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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?
"
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.
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
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.
"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
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.
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?
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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 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
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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
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
Metallica may naive in going after Napster, but they at least have a more legitimate claim - they actually made the music that has their copyright on it.
--
We may not imagine how our lives could be more frustrating and complex—but Congress can. – Cullen Hightower
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
Fairtunes is a great idea, although personally I'd rather pay a per download fee or monthly subscription on a Napster-like service that cooperated with the production companies to provide more "legitimate" (read complete, well-digitized) copies of songs, that I could feel were ethically and legally okay. Right now, with less than $4K in "tips" to artists, Fairtunes is completely off the radar. But given the contracts that most bands have with their record companies, and the oddities involved, like advances, royalties, etc etc, I have to wonder that a tipping service isn't at least as fraught with potential legal complications as Napster-- especially if it can be shown that these "tips" are in fact payments for what would otherwise be considered pirated copies of songs.
Also, I'm a little skeptical of the need to cut out the record labels (or why I should care as a fan), if the bands themselves-- over and over again in the face of the obvious snow job they themselves are getting from the record companies-- won't refuse to sign with these jokers. There are so many small labels out there and the cost to produce a small run LP or CD is not that huge. Most of these bands seem perfectly willing to play the craps game that is rock & roll stardom. If they get screwed in that process, that's their problem. Maybe they should consider forming a union.
As a consumer, I'm only interested in Napster as a way to obtain rare tracks and sample or single tracks (and hopefully they can work out some legal way between a Napster-like service and the RIAA members for this to happen), although I suppose I'd get into downloading full CDs worth of tunes if available. But if I don't like the price of a new CD at the music retailer, I don't buy it. That's the underlying principle of capitalism, and in this case it's not like it deprives people of something important like housing, food, or their right to bear arms.
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