was only ever intended to give a monopoly on copying and distribution NOT use. In fact, the concept of "fair use" gives you directly the legal right to use it, once you have a copy).
Fair use may apply in any situation. But invoking fair use depends on you having a legal means of using that IP. See below...
You may not remember but several months back, there was an article where someone was getting sued over MP3 distribution (napster case or was it another - been so many at this point) and I remember the quote clearly: "Lawyers on both sides of the case agree that fair use would apply, regardless of the legality of the distribution medium"
This sounds like the MP3.com case. In that case, the issue was my.mp3.com, which allows you to stream MP3s off the site of CDs you have had in your physical possession. In that case, the technicality of copyright law means even if the user is not infringing on copyright, MP3.com was, by the very nature of the service provided: they were making money from distribution of musical works without a license.
If I own the CD, fair-use doctrine says it's OK for me to possess or listen to MP3s of the tracks on it, no matter how I acquire them, but that only applies if I have an implied license to that IP (which I do in that case because I own the CD). If I don't own the CD or some other legally-acquired form of the work, I have no rights, fair-use or otherwise, to possess or use those MP3s. And even if it's OK for me to buy the rips, it's not OK for someone else to make money off providing them to me as my.mp3.com did.
A complication in the MP3.com case is that despite some effort to make sure that users really did possess the CDs they were listening to, the practicality was that, as another Slashdot poster said after the judgement, "My CD collection just became the union of the set of all the CD collections of me and my friends." So distribution aside, they were still gonna get busted.
-- Old Man Kensey
Just off the top of my head but:
IIRC, ISP's can't be held responcible for what their users download through their network and for most students their school's network pretty much is their only connection to the net. So could schools say that they are ISPs and there for be safe from being sued?
-Fyre
- Apple Computer......proudly going out of business for over twenty years.
This seems to be a re-occuring theme in the legal system. People don't care who they sue and don't really know who is responsible but they just point the finger at everyone. Hoping that they will hit the bulls eye at least once or twice. We just watch to see who is left standing to find out who wins in the end.
"Howard E. King, the attorney representing Dr. Dre and Metallica", states, "We're going to try to keep a dialogue with these universities, maybe point them to some authority that they've ignored or are not aware of,"
You mean make up something that some judge might believe? Or lets try to show the Universities that they are responsible for their facutly, staff, and students actions. Are we really searching for who is liable? Or just blindly shooting in the dark at anything we can hit?
"that tells them they have a higher responsibility than just putting their head in their sand,"
they aren't putting their head in the sand. They are refusing to submit to your demands. Blindly shooting in the dark?
Who do you think will be left standing?
RIAA, Metallica, et al should know by now that to gain influence in academic quarters you have to be a donor. Having your legal gnome knock on the door and utter, "Cease & Desist," carries more weight if you've already got a waxy buildup of lipstick on your a$$ from their foundation office.
Bill Gates has learned this the hard way, but not having already purchased his fair share of government.
Silly to have all that money and not own a few people...
It's all true! ±5%
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Our institutions are not sticking up for online piracy, and i'm sure you don't truly believe that. In fact, the institutions aren't sticking of for anything other than a constitutional right to privacy. That's PRIVACY not PIRACY.
I'm not saying that I am in disagreement, on the contrary. I believe that the release of free music cuts out the middle man. David Bowie knows it, Smashing Pumpkins know it. According to Wired Magazine, CD sales have risen about 12% in the past three years. MP3s started catching on then -- napster is just the fall guy, of sorts.
What the RIAA doesn't want you to know is that it is not the intellectual property that they are worried about. It is the middle man. Who are the middle men in this industry? The Recording and distribution companies -- the members of RIAA. Guess what? It's their cash flow their worried about. Musicians (contrary to popular belief) don't make that much useing these guys as a middle man. BUT, if they can eliminate the middle man and make just as much money (if not more), then they will be a happier bunch of musicians.
Metallica is the exception -- they are a rare case that the artists DO make a lot of money from the agencies. But there are always exceptions.
My university blocked Napster last winter due to problems with bandwidth, but they did mention questions about the possible "illegality of the service". Most students simply downloaded Napigator and continued to use Napster, while others now use Gnutella or Scour Exchange.
The university has not attempted to block or restrict the use of any other file sharing applications (although in some cases, ie Gnutella, this is impossible). They have increased our weekly and daily allotment of bandwidth, and people are downloading merrily away.
Not only do students use file sharing software, but there is also a large campus network, where students have MP3s for the asking.
Apparently, bandwidth is not as much of an issue as the university claimed it was, since people are actually downloading more. Note that the only banned service is the one being sued by the RIAA, and the fine folks from campus resnet have made no attempt to block anything else.
I know where I stand on the Napster/MP3 issue. I just don't know where my university does.
KAR
"The future belongs to those who can look at a challenge and see an opportunity."
This is done all the time. They are often called tokens. If you use them in a machine that is intended to recieve actual currency, then you are the one breaking the law. Handing out tokens is not illegal.
Just think once in a while.
Anybody know if UWM has made a decision regarding the c&d request they received?
I don't want knowledge. I want certainty. - Law, David Bowie
My school blocks Napster to all computers but one - it saves a ton of bandwidth and since you can share files from SMB shares, the whole network's on Napster. If you want an MP3, you sit down at the terminal, save it and copy it from your PC.
Simple and not that horribly bad.
All browsers' default homepage should read: Don't Panic...
Ok, obviously the universities aren't required to police the online activities of their students, but how the hell do you justify pirating music (not the only napster use, i know that, now hush) as "academic freedom" and "access to information"? Coming from a school where most of the classes require some (if not all) work to be done on or based on the web, knowing I'm paying $30k and I'm not gonna be able to do my homework because a bunch of slackers who won't be there next semester because they're d/ling music truly pisses me off.
Most of these uni kids are on high speed connections right? How many of the snot-nosed brats do you think are the bastards who wait until you're at 90% and then cut you off? ^^;;
--
Peace,
Lord Omlette
ICQ# 77863057
[o]_O
It's the users' fault for copyright infringement, not the protocol's.
--
The court opinion stated that items should not be banned as long as "the product is widely used for legitimate, unobjectionable purposes." How exactly you come to the conclusion that this implies that the Supreme Court of the United States is saying that a tool should be available to the public "as long as it is possible to use it in a legal way, regardless of the actual uses..." is beyond me.
That simply is not what the opinion says. In order for Napster to use this argument and refer to this opinion from the Supremes, Napster would need to show not only that the technology can be used in a legitimate manner (as you suggested), but also Napter would need to show that the majority of the actual physical use of the technology is legitimate.
The real problem here, is that Napster can not prove that. While it is true that there are legitimate uses for Napster like technologies, any technology like this in a college atmosphere will be abused. A simple poll in many college campuses will give the RIAA plenty to discredit any argument Napster makes such as this.
As often is the case, the technology itself is not illegal, the use of the technology is.
This is where I am against the RIAA's use of the court system. Instead of protecting their property using the laws that exist, they are lobbying for a bigger blanket to allow them to "protect" themselves easier.
Instead of sueing 300,000 Napster users, Metallica thinks it would be easier to sue the access providers. Knock out 100,000+ law suits in one case, make big bucks and move on. And don't forget, Metallica is not the driving force here, simply the face to the movement. The lawyers are the ones that want those big checks...
Those universities' decisions not to block napster had had a lot to do with protecting online freedom, but it might also have something to do with those 80 gig untra scsi2's that the Deans of some of those universities just bought. As well as the extra data lines into their offices. :p
Opportunities multiply as they are seized. --Sun-Tzu
The univeristy should be charging those who have access for personal use for the amount of traffic they generate at the gateway.
In other words, the cost to students should reflect the cost to the university.
This is basic economics.
When has apple ever charged money for a point release? Or well, 7.5 and 8.5, but those were both drastic changes over 7.1 and 8.1. It's not like you have to but OS9 and OS9.0.4... the 0.4 update is free, and apple updated the CD they sell to include the latest updates so people don't have to go download them...
Past that... you didn't have to pay for any version of the Mac OS before System 7 arrived. Then you paid for 7, 7.1 7.5, and 8. not for 8.1, then for 8.5, not for 8.6, then for 9, not for 9.0.4...
It's not an aweful deal...
Napster can distribute ANY MP3, not just songs by RIAA distributed artists. There are works by any number of artists without recording contracts available via napster et. al. If the owner of a copyrighted work consents to distribution via a mechanisim such as napster or the work is in the public domain, distribution of that work IS LEGAL. This would seem to meet the requirments of the "non-infringing uses" test used by the Supreme Court in the BETAMAX case.
Frankly I doubt so called "piracy" has much to do with the RIAA suing Diamond, MP3.com, Napster, etc. I believe the recording industry is TERRIFIED they may, in the long run, become nothing more than unecessary middlemen.
Happy Fun Ball is for external use only.
Farley grew up on Madison, attended Edgewood College, not UW.
Ben Masel: 51,282 votes for US Senate in the Wisconsin Democratic Primary
Ex post facto, it is easy to postulate conspiracies. And you cannot disprove intelligence based on them.
You have to look at other RIAA actions to measure intelligence. If they were intelligent, they would have beaten Napster to the punch. Some of their other blunders [work for hire legislation] are also indicators.
Evan - needs to hit preview before submitting
The University of Minnesota is threatening all students with revocation of internet access if 'caught' using napster. Whether they actively seek napster users, or just wait until their habit is out of control I haven't quite figured out. I haven't had my access banned yet, so I don't think they are doing either!
The local college radio station (I'm not sure of the URL, I think it's www.vtc.net, my work won't let me access the site), they are completely automated.
They download mp3s, people place requests by looking at the playlists to see what mp3's they have, and then request them, it takes a few minutes, but your song will be played on the radio and on the webcast.
I'm just curious, but what can happen to them?
Oh, just like the CIA and other TLAs who want you to underestimate their capabilities. The problem is, they're self-fulfilling! [Fall of Communism]