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Shawn Fanning's Account Of Napster
ttol writes "Take a look at this speech Shawn Fanning did to the Congressional Committee on October 9th. He explains how Napster came about, what his visions of the digital future will be, and how everyone can be involved. It's a good read."
The Napster protocol has been reverse engineered up the wazoo. For all intents and purposes, the protocol is Open Source now. Ever heard of OpenNap? Ever heard of Napigator? Do you guys even know what you're talking about?
Shawn Fanning was a piglet in a little hacker crew called "Havoc". Anyone who can find the obscure sources to some havoc work will see his sig in a couple. He didn't go around looking to program. He grew up a skript kiddie, using the power of smurf (when it was new) among other stuff to pull down sites and create netsplits. He learns how to copy the basic structure of a C program using berkley sockets and touting the superiority of linux over winblows. His uncle, John, is a friggen millionaire. Starts giving him shit left and right, first a computer, then a friggen bmw, all while he's still in high school. Just adding to the ego that was blowing up with his skript kiddie exploits. Then he goes to Northeastern. Guess what? It's real world coding time and he can't cut it. His grades start sucking real hard. He doesn't leave northeastern because he wants to develop Napster. He leaves because he's an inch away from being kicked out. BTW, Napster was originally a console-based program developed on linux and it was crap. Without even some kind of a real database backend. Just a dam hard-coded proprietary (sucky) db format of sorts. But while at NE, he starts getting a clue about CPP and MFC. And berkley sockets work just as well under MS as they do linux (except for the holy of holies, the IP_HNDRCL or whatever it is flag to let the kiddies sniff. But oh well). So now he gives napster a gui, shows it as its being developed to his uncle. His uncle, who didn't realize what crap it was at the time, says "okay, let's try this as a biz". They go out to california and continue development. Along the way shawn joins up with an old havoc buddy in CA. Together they get the first bits of napster up. Then people let shawn know what crap it is, but help him develop it further. Such as using hash functions to help db searches faster. Eventually working his way into a commerical db backbone rather than his proprietary crap. Then Metalica gets wind of this whole "MP3" thing and gets their first introduction to it via Napster. Whoever was the first person to show Metalica napster is the _REAL_ person responsible for Napster's success. So Metalica gets pissed, they create a lot of press. Now the Napster/Metalica case becomes a microcosm for the whole dam "Hackers on the net / Authority" battle. Enter in more publicity from Doc Dre and Eminem, plus the fact that the DOT-COM industry is SCREAMING right now and ALL news agencies are looking to be the first to crack the next "BIG" dot-com story and you have a media frenzy. Not because the program is any good. But because Metalica sues them. Now all the teeny-boppers out there, the 14 year olds who listen to Britney Spears, they start feeling this "napster" thing is the new "hip" thing since its what everyone else is trying to stop. So for no other reason than because adults in society said it was wrong, they start moving to napster. And thus we have the napster of today. There is no teen-genius here. This is not the next bill gates. The whole scenario was shaped and paved by the media. Is my opinion biased? yeap.
You do realize that labels 'loan' the money to make these recordings, they do not 'give' it. The only thing that comes close to a benefit to a contract with a recording label is nationwide/international distribution, and advertising. Everything else (and I mean *everything*) is just a raping.
Internet == free distribution, and to an extent, free advertising.
- Making copies of CDs and sending them to totally fnarking strangers is illegal. Period. There is absolutely no ambiguity here.
- The people who think otherwise are either letting their passions cripple their understanding of law and reality, or else they are hopelessly ignorant or somehow mentally impaired.
- That being said, it certainly looks like MP3 in general and Napster in particular are actually boosting CD sales, which is hardly surprising since MP3s are only substitutes for CDs for people with either shitty speakers or even shittier hearing, and because fnarking radio has been doing the same damn thing for years with the same effect.
- Ergo, the RIAA should just roll over and be happy for the increased sales instead of getting greedy and killing the goose that laid the golden egg. This would have the added benefit of leaving all the "copyright law doesn't apply to me" crowd with nothing to spew bullshit about.
Please note that I'm in favor of reducing copyright to its original duration, and I think both the RIAA and most IP laws are monumentally stupid. But it irritates the bejesus out of me seeing people lose the ability to understand blitheringly simple laws because they're having a gimme-fit. "Wanting it real bad" isn't a legal argument.--
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
That's the way I always envisioned the Internet should work. Ideally we all need hard-core 24x7 links and more sophisticated firewall software at home and things will be just swell.
The average PC is a very powerful machine but it's usually thought of as a "low end system". Really it's more hardcore than any of the old systems that ran on arpa.net etc so if you think of your home machine in terms of a "node", rather than just a client or server, we could build a much cooler, more user-oriented Internet.
Lots of good free DNS services would help too. I guess these will come in time, just as free email and free hosting services etc are now available (in the peer-to-peer Net, services like outsourced hosting and email would, of course, be totally redundant - we can do all that on our own machines)
No... i think it'd only be the very vocal minority that would attempt to spark an outcry. The rest of the users would just go "Oh, they got shut down? Bummer..." and move on with their lives. Kind of like when you get a bonus you weren't expecting, you're all psyched to spend it because it's money that you wouldn't have had in the first place, but once it's gone, oh well.
Of course the record industry is pissed at and scared of Napster. Napster is giving away for free something that costs the industry hundreds of millions of dollars to create. If Napster's allowed to flourish, that means that really, in the short term, cool, everyone gets free music, but in the longer term, how much more music do people think will actually come out? And how much of that will actually sound okay, recording wise? If labels aren't to exist, then there goes the money that artists would have used to pay for recording their albums in a nice studio rather than in their basements with one microphone set up in the middle of their setup...
Correction, it costs the record industry hundreds of millions of dollars to distribute and promote their product. The Internet has reduced the cost of distribution to mere bandwidth and storage, and Napster has improved even that by utilizing users' own bandwidth and storage that would otherwise go idle, and included a forum for word-of-mouth promotion to boot.
Believing that artistic expression would somehow disappear if people didn't get paid is preposterous; Art was around long before anyone got paid for making it. If anything, cutting off the profits of obnoxious industry engineered pop stars will make room for true artists who are dedicated enough to make a living form what they do by making good music that people will pay for whether its free or not.
The cost of distributing music and media in general got a whole lot cheaper. Railroads were the evil corporations of a century before because they controlled the only means to move goods over long distances. With the advent of the automobile, people could move their own goods without paying the robber barons, and the railroads went to the brink of ruin.
Aint that Slashdot's Business Model?
Are either making *that* much on advertising?
-Ben
I think it will do the same to the movie industry as it will do to the music industry, make it much more competitive. And I'm pretty dang sure as "consumers" that's what we want and totally sure that it's exactly what the consortiums don't.
--
+&x
but that makes it too complicated. Napster's biggest asset is how simple the whole process is (and all that music). I think the simplest thing to do is have the judge rule that individuals sharing music with other individuals without any monetary exchange whatsoever is perfectly legal, just like it is now. The market will adjust, and the whole point of record companies (telling people what to buy, i.e. the largest part of the cost of CDs) will be reduced back to what it was originally, making good recordings.
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+&x
As far as recording in a nice studio goes, I've done some recording before for a band that I did sound for and it does not take hundreds of thousands of dollars to have an awesome studio. You can have more than enough studio for under $10,000. The recordings I made were made with equipment that totaled under $3000 (not counting the band's instruments), and honestly the sound quality is cleaner than some of the mainstream bands' cd's that are out today. The only thing that record labels do is distribute. If an alternative distribution method came up, then record labels wouldn't even be needed. Just people that were willing to work in a small private studio, and bands could hire people (not companies) to do that easily.
>I ordered a Windows programming book over
>Amazon.com to learn what I needed and wrote the
>client software.
Does this mean that the RIAA will now be suing Amazon.com?
don't blame him being fascinated by programming, but it would be good if kids like him were finding time in their lives to do sports and other social
activities, not just hacking.
Why do we never hear 'I don't blame him for being fascinated by sports, but it would be good if kids like him/her were finding time in their lives to do some hacking and intellectual activities, not just hacking.'
What is the fascination with physical = good, mental = not as good that some people seem to have? Why should he play a sport or socialize? I apparently finds no internal desire for such activites.
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
The PR firm that wrote the speech for him must suck... if they honestly wanted people to believe the Fanning was speaking his mind they would not have put such gems as:
This synergy of technologies created a platform..
-- Point? None! Cob.
Labels only recoup monies paid out if the albums sell. If the band doesn't go anywhere and they get dropped from their contract, they don't have to pay back money for recording time.
Stop listening to Courtny Love, it isn't all a rape.
Unlike traditional web-based search engines, the Napster system cannot index files based on their content and organize them in a meaningful way for the users.
and...
When Napster is able to implement a business model, there will be other benefits for artists as well, including payments to rightsholders.
So, there is no way to know if it's copyrighted, but if it is we'll pay the guy...
"I told you a million times not to exaggerate!"
I'm afraid Fanning makes it clear that his vision was the sharing of Copyrighted materials (in other words-- piracy). He basicly admits, multiple times, that he wanted to assist people in sharing their MP3 files with others.
Now a question.. he claims napster is peer-to-peer. Why then is there a central site? he makes it sound like Gnutella but I've heard its quite different. Can someone whose looked into both explain?
Actually, its befasue Napster makes money that its in trouble. Theres lots of money to be amde, as i udnerstand it, off of ad space on the central site.
,ther eis only "amature priacy' and its a lot harder to get any recompense from the courts.
You don't see Gnutella under legal attack. Thsi is because of two things:
(1) No central point to attack
and equally
(2) No money chnaging hands. Where there is no money
Its the for profit nature of Napster that has them in the hot seat. And IMO that's as it should be. Tehy shouldnt be allwoed to make money off of the acto of stealing someoen elses work, even if they aren't the hands doing the stealing. They ARE the monetary benenficiaries.
or HyperG.
**sigh**
There was proof that just having the right answer doesn't mean you'll win the war. (Ofcourse, there's lots of other proof, VHS tapes for instance...)
Testimony from other witnesses at the hearing is available here.
You can exclude most Napster stories by going to your preferences and checking "Hide 'Music' stories". Granted, some Napster stories make it into topic: Technology, but most are in topic: Music.
Will I retire or break 10K?
oh come on. that's a weak argument - even though its constanly being used by the record industry. if the profit stream from selling rights to listen to past performances (ie, those plastic discs with music on it) dries up, they'll seek a new business model and stream.
its inevitable - the only question is WHEN, not IF.
its right and fair to charge for the distribution of the plastic discs, the store space to shelve them, the wages to have folks sell them to you and put them into pretty plastic bags; but when music has near-zero overhead in the new Inet distribution model (ftp's cost next to nothing) its not right and fair to aply the 'sell physical plastic' rules to the 'download in a few minutes and store on your own media' rules.
--
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"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
I have a comment.
Why must the record companies be involved at all?
In your idea, they don't even have to do anything to get paid, so why ARE they being paid?
I think you made the mistake that 'in order for an artist to make money, a record company must first make money and take a cut of it'.
--
Soma: because a gramme is better than a damn.
Napster is a throwback to the original structure of the Internet. Rather than build large servers that house information, Napster relies on communication between the personal computers of the members of the Napster community
Honestly i think that is the best line for ANY of the P2P applications out there right now. The internet has become rather vast and company orientated. finding just something amusing or some odd bit of information is a pain in the ass. Just think of what could be accomplished by merging a newsgroup style listing with P2P applications. Finding your music would be a snap, finding that odd ball info would be as ez as connecting to a group that might have it. the scaling problem of Gnutella might even have a chance of being fixed. There is no greater resource than people and P2P applications take advantage of this. Imagine a app thats a cross between Ask Jeeves and Gnutella. You ask a questoin, other people see it, if they know the answer they might answer you with it.
Shhh, it's just the noizes in your head.
It's tempting to see Napster as a counterstrike against the media monoliths and their misuse of the intelprop laws. Napster is certainly playing that role, but that's not their purpose. They're a for-profit company too, and their investors didn't put up all that money just to make life difficult for Time-Warner-AOL-Turner-EMI-moretocome.
Will Napster try to make money by collecting royalties? Don't be absurd. Napster can't make money off of the distribution of copyrighted music for the same reason they can't prevent said distribution: they don't know what specific tracks their users are sharing, and have no way of finding out.
(I'm suprised somebody hasn't suggested filtering software. But I guess it's too clear that you can't filter music. Of course, you can't filter web pages either, but it's easy to pretend you can.)
So how will Napster make money? You got me. Fanning's statement is, as falloutboy points out, very vague about their business model. I'm sure that was deliberate. If you wear an electronic badge to work, you know (or should know) that the main purpose of all that security is usually not to hide your technology from your competitors. Usually, your competitors have much the same technolgy. What you don't want your competitors to know is what you plan to do with that technology.
__________
How come Napster didn't publish any of the questions and answers from the hearing? Did Fanning get reamed and end up looking bad or stupid or something? Since the recording industry no doubt fed a lot of the questions to their favorite Senatorial stooges, I think it would be interesting to see what was said to him and how he reacted.
...if noone listens. Money talks. If Napster isn't lobbying the committee, they can kiss their company goodbye.
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
It hasn't stopped growing since. Today the Napster community numbers over thirty-two million; for the past four months, it has been growing at the rate of one million new users each week.
Now, if they shut down Napster, not all of those said 23 million users would rebel, but a good lot of them would, and have already.
The way I see it is Napster, and especially streamed mp3's, are the radio broadcasting of the new millenium. and Lars, when you read this, I see you sitting up on your mighty drum riser, with your mighty record company. We may use the same headphones, but I am the one down here, in the band, playing at the corner bar, breathing much more cigarette smoke than I care too, standing on a stage that barely fits the guitar amps. Remember what its like to be without money, not being able to feed oneself, cause the drunks sitting at the bar, are too drunk to notice the tip jar? Ending the night, owing the bartender more money than you made. Rolling up your own beer stained guitar cords, and mic cables.
If you and your mighty attorney's manage to kill Napster, will be keeping the status quo, as it grows into one big behemoth AOL-TimeWarner media megalopolis. Yes, the future with Napster may be scary to you now, but wait till the $$ starts flowing in.
I want equal access to the 'airwaves', and to the distribution channels. Napster SHOULD be the way to get it. Now get out of the way, Lars, because I will kick over your drum set on my way out.
-- "Perceptions create reality. By changing your perceptions you change your reality."
Sen. Orrin Hatch seemed to be very impressed with Fanning, and his "collaboration without litigation" speech. Still, everybody but Fanning at the hearing lauded the DMCA and the protection it grants corps to do business on the net.
I'd rather have someone respond than be modded up.
(well, i thought it was funny.)
-legolas
i've looked at love from both sides now. from win and lose, and still somehow...
can be found here.
arnald
>if not impossible, to implement using the
>technology Napster has introduced
Unless i'm mistaken Napster isn't new techology. It's glorified IRC. People have been putting MP3's on BBS's for years, with searching, albeit centralised storage. But prior to Napster's sucess there were many peer-to-peer systems (DCC anyone?).
Now Napster doesn't allow people to break copyright anymore than the phone system allows criminals to break laws. When telephone systems came out many politicians wanted the things dismantled as criminals could use them to coordinate their devious plots. It's the devious plots that are wrong, not the telephone.
Napster doesn't "allow" as that's the wrong word - it's completely agnostic. Wrapster showed that it doesn't even have anything to do with MP3's necessarily, Napster just involves a searchable database of filenames, chat, and direct connections.
Now as for piracy being your definition of "illegally make use of resources without paying for them". Well, "illegally" is the word at play here - and that's very different to empowering the artist for what they want.
Radio stations, for years, have been playing music regardless of whether the artist wants their music distributed. Artists are powerless in this regard. Radio stations pay some fee to the government, the artists don't get a cent.
AFAIK, Artists have never been able to "track the authorship of the clips" and it's unreasonible to expect such a thing. From minstrels singing each other's tunes, to someone just playing music loudly, to our local radio stations having "TAPE THIS!" nights. Artists have never been able to track it once it goes out of their hands.
I prefer the web for music too. But if only servers weren't so scared of hosting the evil MP3 format. My friend's band had to move to MP3 dot Communist after the free host kept deleting that files. She should have just gave them the .pdf extension and asked her audience to rename the bloody things.
ps. The AC who's talking about swashbuckling parrots and eyepatches and such - don't be such a wanker - Arrr! arrr! ARRR!
--Giving to trolls for the benefit of us all
and before long I gave up sports so I could spend more of my spare time at the computer learning about programming.
I don't blame him being fascinated by programming, but it would be good if kids like him were finding time in their lives to do sports and other social activities, not just hacking.
--meredith
--meredith
Sometimes a scream is better than a thesis
And in the future, who knows, but the concept of negotiated royalties is certainly difficult, if not impossible, to implement using the technology Napster has introduced. Without being able to track the authorship of the clips, how do you ensure an artist can get anything but a flat sum from Napster? Would that be fair? Should a singer singing a cover version of "American Woman" be paid the same as a group singing an original two hour rock opera?
In both senses, Fanning has been disengenous. He claims that he has always wanted to help the artists from the beginning, yet introduced a tool whose primary purpose was to facilitate music piracy(1) [and his article pretty much explictly explains the history in terms that can't be interpreted as anything but.], and he's suggesting that he can magically wave his wand and introduce a business model that will give artists what they want, when in practice he's going to have to radically change the technologies and protocols involved to do so - creating an entirely different business and product in the process.
I agree with your comments about the little guy, or at any rate any artist who produces something and wants to get it out there [I assume this, because presumably any "big" guy out there who's sufficiently ripped off is going to end up being the little guy.] I appreciate that it's possible to find legitimate (that is, legal, with the full consent of the artist) uses for Napster - with reservations I'll explain in a moment, but Fanning's actions do not suggest he's on the side of anyone but the copiers IMO.
I would argue that the world wide web, with personal web pages created by struggling artists, and fan sites/review sites providing the pointers, almost certainly offer a more reliable and sane way of getting free music out there than Napster can or ever will. That, after all, is the WWW doing what it does best, the sharing and dissemination of information. The MP3s are only part of the information.
[And on a slightly off topic note, to finish my rant on this, I really wish - if Slashdot readers who post pro-Napster are representative of the bulk of the free(speech) geekdom movement - that the concentration was on fights where free as in speech and not free as in beer were the copyright issues. To me, the fight over DeCSS genuinely is about fair use and freedom. There's no question that the bulk of DeCSS uses are legitimate and not to do with making copies of stuff so other people don't have to buy them. But with Napster and DeCSS so often mentioned in the same breath here, the entire argument about copyright reform is being corrupted to be something about nobody paying for anything, which is not something many people are going to support.)
* [1] To help out the AC who had trouble with this phrase, the word "piracy" has been used for many decades to describe those who illegally make use of resources without paying for them, those of us who agree the term theft is inappropriate for copyright infringement, the fact that this definition has become a standard meaning for the word "piracy" and the fact that nobody would hear the word and assume the usage refers to the "other" definition because of the extreme differences, use the term instead. For more information, please consult a dictionary.
--
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
I would like to posit that Napster actually limits music piracy. I myself can be considered a MP3 pirate. I have downloaded hundreds of gigabytes in the past 4 years. I am unscrupulous about my d/ling. I will not claim to only d/l stuff I own or d/l to just test out an artist before I buy. I d/l to keep. If I like it a lot, I burn the music to CD so I can listen to it in my car, etc.
My favorite thing to d/l is full albums. This is the best. I would go on IRC, chat to some people, find a good site (which are usually themed by musical genre) and d/l until my heart's content. If I wanted to pirate Top40 singles I could tape the radio. The full album is where the best music lies. A full hour of music.
Since the advent of Napster my available resources have decreased dramatically. The majority of Napster's content is singles. Sure this is great if you want to own "Karma Police" or "Hit Me Baby One More Time." But without listening to the full album, one misses out on songs like "Electioneering" and those hidden gems on !N'Sync's album that never made it to TRL. Few people share full albums on Napster. A full album is what one pays for when they buy the music from the retail store.
To make things worse, the largess of ftp sites that existed in the past have almost vanished. Napster has taken all of their business, so to speak. The ones that remain are consumed with making money, and require each to user to apply to various internet pyramid schemes in order to make them money. A greedy pirate is just plain dispicable.
So to sum things up: Napster is actually benefical to the recording industry in some aspects. Listeners still need to pay money if they want to buy the whole album. Due to MP3's inferiority to CDs (by a slight margin), buying a CD is still a better option if one really likes an artist's music. And with Napster's excellent promotional aspects, it is, if anything, a boon to the RIAA.
WTF are Shawn Fannings opinions being given importance? He is simply the cute mascot of Napster.
He owns very little of the company. His uncle owns a huge chunk of the company. CEO Hank Barry (a "suit" just like the music industry execs he is supposedly battling on the people's behalf) owns a huge chunk. Shawn Fanning doesn't even have a role to play in the day-to-day running of the company. 1 He doesn't set long-term policies for the company.
Extract from Businessweek: John got 70%; Shawn got 30%. ''We all knew from the beginning that this would be huge,'' recalls John Fanning. While Shawn is the public face of Napster, today he owns less than 10% of the upstart and is not involved in the company's business decisions. Shawn Fanning has no senior management position and isn't on the board. Mostly, he works on developing the company's software.
the Businessweek article
WTF is he trotted out all the time (with his trademark baseball cap)?
They are using SF simply to portray the impression that the big bad music industry execs are trying to squash the "innovative" company run by a 19-year old. And remember there is not a single article which doesn't mention SF's age.
Give me a break. This company Napster is run by suits (I'm sure they have more lawyers than programmers there) backed by huge sums of venture capital.
Note to Napster suit reading this: Stop pimping SF to win sympathy from the geeks.
Hopefully by Shawn speaking to Congress on this issue, people will realize that it's not Napster that's the *real* problem, but the recording companies/RIAA that have a stranglehold on the US music industry. Do you honestly believe that Napster would be as big a deal if the recording industry monopoly had priced CD's half-ass reasonably to begin with? Or instead of the industry going into a fuss over the use of mp3 technology, simply embraced it. They can't maintain their monopoly and cd price fixing forever.
I wasn't lucky enough to be able to see Shawn speak where I live, Salt Lake City, Utah. But a few friends of mine were. They said he presented himself very professionally, and made a good speech. Everyone listened to him and seemed to respect his ideas.
If you read about what Napster is, it sort of brings the whole thing into perspective. This isn't a giant plot to put the music industry out of business, nor is it going to make Ulrich's kids go hungry.
It's a well designed program for sharing information, specifically music of all kinds.
Good job Shawn
i go to northeastern university. I knew Shawn, somewhat. Trust me, he was smart. bored, not stupid.
-mark
Welp, I'm the first to admit that I have ALOT of MP3's, and I'm also absolutely willing to admit that a good, if not overwhelming portion of them are indeed illegal. However, I think that any attempt to *JUSTIFY* things like Napster is foolish. Having MP3's of copyrighted material that you haven't purchased, irregardless of what your ultimate intentions are, is illegal. Unfortunately, Napster has turned a pretty minor issue into an all-out witch-hunt, with the music industry and various recording artists declaring Jihad against MP3, programs that facilitate trading of MP3's, and people who have MP3's. I think we've passed any point where the music industry and the illegal music scene can ever find any "common ground." There is no "solution" to how Napster has affected the music industry. Sure the record companies are dirty price-gougers, and sure a huge number of people end up purchasing the albums of MP3's they have, and sure lots of artists support MP3, but in the end, all there is to do is accept the fact, if we're playing the illegal music game, that we *ARE* breaking the law in most cases, and stop trying to justify our actions.
"Cut word lines. Cut music lines. Smash the control images. Smash the control machine." - William S. Burroughs
Shawn made Business Week's E-Biz 25, and he had some Q&A with ZDNET.au not too long ago. It's fun to watch his public discourse over only a couple months when he himself is only a handful of dozens of months old himself.
-- Anne Marie
They can just use the standard dot-com business model:
can be found her e. It was an excellent hearing, and Shawn did a good job of explaining his position.
When Napster is able to implement a business model, there will be other benefits for artists as well, including payments to rightsholders.
This is vague, at best. At worst, its a good reason for Napster to be shut down until the business model is a reality.
What kind of business model could be implemented here? Royalty payment to the copyright owner for each instance of a song being downloaded? Ambiguous filenames could be a big problem there. What if the file is the song name, and happens to be the same as a song by another artist? Who gets paid?
Anyone know a better way?