Slashdot Mirror
Napster Back in Court
Wakko Warner writes "According to this article, Napster lawyers (and RIAA lawyers) were grilled today by appellate judges. What's more interesting, though, is that, to appease the RIAA, Napster may institute a subscription-based service.
Would you pay $4.95 a month to use Napster?
"
If they let me pay by the day/week/month/year, then maybe. I can't say that I would want to fork out the 60 some bucks that it would take for an entire year (I didn't spend that much on cd's before napster came along).
Now, if I could buy a weeks worth of access for $3.00, then I probably would (and saturate my pipe for as long as possible).
I don't think the subscription thing will fly. If the courts say that they have to pay royalties, then they will have to charge per download, and that can get expensive...
Joseph W. Breu
They claim they'd make $500m by charging $5/month, but that's assuming that everyone continues using their service. I really doubt I would. Not that $5 is too much really, I just don't want to subscribe. However, I would be much more likely to pay a few cents per download. Even though it would add up quickly and save me no money over the subscription-based service, at least I know what I'm paying for and can decide on a per-song basis. Maybe it's all in my head, but I'd find micropayments much more appealing. What does everyone else think?
Only in Canada. In the US, regular CDRs are not taxed, while the music-specific ones are. I don't know what dumbass came up with musicCDRs, but only an idiot would pay for one when the regular CDRs are cheaper by as much as dollars per disc.
Here's my DeCSS mirror, where's yours?
Well, if the RIAA wants money for it, aren't they then condoning it, meaning you can pay your 4.95 and download all you want without getting in trouble? If they want money, then that obviously would be for copyrighted material, not for the indie stuff which the have no rights to, right? That's how I would take it.
Any sort of subscription model for Napster will fail, both because of the lack of a quality guarantee, and because, if they aren't kicking some of that subscription back to people sharing their files online, people won't put their music up to trade. You can either sell music or trade music - you can't sell trading music.
-Cyclopatra-
"We can't all, and some of us don't." -- Eeyore
hey now, how do you know that I didn't download my music to my DAT tape?
ok then your [sic] infringing on my copyright! Could you as [sic] me next time before STEALING my comments for your own?
Come on, man, just last week I pulled out my $9.95 Casio and set it to "Rock Beat" and did a rap of "The Real Slim Shady". I forgot most of the lyrics, but it's still pretty good. I wanted to edit out the part where my mom told me to turn it down because she was on the phone, but I accidentally taped eighteen seconds of ABBA in the middle right after she stopped talking instead. Anyway, it's got to be worth at least $5 to someone.
"Beware he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he deems himself your master."
Emusic.com does this and I assume they are making money. $10/month download whatever you want, I guess the banner ads are paying decent money or something. Great deal, but I do have my wonders about the profitablity. Until then I'll just keep downloading my music from them legally. Beats the hell out of dealing with napster and partial songs, disconnects, and slow downloads
If I'm going to pay for a service, I'm going to expect quality. (i.e. non of the above should ever happen.)
In order to assure this, Napster, RIAA, or whoever is going to have to set up servers distributing MP3s. Not gonna happen... And besides that, it defeats the entire purpose of peer-to-peer. I'm not going to pay just so I can share files with random, unsolicited people. Why would anybody else??
If they can't make any quality garauntees they're just gonna piss some people off...
You do realize you already do so. You are paying someone for your internet connection. Even if you think its free, your school is providing it from your tuition.
With netzero and others, you are selling your soul. So what is so unusual about paying to get on another network? Back in the days of BBS's, you did it to. I think what hurts the most is that it was once free and will be subscription based if this fee comes into play.
---
-
ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
It's kind of funny. I've been following the Napster debate on slashdot since it started many months ago. And everytime something about Napster or one of these other file sharing programs was posted a whole bunch of supporters said they would be happy to pay 50 cents or so for a single of a band they wanted. Now that napster has said they are going to charge 4.95 for downloading feature, what happens? A bunch of you say I'd rather go to another sesrvice. Now either you like the Napster service for what it offers, or you just wanted something for nothing. So either swallow your pride and if Napster cuts a deal with the RIAA continue to use it or realize you are hypocrites and jsut say what you truly want and thats anthing you can get for free. Yes I know this is probably flame bait, but I'll deal with that.
The other thing that makes the 4.95 a month proposal pointless is that Napster users could just get Napigator and switch to OpenNap.
I think the RIAA isn't interested in the proposal mainly because they want to extend their control and total ownership of music distribution into the online space... but also because they know that it would be pointless. The cat is already out of the bag.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
"HTML needs a rant tag" - Alan Cox
What is Napster paying for? They do not distribute music, Napster just provides information about who has what.
What would that mean exactly for users? Does this mean if you are a Napster subscriber, it's legal for you to put any music up for sharing on Napster if you pay the fee? Napster users didn't sign anything and aren't part of the lawsuit, how can it suddenly be OK for them to share?
If it's not legal under the proposed system for users to distribute all the files they like, then again I ask - what is the $4.95/mo for?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
If Napster goes subscription, they're not getting any cash from me- with bandwidth backing me I have my collection to the point where it will never get stale... and if Napster goes away, I'll just do what I've always done before it was even a conceptual wet dream- hit the FTP servers. The recording industry might kill Napster, but they can't stop a million guys with broadband and FTP server software from sharing their collections.
You can see the arguments for yourself here (in RealMedia format) on Cspan.org.
well we can dream :)~~, but hamsap references aside...
In the story the Dutch boy saved the village, it makes more sense if you reverse it.
The RIAA are trying to stop the leak into thier territory, but behind the wall there is a whole ocean of file sharing going on, they can't see over the wall, they just stick their fingers in what they can see.
Umm ok that didn't make much sense after all, made much more sense in my head....
Ho Hum
~ppppppppö
Make up some incredibly trivial "content protection" scheme designed to keep out RIAA, lawyers, or anyone else who might give them trouble, then if those people get in, sue on the basis that they broke the "content protection" mechanism.
:)
This sig is false.
Why bother? Just use one of the many free alternatives.
OK, let me get this straight. They want me to pay $5/month for the privilege of sharing files. I sincerely doubt they're giving any license to any music, either. So it's more along the lines of $5/month to share files and have every transaction tagged with with username and personal information.
On the other hand, if someone would offer me on-demand music, off a centralized server so I can get more than just the currently popular song off of each album, and I was licensed to play the music, I'd probably be willing to spend more on the order of $50/month.
yes sir i have. not to mention speaking personally to many professinal musicians and trying to sway their opinion away from the mal-formed opinions spit down at them from their record labels. also, ive been writing numerous posts such as this one on various web sites, calling in to radio shows , and preaching to anybody who'll listen.....
"sex on tv is bad, you might fall off..."
I lost my concept of community when my community lost all concept of me.
>$1 per file for a high quality mp3 direct from the label/distributor. I will pay for the added value of getting a high quality mp3.
You do realize that this would cost you more than simply buying the CD, and would leave you without the art, right?
Of course, it would buy you conveneince. But at such a high price, I don't know if it would be worth it to anyone else.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
My MP3 collection is huge (~16Gig), but it is not nearly as convenient as my CD collection, nor is the quality the same. Add to that the fact that it takes considerable time and effort to collect from Napster and I'd argue that purchased CD's have a greater intrinsic value than Napster downloads.
That may change as time goes by and we have more products that make MP3 collections more useful. But for now the value of MP3s is somewhat limited. My MP3s give me exposure to music that I would not generally buy, and allows me to screen my CD purchases so I never buy a CD I don't love. That is valuable to me, but I'm not sure if I would go for monthly flat rates, or what dollar value I would go for. I'd have to ponder that.
People are speaking with their wallets at Fairtunes and sending their money directly to the artist and cutting out the record labels. I totally agree that we need more action and less whining.
Matt.
Never foret OpenNap
Yes I can not spell...Wait....for a second there I almost cared.
Would you really pay 60 dollars to use Windows?
:)
Though these are different things in perspective, they are similar in some ways. One of them being that while a free operating system with similar features, and in many cases, more robust features is available, there will be those that don't "get it from a friend" and purchase it. Likewise there will be those that pay for Napster - me personally? No, I'll find a free alternative and one that spits in the face of communist musician whoring
It's monday and I'm stupid, moderate this appropriately!
hmmmm...sounds familiar....oh! Offspring!
I'm not going to pay $4.95 so that other people that i don't know can steal my bandwith... if napster intends on charging for their service, their service better become more than just a listing of other peoples files... right now it's based on sharing, i get free mp3's if other people let me get mp3's from them... however if i'm going to have to pay for it, napster had better post the mp3's on their servers, and actually provide more of a service than just listing other peoples archieves.. if 20 million users start paying $4.95 a month, their is going to be a lot of money coming in.. more than enough for the RIAA and napster to split.. that's only every month too, draw it out to a year, and your talking about 1.2 billion, yes with a b, dollars gross profits..
dont_forget
There ain't no goddamned way I'll ever pay for music again. Certainly not until the RIAA cartel is broken up. Now, if my money actually went to the artists themselves instead of Sunset Boulevard, then I'd consider opening up my wallet. But I feel that music, like other forms of art and all forms of information, should be free. The RIAA may crush Napster or, if they were smart, cut a deal with them based upon the "if you can't beat em, join em" principle, but they'll never wipe out P2P MP3's. The revolution has begun, and it's not televised, it's on your computer.
You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one
-John Lennon
In my current financial situation, $4.95 is absolutely nothing for what Napster means to me. However, Napster's strength is in the number of its users. A subscription fee would put people off: some wouldn't wanna pay, some wouldn't feel like going through the registration process for something they hadn't tried before (in particularly lazy moods i won't do free registrations with emailed passwords), and some don't have credit cards. Therefore, I wouldn't be paying $4.95 for the current Napster, I'd be paying $4.95 for a severely limited Napster, which WOULDN'T be worth the money. And others would feel the same way, and the chicken, and the egg, etc.
grep -ri 'should work'
Seems to me that if Napster could argue that any type of file could be exchanged over the internet, not just music, then Napster would be no less a target for the RIAA then WorldCom or AT&T for providing bandwidth services.
Napster should flood their service with copies of DeCSS the dramatic MP3 reading and call it a code exchange system that accidentally let users share music.
But an interested in the precedent, in the event I decide to start a service rebroadcasting my video tapes of Alf
When I want to listen to real music I wind up the Victrola and put on some Enrico Carusoe.
--
Chief Frog Inspector
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
as much as we'd like to pretend, napster is _not_ under the GPL, and their fight is _not_ the same as Free Software's fight. while napster raises some interesting IP issues, they still want to make a lot of money with what they're doing, and for those looking to make napster into a shining cause of the New Internet, this was a train wreck waiting to happen.
Err, Red Hat and all the other distro makers are "under the GPL" but they still "want to make a lot of money with what they're doing". The difference is that while Linux is a great example of the power of the "Old" Internet--distributed programming and developer mailing lists and all that--Napster is indeed the quintessential example of one competing vision for the "New" Internet. (The other, of course, is an Internet in which only the big media companies have enough money to create/buy content, scare off most of their competition with lawsuits and choke off the rest through their control of the pipes into everyone's home.)
Now, of course, it can be argued that Napster has less of a right than Red Hat et. al. to make money off their insight, because whereas Red Hat provides tech support and reliability checks, and pays several programmers to write GPL'd software for the entire Linux base, Napster just provides an interface, some database servers, and, uh, pays for Limp Bizkit's promotional tour. Indeed, I have no problem paying for a distro but would strongly consider switching to a different peer-to-peer file network if Napster goes for-pay.
But that doesn't mean Napster's fight isn't worthwhile, and it doesn't make Napster's contribution any less revolutionary.
Even if people were willing to pay for the right to use Napster, who would get the money? I'm assuming it'd go straight to the RIAA. Of course, from there, they'd just screw the artists as usual, and keep the money for themselves. It would be interesting if this actually came to pass-then everyone could see the hypocrisy rampant in the RIAA.
Colin Winters
Of course! With the right amout of bandwidth, I could download more music than I could ever buy at retail for that kind of money. I just don't see how it would make financial sense...for the RIAA, not for me.
You can make a lot more than that selling live Metallica cds at shows
More like .35 a track. I'm losing the art??? Big f'ing deal. I never once bought a cd only b/c it looked neat.
A subscription-based version of napster, ever if all profits go directly to the artists, will not work.
Why? For simple reasons: would you pay Napster $4.95 to donate YOUR files, YOUR bandwidth, and YOUR system resources? I know that I sure wouldn't, even if I did have the bandwidth.
The whole success of napster is that anyone can jack in and out at any time, and that people with gigabytes of MP3s and a fat pipe can share their unused bandwidth with lesser users. There is no loss on their part. But, if you introduce a charge, a majority of these generous users would leave for a better, free alternative, for the very reason that if they were to continue with Napster, they would have to pay Napster, Inc. to provide a service for them.
If Napster acknowledges this and hosts their own files, they would be in even deeper legal trouble; their principal defence has been that they're only the middle-man. it's the users that share illegally-obtained content.
Consequently, any charge, no matter how small, would destroy Napster and the RIAA will be gloating over another victory.
Keep your steenking mits off my steenking buds, bud!!
Edith Keeler Must Die
Mabey this should be made a /. poll?
--I assume full responsibility for my actions, except the ones that are someone else's fault.
Why shouldn't anyone walk into McDonald's and grab 50 ketchup packets? After all, it's unlikely that anyone will try to stop you, and even if they do, nothing will happen.
... I don't have a problem paying for for something I want. In fact, I see it as a responsibility.
If Napster was the only music-sharing service available, you can bet that lots of people (you included, more than likely) would shell out five bucks for it. In fact, I bet a lot of people would anyway (if this happened to fly, which it almost certainly won't), because right now the alternatives aren't so great.
If the music is worth $5 to you, then why wouldn't you pay? Perhaps that's what I don't like about Napster etc
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
It solves the issue of the RIAA not getting any money from napster. That's the only issue they really want resolved.
Planning to be moderated ± 1: Bad Pun.
I'm boycotting. I'll never buy another CD from a label as long as the labels exist. Not for any reason. Unfortunatly most people just don't care. I told my gf what the RIAA was trying to do, and what they would really like to do (go down the same path DVDs have), and i asked her, knowing what they are attempting, would you still pay? She said yes...its sad, but i think that is the stance of most people.
Here Here! Seems like one of the big reasons that is knocked around for Napster and others of it's ilk is "there isn't any way for me to pay to get the music". Up pops a semi-workable idea for a for charge service and it becomes "no, wait. i really just wanted to get something for free." I don't care about the cost of CD's. If I like an artist, and they've got something I want to hear I'll buy it. However, if there is just one good cut I don't want to have buy the whole album, it would be nice to be able to easily get the one good piece all alone, and $5 a month to do that doesn't seem bad at all to filter through thousands of songs.
Never argue with a man carrying a water buffalo
To everyone stating that they will NOT pay for Napster: "Its $4.95 a month! I'd be more than willing to pay that for Napster services. Have we all become such freeloaders that we can't even shell out five bucks a month to use software someone else wrote, requires servers someone else paid for and maintains to give us access to music someone else wrote, played and produced. I think $4.95 would be quite a bargin considering the time and energy that went into your download of an mp3."
To everyone who said they would pay $4.95 a month for Napster: "I agree with you as if you couldn't tell from the above rant"
I would not pay. Not unless the service was a *LOT* better.
But it is his hard drive space, his processor cycles, and his network bandwidth. He's saying that napster service relies on his resources, and he isn't willing to pay to let people download music from him, whether it's his music or not. And I agree - I don't use napster often, but when I do, I consistently download fewer songs than I upload. So napster is getting a service from me, and I don't want to pay them for it. G0del
Would you pay $4.95 a month to use Napster?
No, but thanks for asking.
"We don't want it to run because... nobody is making a single dollar out of it!". They do not understand somene that does not make money out of music distribution.
Also, watching the live connection that the FoxNews made, their lawyer does not know everything on the matter. He argued that "...only with their [Napster] software,...users can exchange files...". Yes, dear friends, they do not know about Gnutella and similar projects!.
Let's rejoice alltogether, my friends, by their lack of knowledge and general blindness...
very rarely, think of the label as a loan shark, a very fussy one, even if they do give you a deal you will be very lucky to see anything at all after the advance, maybe if you do well you will get a better advance on the next album, but even so you're better with a credit card...
Ok they do promote, but what?
*where we have a tangible good or service to produce. *
If you're not producing anything tangible what are you doing? except possibly working in management, music is tangible.
*wealth was even more unevenly distributed*
There has NEVER been such a time.
Hope you were trolling...
~ppppppppö
A lot of you are missing a key point, if Napster goes to a subscription based service, we would be paying Napster to allow other people to suck up our bandwidth and download our MP3s. Yeah you would get Mp3s for yourself in return, but I bet if people had to pay, many would turn the sharing option off and just download from other people.
"A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep." --Saul Belloe
I can see both views dealing with paying for Napster.
On one hand, there are people who would say "Sure, costs less than CDs, etc, etc..."
On the other hand there are people who would say "Now that I'm paying for it it's not right. I should do this anymore."
The problem is with people like me who are in the third category, right between the two. What are your opinions?
Actually, part of the problem is that the music does not belong to the artists, it belongs to the record companies. They own the copyrights.
We watch them claim to defend the artists when they couldn't care less about them. They only care about their profits.
Up until I read the Home Recording Act, I thought to myself "Well, Napster does stick it to the man, but it's hardly legal." But the law says that non-profit music sharing is totally legal. It became legal when they said we were all criminals and should pay the price of our crime before we even commit it.
You pay tax on every medium that records audio. This tax goes directly to the RIAA. It is meant to be compensation for the copyright violation you're expected to perform with this medium.
only if they still let you download all the copyrighted songs :) sure, 5 bucks a month is a lot less than I spend on buying cds every month that I only burn. (especially now that I have an mp3 player in my car)
--
Geoff Harrison (http://mandrake.net)
Senior Software Engineer - VA Linux Labs (http://www.valinux.com)
Geoff "Mandrake" Harrison
Some Random UI Hacker
here's the only way napster will ever win the war against the RIAA. By charging a subscription fee and dividing the revenue fee completely amongst the artists in whole..... based upon the statistical representation of how many songs were downloaded, etc. That way, you can circumvent the RIAA punks and get the artists to join forces with napster as well. Napster could still make an assload of money with advertising revenue... of course, artists would get smart, write some scripts to download their own songs like crazy and screw the whole thing up. However, there must be some way to categorically pay the artists based on demand. hehehe...my evil mind is churning.. as an advertiser i could now sell old people shit to users downloading old people music, and stuff like girlie magazines and sick stuff like that to girls downloading nsync....
I'm going to either share a couple thousand files to everyone, or pay for the service. Not both.
I'm sure this opinion is shared by virtually all Napster users on fat pipes and broadband. Subscription service will only lead to the death of Napster.
--
Rob Carlson
Opennap is far better anyways, as it is far less populated with junk (gnutella) or crappy songs(napster). Honestly, i don't care about napster, corp. Simply them trying to make money off of sharing is a bit atrocious.
isomerica.net | Foonetic IRC
I think that a fair number of people would be happy to pay 4.95 a month to use napster, but that raises two issues. First, I dont think the RIAA would ever bite for that. Why take 500million in 2001, when they can eclipse that several times with normal record sales (assuming of course that you buy into RIAAs claims that napster is killing their profits and that with Napster gone they can regain said lost ground). The more pertinent question I think would be will I pay 4.95 a month to give you access to my harddrive and the bandwidth that I pay for? I think for napster to charge a monthly service fee, then they would need to provide some sort of return so that people wont feel like they are being charged to share out their own harddrive.
jason
www.cyborgworkshop.com
...and the geek shall inherit the earth...
www.linux-skunkworks.com
Have you written any letters?
Presumably if they're collecting money from you - then you're going to be pretty traceable.
Read the article. These would basically be used to pay the RIAA members -- IOW, a form of licensing, just not per song download. The advocate suggests that $4.95/mo might generate half a million for the RIAA.
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
The thing that has constantly annoyed me has been the fact that when the media covers Napster and the whole issue, they seem to always make sure to mention something along the lines of "Napster lets users trade copyrighted songs", "pirate music", or the like. The articles themselves are biased against it, and fail to mention one very important fact - Napster allows users to trade .mp3 music files, it's the users that decide whether to use it for commercial copyrighted music, or free .mp3s that have been released and are legal to trade as such.
I have yet to see one story even mention that it has that legimiate use, that there are files that it is not against the law to copy and distribute.
It would be like a story about VCR's and mentioning "VCR's, which allow people to copy movies instead of buying them..." and forgetting all the other uses they have.
See, the media doesn't have a liberal bias, they have a corporate bias...
---
"You know your god is man-made when he hates all the same people you do."
I think this is a great proposal. RIAA doesn't realize, though, that this too may lead to their eventual death.
If the RIAA accepts this, their stance will be clear: they are only interested in insuring their continued ability to take a cut of music distribution.
However, I forsee an interesting future: if napster monitors downloads and distributes money accordingly (similar to how ASCAP monitors radio broadcasts), why would an artist need a record label?
I would gladly pay the 5bucks a month as long as I knew it was going to the artists whose music I downloaded.
However, I still think micropayments would suit my usage patterns better than a subscription fee, and it would also make the link between my cost and the artist's pocket book that much clearer.
Free beats $5/month everytime and any day of the week.
-B
benjones@superutility.net
-B
>RIAA/metallica? (emphasis mine): So, am I
>to understand you'll pay for music you
>download, as long as you don't have to pay
>for Metallica
metallica ceased to be *ARTISTS* the day they released "the black album". Up to that point their albums were quite good, inspired, groundbreaking metal. The black album, and everything since, has been nothing more than radio-friendly, MTV-fodder crap.
Since then, they have become worse than sellouts. They have reinvented themselves as the #1 shills for the RIAA, talking heads for the very "establishment" they told us for years they were "rebelling" against.
They became something worse, by many orders of magnitude, than sellouts. They became hypocrites.
When you hear lars speak, you're really hearing what hillary rosen dictates. Metallica/RIAA are effectively the same entity. I see no point in distinguishing between them, when they do absolutely nothing to differentiate themselves.
metallica, the RIAA, the MPAA, lars, rosen, valenti.... is there ANY difference anymore? When you read statements by any of the three establishments, or their talking head spokesmen, they're pretty much interchangable, the only difference (besides a healthy dose of um's er's and uh's from lars (see the
Masters of Puppets indeed.
john
Resistance is NOT futile!!!
Haiku:
I am not a drone.
Remove the collective if
Imagine all the people...
Yes, but only if I knew that 30% was going toward taking rights away from the RIAA and giving them back to the artists.
This might not be the most popular opinion here, but would I pay $4.95 a month for Napster? ... Yeah! Well, probably.* While I'm not shedding any tears over Lars' and Dr. Dre's alleged lack of funds, I'm not wild about other more deserving artists getting screwed by their labels even further since Napster's "costing them millions of dollars in revenue" or somesuch. OK, so maybe I don't understand the record industry, and maybe this won't improve things that much for artists, but looking at it selfishly: would I rather pay ~$18.99 once or twice a month for CDs with only a few songs I like, or pay $4.95 for a big music buffet with everything I like? You can't (or shouldn't?) get something for nothing...
* Unless the fee causes people to switch to Gnutella or whatever, and Napster loses critical mass, leaving me with just Britney Spears and N'Sync songs to download. Which also seems like a plausible course of events...
Napster is not the be all, end all of mp3 music "sharing." Long before napster came around there was www.oth.net and it's ftp listings. If they do start charging a monthly fee, no I would not pay it. There are enough other places to get music that are not any harder than napster.
If RIAA were content with charging $5/month flat rate for music access, a portion of which they'd get, wouldn't they open up their own shop and charge either more flat rate, or by the K downloaded?
They have no vested interest in letting Napster provide a portion of that which they could do themselves.
-Nev
Paying a fee may be distasteful to Napster users (can't say personally since I used it only once as a curiosity) but it is and always has been a business, and even RedHat knows that free software + free service means no revenue.
Bingo Foo
---
taken! (by Davidleeroth) Thanks Bingo Foo!
Right, emusic.com is legal. But, it does offer a subscription option (eg. download as many of our mp3s in a month as you want for $20 or less) in addition to being able to pay on a per track basis. esentially this seems to be the model for what some people here are advicating, they just don't have all the songs that napster has.
"I don't need a compass to tell me which way the wind shines." - Mr. Furious, Mystery Men
So far as paying for music is concerned, I will pay for music I like. Humanity is better off when information is freely available, but at the same time I don't want to quantity or quality of the music to lapse, an enevitability if artists can not make money any longer.
But this exact concern is what the true spirit of copyright law was about. It was about giving the authors of creative work control of their work for a limited time so that the creative work would keep getting done. But only for a limited time because eventually we want that work distributed and disseminated to the public. Copyright law was not their to make people money, it is there in essence to promote science and the arts.
The RIAA does an extreme disservice to this argument because they couldn't care less about the lofty goals of the copyright law, they are greedy and know it will make them money. But at the same time, no matter what their alterior motives are, they are on the side that will maintain some level of control for the artists over their intellectual property.
Napster comes in on the side of making the information available to the public. This also is an important step in promoting the arts and sciences. But most of the arguments I hear from this side come down to people being greedy, and wanting what is best for them personally without a concern in the world for what is best for everyone.
The system needs to change. The RIAA has glutted itself on the old system, and its fearful of a system where its no longer needed. But if all information everywhere is just free, the people that make their money creating that information will probably not continue to do so. Then we can freely distribute information that is no longer being created, which certainly isn't the desired result.
A system where everyone just does what they do for the good of everyone was tried, it didn't work, it was called communism. People are lazy, and greedy, and competetive. That's why the economic system we have works the way it does. People want as much as they can get, at least as much if not more than anyone else (because if someone else can get it, it's *possible* for you to get it too) for as little work as possible. People aren't looking out for what's going to be best for all of us, and I don't see that ever changing. It's been a fantasized ideal for most of human history, and yet nothing has changed. Its the reason we need laws at all.
It's wonderful to talk about what could be with this. I'd love to pay the artists directly for their work, and cut out the RIAA. But if that's going to happen the artists need to work to make that happen as well. If the artists stay with the RIAA, because they don't want to worry about promoting their music instead of just creating it, then unfortunately you'll be paying a middle man of some sort. Ultimately, its going to take the artists, the fans, the law, technology, promoters, and probably a slew of others I'm not thinking of right now to find the acceptable solution to this problem.
That solution I think will have the original spirit of copyright law at its heart, which is to promote science and the arts. One that makes it possible for those creating the information and art to continue to do so, as well as making it available to the public.
Is subscription service the answer? Not with the current Napster model, at least I don't see it. I'd go for subscription to a service that provides garunteed access to high quality and quantity of music. With something like Napster, they can't garuntee what you'll find, you can't really be sure of what you'll be able to get. How many crappy copies of music have you ever found? Incomplete tracks, crappy playbacks, corrupt files - I'd pay Napster a service fee to sift these things out and save me time, I'd pay the musicians for their intellectual property if I get quality products in return. I would not pay Napster for the service they currently provide.
What's more is that the artists still have no say over what gets put on there or not. The artists should be able to maintain control over what they share, and what they don't. Regardless of whether they are ok with their music being distributed freely or not, they never consented to it being distributed like that in the first place. Just for an example, you write a love song to your spouse or SO, its personal meant for the two of you and no one else, and yet under the current system, if anyone got their hands on it, it could end up on Napster and swapped around with no one concerned you didn't want it up there. Say Napster starts swapping digital books, and someone swipes your diary and puts it up online to be traded, how would you feel about that? It's an issue about respect for the intent of the creators, and the current Napster model doesnt pay any, let alone cash.
But my dreams they aren't as empty, as my conscience seems to be...
I would pay twice as much for the service if there was more music available and of better quality. Napster sites are swamped with the same music I can hear on the pop 40 radio stations. Finding anything else can be substantially more difficult. When I do find that rare gem, I am rarely suprised to see low bit rates, poor quality, and missing tags. All of which is fine only if the service is free.
open mind: teaching computers the stuff
He's referring to the playing time...a 3 minute mp3 would cost $0.75.
Download a fast DirectX Tetris Clone [276 k]
conceeded. i guess tv and cable (or satellite) are just synonymous in my head.
london is drowning and i live by river
We all seem to be forgetting about Opennap. If Napster shuts-down or charges money, why not just turn to Napigator to connect to OpenNap servers? We'll have tons of servers scattered on Linux boxes with plenty of bandwidth. We may even see Shell providers offer it as a service. Usually these servers have better mp3's anyways :)
I know of one, hosted by Panasync, maker of BitchX. bitchx.dimension6.com i think.
FOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOP.
Ballin-Networks
No, if anything, Napster would be in violation of anti-competitive laws and/or dumping, since they sell their product for a cost much lower than which it costs to create ("free").
The labels pay the artists. They pay the engineers, managers, producers, roadies. They pay to make the videos and the ads you see in Spin magazine. And then napster just lets you take it for free...
If I have an OC-3, i'm getting more music for $4.95 than the guy on the 28.8 ;) Perhaps I should pay more than $4.95 because I could download a whole CD in a few seconds?
-Rob
I don't think napster would be really successfull imposing a fee (at least not with me...)
---
Guillaume
give me all your garmonbozia
So if I send $10 a month to my grocery store, can I just walk in whenver I want for a month and take what I want? This $4.99 a month math doesn't add up, the RIAA is up to something or a case of bad media.
-re
I derive at least that much benefit from it, so sure, why not.
In fact, if you can't afford to pay $4.95 a month, you should probably sell your computer, since you obviously need the money.
If you refuse to pay such a small amount, just know that you're in the same category as those cheap bastards who ask for 50 ketchup packets at McDonald's and steal flatware at Ponderosa.
But another thing to consider is audio quality. Most of the MP3s I download are obviously lower-than-cd quality and many are simply bad quality. I think the fault for that lies with the MP3 format partly, but that's beside the point. I don't know that I'd want to pay a subscription for sub-par music.
I know this isn't Ebay, but I'd probably pay $20/month to have access to any song I want. I'd pay just for the sheer ability to connect and be able to bitch at someone if I couldn't connect! I don't see Napster existing for very much longer unless it evolves into some type of "pay" service, whatever that may end up being.
On the other hand, if it's a restrictive type of service only allowing certain "allowed" songs then I might pay $5 or $10 a month. Of course I really haven't liked much of anything new since the early 90's, but that's just me... Heavy metal died the day James and Lars flew up to Canada to meet Bob Rock...
"It's awfully difficult to spend 40 minutes in the court listening to (Napster attorney) Boies arguing why they don't have to pay," said RIAA chief executive Hilary Rosen.
Hillary is wise beyond her years. Which is impressive, since she's so goddamn old. Hillary is right - if you incorporate, if you distribute music, you're gonna have to pay. The RIAA basically has NO assets. They produce nothing. They exist only to suck money out of both sides of the artist-fan conduit, and to shape that conduit. That's a really good gig folks. Entertainment is the number one industry in the united states, and it has the highest profit margin.
And when you've got a good gig, and someone tries to take it from you...
someone is going to pay.
File sharing corporations have no future.
File sharing applications are the future.
--
What happens when you outlaw guns
There's also the issue of simply listening: isn't that free? Can't you turn on the radio and hear music for nothing? The problem with the radio, however, is that the songs that are played are those which are being pushed by the various record companies. Napster gives me the freedom to download anybody's music and listen to it. If want to support the band (and thus have more of their music), I'll buy the CD, or support them financially in some other way.
The point is that the consumer should have the power to choose what music he or she wants, where he or she gets it, and how to support the artist. Frankly, I'd like more of the $12-20 I spend on a CD to go to the artist.
I would definitely pay for a subscription to the service, but what I guess the record companies don't realize is that there are plenty of Napster users out there like me, that get introduced to new music on Napster and then go buy the cd (or try to find it on ebay if it's no longer in print, as the case was recently for me for KMFDM Naive orange cd).
c ollege/index.html, it was written- "Take local record store owner Gordon Lamb.
I like being able to download songs that are very very rare, or that are no longer being put out by record companies or just plain haven't been released.
It's great to be able to find rare and unreleased songs and according to some record stores, napster has even helped sales...
On http://cnn.org/2000/TECH/computing/10/02/napster.
You might expect him to despise Napster. After all, he sells the music that millions of Napster users are swapping for free.
But business at his college-town shop, Wuxtry Records, is good. And worldwide music CD sales are reportedly up half a billion dollars this year overall.
Lamb thinks Napster should get some of the credit.
"It has helped us a lot," he said. "People have discovered things on Napster and then come in and special-ordered them or bought them right off the shelves." "
I think that other people would pay this nominal fee for use of this service, if it meant being able to get to material easy that record companies won't release.
Yeah, and then Napster can pay income taxes for it, everybody happy, right?
Funny how everything is OK if the government gets money for it...
Like with taxes on CD-Rs. Makes you wonder...
Every expression is true, for a given value of 'true'
Nope. Everyone would jump on the gnutella/other bandwagon. There will always be bigger and better things, and if we've realized anything (with experience with GNU-related incidents), the bigger and better of software wont cost you a dime :)
Wasn't the whole idea behind Napster, at the beginning at least, *free* trade of music? If they do this, they'll be tossing all that they seem to stand for, and becoming as much of a corporate whore as the millionaire bands who are against them. And the users will realize that...Or will just be too cheap to pay.
-You're wearing...A bag? I have misplaced my pants.
The question is if Napster is making a profit.
I use Napster so I can spam-download music and I tend to discard 90% of it before it finishes playing once. As a result, there are artists that I'd never have listened to because they don't get airplay. Mary Lou Lord. Moby. BT. Boa. And with those I'm more than happy to send a few bucks to fairtunes.com (and I really need to get off my *** and actually do that).
And that is the crux. I will support the artist. Which to me is far more equitable than the thug-like, drug-pusher-like cartel of the RIAA. Now look, I know this sounds to you like a big knee-jerk reaction but I have serious issues with the RIAA that I've come to on my own without the every-present nudging of Slashdot. Yes, I know that there are people looking to freeload, but you can't simply lump me with them wholesale.
My .02,
My .02,
zencode
iactivist.org/jason
Great! We're now going to be paying royalties to RIAA for music provided by independent artists who have released their music for free specifically to avoid having to deal with the BIG record labels.
This sounds like a typical OEM deal with Microsoft... you bought a linux box? Too bad, you're paying for a Microsoft license anyway!
'sapientia potestas est'
You can look at this case either with logic or with emotion and this will effect the opinion you develop. On the one side you have the general popultion wanting easy access to the music and on the other side you have the record companies saying that they want to protect the interests of their artists. While it is true that record companies do make billions from the music they sell, the also want to avoid a land-mark victory on the Napster side that might make it difficult to make money in the future. If the people feel that it is a free for all and the CD purchases don't really matter, then how are artists going to remunerated, irrespective of the existance of the record companies.
I would be willing to pay a monthly charge for use of Napster, though I would have to evaluate the business model before making this choice.
The question should be which is the important decision here the emotional one or the 'logical' one?
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
From http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/ap/20001002/tc/napste r_lawsuit_3.html:
:)
"SAN FRANCISCO (AP) - Three federal appeals judges put the onus on the recording industry Monday, grilling its attorneys with questions about why a lower court's injunction against Napster Inc. should be reinstated and the song-sharing service shut down."
And it gets prettier from there
========================
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!
The only reason they want you to pay the $$$ is so that users cannot remain anonymous!
This way they can ban a user and he will not be able to re-logon to the system.
This way they can track a user down to his billing address or credit card. Once they know who somebody really is, they can sue you. This will just scare everybody into not sharing the MP3s.
just my 2 cents.
No. Commercially recorded popular music is for wankers. It all sucks. They should pay ME to listen to that crap. Good riddance to Napster, the RIAA and everyone else involved with this tripe.
Edith Keeler Must Die
But the best part will come in Napster's testimony, when Shawn Fanning says, "If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine."
If Napster had a rating for people who downloaded mp3's, i'd be known as napSTAR
One of the primary arguments behind the thiev^H^H^H^H^Hpeople who download Copyrighted works from Napster is "CDs cost too much!"
But yet, we get people who bitch about the possible $5 subscription price. HELLO! This is less than HALF what your expensive CD costs!
This only provides proof to what I've been arguing. 98% of the Napster community isn't there because "CDs cost too much." They're there because they can get something for free that they would normally have to pay for.
And the minute they have to pay for it, they don't want anything to do with it. Even if it's an insignificant amount.
For Christ's sake, you LIKE THE MUSIC, RIGHT? Show a LITTLE appriciation for the work that went into creating it!
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon? :P)
(If you can't figure out how to E-Mail me, Don't.
$5 is too much, because the service sucks, and the money goes to the wrong people (another corporation, still not the artists). It's hard to find anything but crap on Napster, and when you do find it, it's improperly encoded and has a low bit rate. But, on the other hand, it's free, so all you're wasting is your own time looking for it. If they start charging for the service, then there's a lot of quality assurance they'll have to provide to justify it. And if I were a subscriber, and they didn't, then I'd be the first in line to file a tort suit against them.
-- Anne Marie
Who's going to be in the best position to offer this in the next couple of years? (A: the networks) If these companies would truly start innovating like this instead of being content to let their technology stagnate, they'd never have to worry about others stealing their 'share' of the market. The reason people go to Napster is because they're dissatisfied with the current model of music distribution (high price, low availability of music depending on where you buy from, lack of instant gratification that one gets from being able to get music immediately, inability to preview music before buying it). I predict the same for the networks if they don't catch on now and keep up with the technology.
On a side note, no, I wouldn't pay $4.95/month for Napster in its current form. I'd seriously consider $10/month, however, if they're hosting the MP3s rather than their customers and if the MP3s are guaranteed, professional rips. Additionally, I would want to retain my right to spaceshift my music (I'd like to be able to legally burn downloaded MP3s to CDs to play in my conventional CD player). Otherwise, what incentive is going to keep people from leaving Napster in droves?
A tip jar on the site to donate to artists wouldn't be a bad thing, either...
Where's our Churchill?
No, I would not pay any "usage tax" that went to support the RIAA members, or any of the other parasites that live off the backs of the musicians. I buy my CDs direct from musicians, or sometimes when I buy music I checked out on MP3, or at local music events, so that more of a percent of the money goes to the artists in the first place.
They'll take my ripper software out of my cold dead robotic arms when they've unplugged all my CPUs and disabled my backup power supply!
--- Will in Seattle - What are you doing to fight the War?
Napster's popularity is due to the fact that it provides a level of pseudo anonymity. If you have to pay for the service, you'll be easily trackable. The people who are actually committing infringement are not going to pay. People who are downloading the truly free music most likely aren't sufficiently numerous to cover the opersting expenses of a company like Napster.
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
you'd think that napster was never in it to make money, or anything....
/. makes ya login if you want to participate in the moderation system, which, in its own special way, is the thrill of it all.
OF COURSE they're going to subscriptions, just like every other content provider throughout history. magazines, cable tv, newspapers--hell, even
they have to pay that army of lawyers, liggers-on-of-shawn, and shawn's uncle somehow. not to mention the folks who actually are coding the damn thing.
as much as we'd like to pretend, napster is _not_ under the GPL, and their fight is _not_ the same as Free Software's fight. while napster raises some interesting IP issues, they still want to make a lot of money with what they're doing, and for those looking to make napster into a shining cause of the New Internet, this was a train wreck waiting to happen. napster is just another channel on that miraculous box in the the den, only instead of the news and weather it's music on demand. isn't that what cable companies have promised for years with movies?
napster has always been about the network it spawned, and it will go to great lengths to market, protect, and profit from that network, much like AOL and instant messenger.
don't be surprised when napster sells out. this was never a fight about free (as in beer) music and the growing of community. this was a play fight for publicity, plain and simple.
i feel bad for shawn fanning. i get the feeling he lies up at night and wonders how much better he could have handled this on his own, instead of letting the VC'ers take his creation away from him.
london is drowning and i live by river
I'm suspicious of this - you might even say paranoid. But right now Napster isn't making any money directly off the trading of music - Just Ad revenue, right? So what happens when they ARE making money directly off of the service? Even if they have an agreement with the RIAA (and they had better hire as many lawyers as they can afford to participate in their side of the drafting of such a document) there are often loopholes, and the RIAA may believe that in this agreement, they have a way to screw them.
I know how ridiculous this sounds to some of you. I know others of you are nodding your heads in agreement. Still others are wishing they had moderator points to slap me with :) But remember, these people have consistently shown that they are the closest thing to pure evil (in the form of greed) that the world has seen in some time. They are more than willing to step on anyone necessary in their attempts to own the whole pie.
Personally, I'd like to keep my pie to myself, but they don't want to see things that way. You should watch out for your slice when these greedy bastards come near...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Geoff "Mandrake" Harrison has *absolutely* nothing to do with Linux Mandrake. Read his sig....Senior Software Engineer for Valinux.
Don't you think that's just what the RIAA wants? They want to make napster a pay product so they can release their "Every song ever written available all the time" (what is that an ad for? I forget) product and we all jump on it because it is a great product. Just like the old DivX. Oh, wait.
This gets to be an issue of big business wanting to make money versus individuals not caring about money. And anyway, shouldn't we only pay per download and they pay US for serving?
Planning to be moderated ± 1: Bad Pun.
Gnutella is great, but it has to be changed significantly before everyone currently using napster can switch over. First of all, people need to start sharing their files, otherwise gnutella doesn't work. Secondly, people need to stop lying about their connection speed. Thirdly, the searching algorithm used must be improved to be more comprehensive and quicker. There are other problems too, but those are the ones I'd *really* like to see fixed. It's only a matter of time though before a group of good programmers (Nullsoft, ideally) can make a client that can "compete" with napster.
* made its service more reliable, including a less buggy client, configurable timeouts and most of all restartable file transfer
* created a better search engine, removing the 100 files limit on search results and generally treating MP3 names and ID3 tags with more intelligence
Now the ideology side: since the advent of MP3 (about 2 years ago on my personal timescale) I didn't buy a single CD (not that I ever been a big CD collector). So there's something nagging me in the back of my mind, even though I'm definitely not buying into the hype that copying == stealing. On the other hand, I've been going to concerts more often recently, so I have some basis for rationalizations :-)
On the gripping hand, how much of their supposed RIAA settlement money is actually going to end up in the artists' pockets??
This whole subscription thing is really a moot point. The RIAA already said no to the idea. They would rather take this to court and set up a precident that they can use to control everything about music. Remember when music was a form of expression to be shared and loved amogst friends? Neither do I.
How you see the world is how the world sees you.
Subscriptions? What comes with subscriptions. Well, you have to pay. And unless you pay cash, you will sing up right on the napster.com with a credit card, or mail a check. Now they can aquire a list of who all is downloading illegal music. Remember the 30,000 some users that they knew had downloaded Metallica... well, know they could know exaclty who the next 30,000 would be. Now they know who all to sue!
...I don't have to pay for any of the content I obtain from other Napster users!
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Would you pay $4.95 a month to use Napster?
This still doesn't do a thing about the bandwidth issues, not to mention the potential lawsuits toward those who choose to block napster traffic..
Would you pay $4.95 a month to use Napster?
Not if I can get it for free somewhere else. I would consider paying $0.02 per download though.
...would that $4.95 be going to the RIAA, the "big" artists, or the small artists who could really benefit from the money. Methinks it will be going to the RIAA. *sighs* If that's the case, I don't think I would pay.
Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains.
Um, pay? No way. Napster is simply a convenience. It's merely a quick way to find mp3s, not the /only/ way. If someone payed for napster because they think it's the only way they can leech their precious mp3s I'd laugh at them. There were FTPs years before napster existed, and there will still be FTPs for years to come.
/just now/ getting upset about it? An obvious answer would be that they care more now because Napster is so mainstream, whereas FTPs are used by a much smaller percentile of net users.
This brings up the question that's been on my mind since the beginning of these stupid lawsuits: Why is the RIAA
So where does the RIAA draw it's "acceptable piracy" line?
hobbz
Not only do we have the entirely-predictable spectacle of Napster trying to charge (All of you who thought that they started the company for "freedom" take two steps back. Anybody who thought they were doing it for the artists, go home), but now a bunch of those people who said, "I wouldn't mind paying if it were reasonable -- CD's cost too much!" now stand outraged at the idea of a lousy $5 / month.
It's hard to go back to paying for stuff after you've looted, and here's my bet: if a system were created that reliably paid the artist a small sum directly, most Napster users still wouldn't do it.
This next song is very sad. Please clap along. -- Robin Zander
It's really simple. The Napster executives could have said "Wow, that's really cool", let's go ask the RIAA for their permission.
At that point the RIAA could have said yes or no, and perhaps Napster could have made their plans a reality.
But instead they took the approach of promoting blatant piracy with the thought that it's better to ask forgiveness than permission.
They should have known better.
well, I would not pay $15 per month but $5 is resonable. However, there are a few problems with this as well. I can't stand downloading songs that are halfway ripped leaving the remainder only to be cut off at the chorus. If there were a way to guarantee clean rips from the Industry itself then I might consider it. Downloading from some guys drive across the state is a free for all. I'm not guaranteed that the song will be in perfect condition. Paying Napster 5 bucks a month is more like a piracy tax. Much the same as how the cost of piracy is built into the cost of blank tapes and CDR's. If they want to justify piracy through this kind of tax then so be it. They won't be able to do this with gnutella though. If they are serious about a subscription service then they will setup a web-based site where one can pay a monthly fee for leech access to their files and leech access to Napster.
Nope. This was just a proposal by Napster to stay in business. The RIAA has no intention of taking this deal. They have Napster by the short hairs, why let them go now?
open mind: teaching computers the stuff
I've already written my own My.Mp3 service that runs on my web server, exposing directories of genres/artists/cd's/files. Replete with check-boxes for playing combinations of any of the above.
:(
Now if I could only get the mp3 encoder for Linux working, I'd be set.
You quitting proves that the karma kap worked. The most annoying of the whores shut up. --CmdrTaco
RIAA artists and indie labels have a contract with the artists. The label pays to promote, produce, etc the artist and the artist agrees to their usually evil paying scheme. Lets say the "pay the signed artist" deal goes through then the RIAA will be suing their own musicians, and they will win everytime.
Un-signed bands are a completly different story, you can send them whatever you please.
...if the RIAA doesn't do it first. The feelings are the same all around. Why should I, the consumer, pay money so that other consumers can eat up my bandwidth downloading songs that I have. The whole basis for Napster is the user's willingness to share their files. But if Napster implements a pay to use type service, people might pay, but they won't share their music. Ultimately Napster will die. What's happened here is that Napster in itself was a great idea. But great so long as it remains free. Some people saw Napster, namely Shawn's uncle, as a chance for profit without really thinking things through. Maybe there's another way to make money off of Napster, but charging its users is not the right way. Perhaps a premium service, one in which users are required to be above a minimum bandwidth and to host a minimum number of files, perhaps then I'd pay, as long as I was guaranteed a certain quality of service. But there is no guarantee with Napster's quality of service right now. The only reason Napster is doing so great is because everyone fears it's going offline soon so they're hoarding. Blah.
-
"There is no off position on the genius switch." --Dave Letterman
-
Next out of the pipe?
Footster: Provides links for fans wanting to view copies of past Football games (NCAA/NFL paths) (Why not? #@%& TV networks never replay them!)
BatsterUp: Links to copies of past Baseball games (Hey, remember that game when McGwire hit his 70th? Yeah, let's watch it!)
BradySter: Uh... nevermind.. next
Sitcomster: 20 minutes of dumb jokes and laff tracks at the click of a mouse...
Toonster: Watch all your favorite old cartoons from peoples' VHS collection
Filmster: Watch movies from other people's VHS/DVD collections stored on their drives.
Etc..
Some of these may seem absurd given the current size and download time, but consider in a few years when glass runs to each house... uh huh.
Tip of the iceberg, eh?
--
Chief Frog Inspector
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Promise me that people won't disconnect my downloads.
Promise me that my money will go directly to the artists who copyrighted the material and not to the RIAA
Then, I might consider it.
JUST USE the opennap networks!!!!!!!
they will ALWAYS be free. THey also have just as many users/files as napster does.
This is just as bad as the media tax.
A flat rate per month is WRONG. It should be based on what you download, otherwise everyone who uses Napster will be paying the RIAA whether the music they trade is owned by RIAA members or not. If anyone is going to be paid for Napster, it should be the copyright owners, who may or may not be RIAA. If they get Napster Inc to agree to this, then it will just strengthen their monopoly and put anyone who competes with RIAA at a disadvantage.
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
FYI:
The interview is in the October 2000 Wired (8.10), pg 253.
rLowe
----- rL
This amount has been brought up in court. It did not first appear hear on Slashdot.
[FromTheMorning]
What you're looking for is MP3.com, then. Forget ever being able to pay RIAA artists directly. Barring divine intervention, their souls were sold so long ago that they're no longer eligible for depreciation tax deductions on the RIAA's annual returns.
I can live with $4.95 a month, but it would be better if any fee you paid for downloading an MP3 could be credited to the purchase of the corresponding CD. I object to having to pay for the shitty sound quality of MP3s.
But hell, maybe that could be the RIAA's way to make everyone happy. People pay a small fee for access to MP3's with a stronger incentive to buy the CD, and all of us sharing files get paid a small commission by RIAA member companies when they make a sale.
Of course, the RIAA is too greedy and too stupid to go for a system like that.
--
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
It depends.
If the subscription fee were simply going to Fanning and co. as payment for the wonderful service that is Napster?
$4.99
If the subscription fee were being payed into a general fund that is payed directly to the artists whose music is being downloaded?
$9.99
If the subscription fee were arranged so that there is NOT a general fund, but the fee that *I* pay goes ONLY to the artists whose MP3s *I* download, and the vapid crap that *I* never download doesn't see a penny of MY fee?
$14.99
If so much as a penny of the subscription fee goes into the coffers of the RIAA/metallica?
$0.00
john
Resistance is NOT futile!!!
Haiku:
I am not a drone.
Remove the collective if
Imagine all the people...
The next big step would be that all warez servers trun into $4.95 subscription-based servers.
I see your point. You think that if you pay for the service, you shouldn't be entitled to share your files and your computer/network resources to "help" them.
You're actually not entitled to share anything right now, either. Yet many people do. Why is that?
Simply put, I believe that people are glad to help out the Napster network as long as it's worth something to them. It's kind of both generous and selfish at the same time, but the net effect is that everyone gets what they want... the world gets your help through shared files and bandwidth, and you get to choose among millions of songs to download.
Add money into the equation, and I don't think things are affected much. I think most people like Napster enough that the subscription fee in itself is an acceptable tradeoff for keeping the service available. I think that people won't see their bandwidth as being worth as much as the subscription fee, which is why Napster has been a roaring sucess so far - no one had to share anything at first, but they did, and in tremendous numbers. So if there is a fee, I don't think people will close off their file lists.
I think the only thing that WOULD provoke people to unshare their files would be if their quality of service to Napster or the Internet as a whole was affected by people downloading. In other words, if too many people are downloading from you, and it's slowing down your computer or Internet connection, you will be inclined to lock people out of your files. I've already run into that situation, and I only share a small download directory of files on Napster when I do use it - as opposed to all of my 10,000 mp3s. Sure, I could also limit the number of people allowed to download at once, but I find that ineffective because then you just have less people saturating the same quantity bandwidth/processor time at once (and the rest of world will patiently wait for their turn anyway).
I do figure that if I did pay for Napster, I'd probably be using it more to download songs just to increase the overall value of my money... which, for me, would mean that I would have more files in my download directory to share, and therefore I'd be sharing more files anyway. And just out of laziness, that's how things would work for most people. Considering that, perhaps a subscription fee would make it GROW FASTER...
Think about that.
I could not see them doing this and living more than a few months. I know there is a percentage of people who would pay for this service but the instance it happened demand would increase for an alternative eager to please programers will work double time to get the next evolution of napster up and running i.e. all the varients that are currently out there. Then these people who would pay for the napster service will be faced with this are they going to pay for the napster service and be called dumb or will they quickly adopt its successor. I have a feeling no matter what anyone says now if this happens the outcome will be bleak for napster.
This is the only reason I wouldn't pay for such a service.
You could keep the infrequently-watched stuff in a robot-operated tape library... but keep just enough of the show on hard drive to allow it to start playing while the robot retrieved and loaded the full program.
--
Wait a minute here... if Napster gets in bed with the RIAA for a subscription service, I will not join. If Napster were offering WAV's of complete tracks, and EVERY song is available from an album (ie no songs present from an album unless all are - keeping you from just being offered 'some stuff' or the 'commercials' for the rest of the physical CD) then I might think about paying $3-5 per year . MP3's are lossy, the recording just isnt as good as a CD, it is painfully obvious on decent stereo equipment, but MP3 (ogg vorbis) is mostly acceptable. I can dload WAV's and burn CD's for archive and encode/burn MP3's at will for 'time shift' or 'media shift'. (IANALthankfuckinggod). If the RIAA thinks they are going to use their collusive oligopoly to maintain artificial control on the music industry they are wrong.
The RIAA enslaves artists and their patrons. Has everyone read the Courtney Love article at salon? If you or everyone you know hasnt read this article, please do.
The RIAA were necessary in a time where reproduction and distribution costs/logistics were sufficiently high enough to allow them to 'add value'.The RIAA is a dinosaur. Technology has made their 'value' == 0. Let them die, they've already made enough money... the corporatist pigs. The anti-IP MP3 'warriors' have the RIAA on the ropes. They are winning this battle. If not legally, they are effectively. Let the RIAA buy more US legislation, let them stop selling CD's in place of 'SDMI CDs', let them demand everyone buys a new CD player... when the sheeple wake up and say "no way, I want my music from artists, you no longer have business here"
Before all the flamethrowers fire up, rememeber to read Courtney Love's article.. the present system exploits ARTISTS more than its customers.
Stop buying anything from RIAA/MPAA members, they are trying to enslave modern culture... and thats a Bad Thing(TM)
Perhaps that would be better, but I think we all know the RIAA would never accept it. That are not after a piece of the "online distribution" game, they are after the WHOLE game. The own distribution in every other media, and they will not rest until they completly control online distribution as well. If they can't they will buy enough laws to make online distribution illegal.
That said, I would STILL rather a system be devised to pay the artists directly.
Finkployd
www.c-span.org
What would Napster do with this money? I would actually consider paying for it. But is it possible to Napster to track where each song is downloaded then pay the appropiate royalties to the artist? I can only imagine the type of cash flow going into Napster if this was ever reinstated. Also, this would fuel gnutella, as the previous slashdot article mentioned.
Well, they'd probably have to make profit (or expect profits) from the subscription service. In any case, Napster isn't giving anything away for free, just their client software.
"Hot lesbian witches! It's fucking genius!"
If you would pay for this service, then you'll also have to agree to have all your download transactions logged to a database. This will become inevitable. Who do you think will be interested in obtaining access to that database?
NO
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
I'd pay $4.95 a month to use Napster, and that's certainly more than I spend on CDs now so the RIAA would be up on me.
They should make it a graduated scale with X number of dollars for X number of songs with an option for unlimited downloads.
BrianTech Humor
Thanks for the link. They don't look to have a lot I'd want to pay for-- and certainly not to commit to a 12 month sub, but this is exactly what I'm talking about. I don't care who makes the money, I care about my price as a consumer and my rights to fairly use my purchases. And this is exactly what Napster should at as an example of what they could offer to the record companies as a way of working.
I do not have a signature
If the RIAA is getting its cut, we have the possibility of a far more efficient system -- and far cheaper than the RIAA would ever have willingly created on its own.
1) Though you see it as "provide-for-a-fee" or "share-it-for-free", the "paid provider of user-supplied content" model has been very successful -- e.g. AOL forums/chat; subscription technical forums on the Web, etc. User-provided content is the basis of eerything from Slashdot on down. (up?)
You're actually better off with a system of client-shared files, if they are available, simply because of bandwidth considerations Would you rather send $5 to a Napster as sluggish as an over-subscribed ISP, that didn't share client files -- or one that is as responsive as today's Napster, which distributes *bandwidth demand* among its many clients?
Maybe there would end up being two levels of service: nonsharing (preferred by modem users) and sharing (preferred by those with fatter pipes) -- but I'd rather not go down *that* road. There's too much opportunity for RIAA meddling.
2) Napster could now legitmately keep a database of its own MP3s. [in addition to the logged-in clients files] This would greatly increase availability of 'rare' MP3's that aren't always available (and are often 'partials' anyway, due to lack of downloader patience)
2) Pipe dream: RIAA gets a big check -- therefore its members want their share of that check, forcing RIAA to divvy up the pie among the rights holders. Suddenly, all those guys sitting on rights to out-of-production music find the only way to get a piece of the pie is to have their music ported to MP3 (a cheap job) and traded. The availability/quality MP3s from the vinyl years (i.e *MOST* recorded music) is likely to improve quickly.
4) It would be a relatively small additional step to *independent* music creators to get a cut, too. They wouldn't probably get much more per download than the banner ads pay per click, but if consumers can 'taste' new stuff with abandon, then the musicians and audience benefit from enhanced exposure.
Record stores would probably survive as smaller specialty outfits (sorry, Tower Records, that's what you get for being a buggy-whip industry) and (insert-name-of-crapola-teenybopper-band) would survive as theatrical swoonfests for those who like such things.
CAVEAT:
All this would suggest better record-keeping of who gets downloaded (and therefore, potentially, who downloads what) - and all the marketeering games that will come from that.
"But, it is well known, what strikes the capricious mind of the poet is not always what affects the mass of readers." -
i still stand by my original statements. F' the RIAA. these people have enough money in their pockets, and im sick and tired of big biz trampling over the right of others and using strong arm tactics when they see something they dont like. but what do i see really going on? Everybody is reporting on it, but what are we doing about it? Who is starting the letter writing campaings, who is starting the boycotts. wheres the flyers. Everybody wants to get on their little hind legs and bitch, but whos doing anything about it? uh huh... keep making excuses. if we stand idly by our freedoms will be gone before we know it. even though its in the 'mainstream' media, doesnt mean anybodys doing anything about it
"sex on tv is bad, you might fall off..."
I lost my concept of community when my community lost all concept of me.
"Would you pay $4.95 a month to use Napster? "
NO!
But i would get a serial from http://astalavista.box.sk
I have been waiting for some way to pay the artists whose work I want to use. It's great to be able to sample something to see if you like it, but I would like to compensate the artist a fair price. If Dynamite Hack got 25 cents for every time someone downloaded that NWA cover off napster I'm sure they would be very happy. Am I going to buy the album just to secure the rights to listen to that novelty song? No. Should Dynamite Hack be able to easily accept some money for me (or even come to any agreement with me more directly)? Yes. I would gladly give them a dollar for that song. A Paypal/tipjar "honor system" would be great, but how do you find where a particular artist wants to get paid? I've actually stopped using napster, because using it with no way to pay the artist is immoral. The only way to pay them now is to go buy the CD. It would be nice to be able to decide whether I like something before I buy it. I bet if an honor system type situation were put in place, the really popular artists might suffer, but most other artists would get a lot more money. The record companies would be giving up a lot of cash, but they're not really necessary any more anyway.
"It was not until their numbers had dwindled to nine that the other dwarves began to suspect Hungry."
...with a strange "H" on the water jug. Now who is that woman in the picture? Looks sorta like Janet Reno with Sandra Day O'Connor's face.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
Why:
:)
The service is not reliable enough to spend money on. About 60% of the downloads I attempt are either corrupted, incomplete to start with, or are terminated before I can complete them.
These are acceptable statistics for a free thing (especially for a peer-to-peer thing) but not for anything I pay money for.
If the RIAA started a service that had every single damn thing ever recorded on associated labels available for download at whatever bitrate I want, always complete, and at hyper speed, I'd pay for that- simply because it gives me something for my money.
Napster is something I participate as a karma-sharing sort of thing- I get some songs, and I make my gigantic library available so others can get some.
Everyone is my friend
--Perianwyr Stormcrow
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
So basically, the Napster server logs would show that the two paying guys from Nevada are currently logged in from over 10,000 IP addresses worldwide.
Paying for access to a device created to transport pirated material...yeah, THAT'LL happen in real life!
------
Let me give you the lowdown
Why charge people $5 a month when they could do exactly what Blizzard did with Diablo's Battle.net system and show an ad banner on the bottom of Napster every 5 minutes or so. It would be a target market because Napster deals solely with Music and It would be easy to implement because Napster already has a Web Browser built in it.
.25 Cents a Banner that comes out to 5 Million Dollars revenue per month and all that profit is transparent to the user.
I mean, if you got 20 million or so users, if they all clicked on a banner once a month at
--
In Soviet Russia, Trojan exploits YOU!
By agreeing to this license:
1. You certify that you are not member of:
i) RIAA
ii) Lawyer association
iii) Law enforcement
iv) An artist with copyrighted works
2. That you won't sue us.
Now that's not true at all. Much has been accomplished through obstinacy, stubbornness, and temper tantrums, not to mention all the variations on the theme of brute force. Additionally, history is filled with people who tried to be 'diplomatic' but wound up getting taken advantage of. Now knowing the RIAA, do you think that we users and simple folk would get a fair deal from them or get taken advantage of? What about the artists? Nobody wins but the RIAA when you play by their rules. I say fuck their rules...where we're going, we don't need rules.
You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one
-John Lennon
If you aren't paying for music, you aren't helping the musicians, period. "The RIAA is screwing them, so I might as well do the same" doesn't put a dime in a musician's pocket. At least when I buy a CD, I have a general feeling that some of the money makes its way back to the musician.
"...I feel that music, like other forms of art and all forms of information, should be free..." and I am going on the assumption here that you mean "without cost to the consumer."
I wonder what you do for a living, and I would like to know how you would feel if some stranger came in and said, "I think what you do should be free. We've set up a system, and your boss agrees. No more paychecks for you."
People work. Pay them for it. Until food, shelter, clothing, and the lower end of the hierachy of needs are free, don't start devaluing what a lot of us are making a living at. I just did a webpage. I made a few dollars. I make webpages for a living. Maybe you would like it that I made no money at all? Perhaps we should all work in factories, at fast foot joints, and barbershops, places where we have a tangible good or service to produce. Yeah, let's go back to that system where wealth was even more unevenly distributed and you had to be born to a family that owned a factory to have a decent lifestyle. Let's go work in those coal mines, because, gosh darn it, this information shouldn't cost anybody anything.
Honest, I am NOT trying to troll, it's just that ... greed masquerading as "we know what is best for you" communism gets to me.
1) Users were required to share a certain amount of files based on thier "real" bandwidth
2) The RIAA didn't make anything off of it.
And not because I download music from Napster, which I do not very often owing to the fact that people are not quite open about their private collections like old days. Previously it was quite possible to download pretty much anything that you wanted to, and I use to leave napster running through out the night and see around 300 downloads by the next day. However nowadays, I have found people masquerading 56kb links as T3 and shutting off access to their private collection, while at the same time downloading from others. Thats what napster community has become.
:)
I would pay the amount but I dont really believe that everyone would, because most of the people who download music from napster really dont care about RIAA, Napster and what free digital content is all about. They just wanna download just another mp3 while Napster is still up and running. What Napster really did to the world was just opening up a new way to trade mp3 files. It really didnt care about anything other than that. I respect Napster and the people behind it for creating the first (maybe) Peer to Peer sharing mechanism, and its a sad thing that it was used for piracy. But then thats life. In a similar analogy, the only Ecommerce sites (after all this dot com hype) who makes money are the Porn sites. So its quite humane to take technology and profit from it no matter whats being exchanged and most of the times its quite impossible to define whats legal and whats not.
I would pay 4.95 and I would hope that the court rules against RIAA (I dont care whether they rule in favour of napster) atleast to rip off the masks they been wearing protecting their own interests and not of their musicians. I hope someone would soon come up with a new model where musicians would be able to reach their fans directly and benefit from it. At the same time I think its crap when people say that music should be free. Maybe part of it, but leave that to the musician, he should be the deciding factor, not some 10 yr old kid in his basement
My two cents
Rapid Nirvana
How dare someone even suggest this!
Would I pay $4.95 a month so other users can eat my bandwidth and download songs that I've collected? Not a chance.
When Napster was being developed, the whole issue was whether people would be too selfish to share. (think of the warez scene and how l33t you have to be to download anything or get a leech account). Ian didn't think so, and he was right. It was easy to share, didn't seem to cost anything, and the benefits made it more than worthwhile (free access to other songs) (not to mention the program was designed to share your songs by default, and closing the program only "minimized it").
If it becomes a subscription system, then Napster and anyone benefiting from the profits is simply leeching off of the distribution infrastructure created by the people "volunteering" their resources on Napster.
THe question should be: "Would you pay $4.95 a month for unlimited download access on RIAA.com which has a searchable database of all the songs of all the artists they represent?"
To that, my answer would be: "Absolutely."
Where did that number come from? Knowing the single-mindedness of the RIAA, I'm sure they'd want about $(cost of the CD/songs on the CD) per download. That's about $0.75 - $1.00 per track. Then tack Napster's fee on top of that. Otherwise RIAA companies aren't getting the return on investment they deserve, right? I mean, think of it - if someone downloaded 150 songs in one month for $4.95 that would be like $0.50 per album. I'm sure that the industry analyists wouldn't stand for that.
And if they decided to be generous and offer music for, let's say, 1/4th the current price (never going to happen) then wouldn't that be an admission of guilt about the current over-pricedness of CDs?
Cooperating with the music industry will just lead to the destruction of Napster and faster acceptance of alternative swapping services.
Call me (+1 Insightful) but doesn't this mean that the RIAA is fine with piracy as long as they profit?
====
Crudely Drawn Games
I'd only pay $4.95/mo if Napster promises that Dr. Dre and Lars Ulrich will stop coming to my house and beating me up.
Well that means it's gonna be a dull Pay-Per-Veiw season...
--
Chief Frog Inspector
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I won't use napster now for free as it doesn't provide a service I require. But thats just me.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
You can be sure that if a flat fee is paid for Napster the performers will be screwed even worse than they are now, and the RIAA will blame Napster users for cutting into their profits. RB
----------
ah honey, we're all resplendent - Bill Mallonee
What's the problem? Get to it. Oh, right... the Microsoft thing. Nevermind.
The hypocrisy at this place is staggering sometimes.
---
Slashdot: News For Zealots. Stuff That's Hypocritical.
I would pay for it for the first month to check it out -- (assuming it was a reasonable fee) ... to me (while free music was cool) a trivial fee for basically infinite music surfing would be well worth my money, as napster (yeah-including the damned chatrooms) led me to several of my last CD purchases ... (which were a few months ago now)
bemis
Linux has BSODs -- we just call 'em screensavers...
Ok, here's the thing I wonder: Why pay for Napster when there's now the OpenNap protocol which lets any geek with a Linux box become a Napster server? Thats retarded. Just get more people to setup opennap servers and we're all set. There are already open-source clients.
Also, another ?. All these schools that are or arent blocking access to "napster", what are they actually blocking? The web page? certain ips? How does this work if there are so many open-source servers??
A subscription fee? Napster would be making money off of providing a service that allows people to distribute music illegally. It would be the equivalent of selling bootleg CDs.
IF
All file types were allowed.
and
There were naming standard with description and verification system to ensure I always got the exact file I was looking for.
I believe the RIAA fears ligitimate and legal paid for sevices much more than illegal free services. As long as people are getting music for free they still have money to buy CDs. But if they were to start paying for online music they would have less money to buy CDs.
Why? Gnutella, hotline, swapoo, and even Beos has beshare (which is very nice, gui wise.)
Dutch boy is putting his finger in the dyke, and more holes are appearing.. only ten fingers...
when Push Comes to Shove
Song by SONY basis? You're not in the industry by any chance?
I know it's been said a million times- but an audiophile like me who already buys tons of CDs and goes to tons of concerts is helped greatly by this- it introduces me to more music, which I then buy. I also go to concerts I would never have known to look for.
People who aren't audiophiles don't buy CDs anyway. Let them have their collection of 50 random songs- they'll have it anyway from people like me in the long run. Napster just makes it slightly more likely that they'll buy something after sampling some of the high weirdness I have available.
That's what advertising is for, yes? Awakening a need in someone that wasn't there before?
The RIAA should be paying *me*.
--Perianwyr Stormcrow
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
I agree, but also think of this: RIAA != The copyright owner of every single MP3 in existence. I don't think I download *any* american music from RIAA. There is absolutely no way I'd pay an RIAA tax to allow me to share files which they don't even hold the copyright to!
I'd imagine this would be even worse for musicians who distribute their music for free on the web, napster etc. How would they feel about having to pay a commission to the RIAA (their competitors!) in order for them to freely share their own work?! Its ludicrous.
If I did listen to RIAA music, I would pay for a RIAA-napster in which they provide the servers, and also rip their artists CDs and put them all on computers connected to this sharing service. A situation in which the RIAA gets kickbacks for *users* providing their bandwidth, and *napster* providing the infrastructure just stinks of
I think that its futile to debate right vs. wrong. Fine, I'm wrong, is RIAA going to continue producing CD's now? RIAA is buying time, what they should buy is Napster, and turn them into the standard for promoting music before other competing standards arise. Subscription fees will only drive people to use other software. Does RIAA realize what chaos will ensue if Gnutella and other open source solutions become critically popular?
Merchandising is the bottom line. A CD is a merchandise... music by itself is not. If you can't make money off of selling CD's, then the industry will have to find other merchandise to package money-making music. NIN and Rob Zombie worked on the Quake computer games, and Countless artists work on Movie soundtracks. While not exactly the same, Backstreet Boys is in cahoots with Burger King, Ray Charles with Pepsi, and NSync have their barbie dolls. There's a LOT of products that use music, and more to come as the Internet matures.
Yes, music will likely change as a result of this. TV fuels Rock-n-Roll (through MTV, short attention spans, etc...). Perhaps the Internet will give birth to a new form of music too... it'd be about time, don't you think?
Wouldn't this be worse, legally, as now Napster is accepting money for the distribution of (often illegal) copies of music?
... $4.95/month is better than ~$20/CD :)
Now, if they're then paying a bigass sum to RIAA, I see RIAA being happy. That's somewhat implied, as the post says 'to appease the RIAA...'.
Still. If it allowed Napster to continue operating, like an above poster mentioned
Media is not marketable. Media is not marketable!
Broken down into essential elements, media, in it's most basic definition, is simply a pattern which your technical toys (TV's, radios, computers, etc..) can use to work in entertaining, educational, productive, and scientific ways. Simply put, a pattern is nothing more than a mathematical construct, a sequence of elements which follow one another in a predetermined way. For example, this is media: 4675636b084d504141. (Uh-oh, you just looked at my media, so I'm charging you $100, and don't you dare copy it. Patent pending on the string above.)
Truly, it is really these patterns which humanity has come to cherish. They are the words you read in your favorite magazine, the songs you listen to in the car, the movie you watch on your brand new surround sound DVD system. But you and I know that patterns can be represented merely as bits. Why? Because that is all that they are. 1's and 0's. Highs and lows. Example: if, by chance, your copy of Great Expectations had one character 'e' on page 149 that was smeared with ink (but still legible, for argument's sake), then you still have a copy of Great Expectations. It's still the same pattern! The words are distinct entities, not dependent on how they manifest themselves. However, that 'e' was accidently printed as a capital 'X' in your copy, then you don't have an exact copy of the work, and it does detract (however slightly) from the original author's intent. Many typos would cause much frustration on your part. My point is that what we value is the content of those patterns themselves, and who is to say what that value is? You? Me? The corporations? Big Brother? The answer is no one, because content is human experience, human effort, and that is priceless.
So, if not media, what IS marketable, then? Silicon is marketable. (CD's, DVD's..) Books are marketable. (The pages, covers, machining, and crafting therein are material in nature.) Radios are marketable. (You need them to pick up your favorite tunes.) Movie projection screen services are marketable. (Hey, going to the cinema is fun..) I could go on forever, but you get the idea: material carriers and services for media are marketable.
I'm really tired of corporations trying to make huge profit just from charging money for patterns which they have no rational right to dole out to us in the first place. This includes recording companies, all these insane new patents of late, the RIAA, and many more. Instead of searching for these endless freebees, corporations should perform their main function, which is competing in a capitalistic market to make the most money by providing the customer with the best, most well-engineered product.
The only reason they're getting away with all these silly monopolies on natural patterns is even more horrific: The government is actually going along with it! They're bowing to the influence of corporate power, and allowing copyright or patent arguments persuade them that maybe these guys actually do have a right to charge a consumer for a sequence of bits.
Truly, there should be no patents. The group who can make the best product will naturally be rewarded with the most profit from the consumer. It's that simple. Any other con games for free money are nothing more than theft. And you can go to jail for that; at least, you used to.
Curry
Is this just a ploy by the RIAA to be able to waltz into court for the next round and say "See, now they're *selling* our^H^H^H the artist's music!"
Greg
I'd pay $5 a month. Napster works pretty good, but of course, if I had to pay, I would expect it to be improved first. Having the convenience to be able to just think of a song and then get it just minutes later is well worth $5. Its more worthwhile then, say, paying $30 a month for 200 channels of crap on cable...
In fact, I'd be happy to spend as much as a whopping $.25 a SONG as long as the money went directly to the artist (minus a small percentage so napster makes money). Then the artists would make more money than they do from the greedy record labels...
-- Senior Software Engineer, Attorney appearance services, locallawyerapp.com.
emusic.com offers a (kind of) similar service here.
"I don't need a compass to tell me which way the wind shines." - Mr. Furious, Mystery Men
The subscription would not be about Napster making money. It would be about leaving financial trails to find users. Electronic payments to Napster would most likely take the place in credit cards, which have a high correlation to user ids, and real people behind them. Once the RIAA can track what real people are doing, and not just IP addresses, things will start getting real rough.
I love napster. I have 3 weeks of mp3's thanks to them.
I think musicians should start looking into the history of the Grateful Dead. They had a HUGE following up until jerry garcia's demise. They cared enough about their fans to let them tape concerts and distribute them among other "deadheads" (flashback of thousands of hippies, people walking around saying "doses") Of course they also told their fans don't pirate our music, if you want an album for pete's sake buy it.
So yeah, keep napster free.
--t0q
Napster doesn't charge subscription or access fees or pay per file fees or run ads. Right now they are not making any money. They don't run ads because that might turn what they are doing into COMMERCIAL peer-to-peer file sharing. How do they do it? Venure capital funding to finance their operations and litigation. Why do they (and the venture capitalists) do it? Because non-commercial sharing is just a really big stick to try and get the owners of copyrights to popular recorded music (which currently is mostly the members of the RIAA) to agree to a settlement that gives Napster the most money possible and access to all recorded music. Then Napster can start with subscriptions, advertising and per song download charges (depending on the commercial category of the music -- i.e., the latest number one hit costs an additional fee to download, really old stuff is free (ad supported) and stuff in the middle is subscription based). Make your own music or "share" music made by people who agree to let you do that. If Napster was so cool, more musicians would distribute all of their work through Napster. At least the record companies spend money on their bands (production, marketing, videos, royalties, etc.). And no whining about the musicians who got a bad deal (as if any of you really cared -- if you did you would take it upon yourself to send an old broke down musician some money).
At $1 per track it's still worth it to me for these reasons:
:)
1. I don't have to go over to Tower records to buy the CD. I can just burn my own (for 50 cents more).
2. I tend to listen to pretty esoteric music that is often hard to find, even on-line. There are albums I have and would gladly pay $25 or more for.
3. I listen to a lot of progressive groups that tend to only have 3 -5 tracks per CD.
Still, I'd happily accept an equivalent per minute charge (maybe 20-25 cents a minute?) to download anything I like.
However, the RIAA will not let anything happen that doesn't leave them completely in control to gouge us how they see fit, preferably by a pay-per-listen scheme that would grossly penalize those of us who listen to music 60 hours or more a week.
Rick
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
I doubt I would use Napster, if they required a monthly fee. I would most likely keep using services like audiogalaxy.com to find new artists. I would, however, pay napster a few cents for each new artist I found and liked. I suppose, if I pirated music over napster, though, I would rather pay $4.95/mo to napster (read: riaa) than $17-$25 for each cd.
Well, if you feel that subpar music isn't pay-for-able, shouldn't it also be unlisten-to-able? I'd think so. If you think it's good enough to listen to, then obviously it suits your needs, and you should need to pay.
the reason software like napster exists is that the RIAA doesn't supply a much needed/desired demand. it's economics 101. perhaps, this lawsuit is more about missed opportunities than anything else.
Yet another Napster article; nothing to see here. Could we please have that "beaten dead horse" icon for this story?
Again, the record companies don't need more money, they can do that all by themselves. They just want control.
The interesting thing here, though is that the judges sound sympathetic to Napster's plight. The RIAA is making the same tired old arguments without regard to what the law really says, or how Napster really works.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
charge us $100 per month! and implement security in the same manner as css (or ROT13 hehe). at that outragious price, peolple will have it cracked in a week... and what if napster decides not to pursue anyone who cracks their encryption?
is the RIAA gonna chase people for cracking NAPSTER'S weak encryption?
yes, i'm a moron. this was only meant to be taken seriously by lawyers!
but what if....
-- My Sig is a P228.
How does making Napter a pay service solve any of the issues here? Obviously it doesn't.
I knew that it would eventually get to the point where micropayment (per song) or subscription-based MP3 distribution would be instituted. I think it's the only way all parties can be satisfied. So long as they don't limit the amount of data I download, I'll pay up to $15 a month.
Consider this as well: Cam cooked this up as a free service, and changed the way many people looked at things. Imagine the potential profits of him making a business out of it! I say he deserves it.
Hey in case you didnt hear from Slim Shady, "Dr. Dre's dead you idiot he's locked in my basement". Oops that might be copyrighted, guess i better watch out for those RIAA Black Helicopters.
I mod down any one who says "I'm sure I will get modded down for this"
I like the idea of song by song basis depending, of course, on what they charge per song. How would you pay for them, credit cards don't work real well for smaller amounts.
Got Rhinos?