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P2P Piracy? Piffle!
jjohn writes: "Boston.com has an op-ed piece on peer-to-peer software like Napster. It concludes, not surprisingly, that
p2p software is in its infancy and isn't likely to credibly challenge
traditional distribution streams of copyrighted material any time soon."
Now there are royalties paid to songwriters (ala BMI) for radio play that Napster users don't pay, but it's easy to see how Napster increases physical CD sales, along the same lines as radio play. If a good portion of Napster users starting sharing entire albums (as was common using ftp and usenet), it might actually cut into CD sales.
If the Napster client had a feature to insert your CD and press "share whole cd", and it'd rip the entire disc (w/out skips), use CDDB to names the files and include ID3 tags, and encode with good settings using LAME.... well, it'd make for a very different network than the current Napster. Maybe when/if gnutella or some other truely p2p network takes off, this'd be a cool weekend hack on a free/open source client program.
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
What is really holding freenet back is the complete lack of a really sound search architecture. It's granted that in any system, only the top 5-10 percent will have a high enough bandwidth and reliabilty rating to be trusted in any long-term sense.
What I want in a freenet search engine:
1) List of hits.
2) Hits ranked by previous reliability ratings.
3) Size of Key.
4) Speed of node.
I also wouldn't mind ping times to node, current connections to node, etc.
Anyone else out there want to boff up some more suggestions? Perhaps a "Requested items list" could be hammered out and sent to the nice people at http://freenet.sourceforge.net/.
Rami
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rJames.org - illustration
If there were a "free music movement", similar to the "free software movement" (whatever that is), in which people made music meant to be distributed freely, nobody would wonder what possible legitimate use Napster could have.
Where is the RMS of the music world?
I think the problem might be that creating good music is just *a lot* harder than programming. (well, for *me* it is anyway.)
Bang the head that doesn't bang!
It's also very possible/likely that the RIAA can hire data hit-men to go out, and upload crap onto freenet, causing some of the symptoms you're seeing, which will ultimately keep freenet's adoption rate low.
We've already seen that with Napster, where you'd download some supposed track, and get either garbage, or an ad, instead of what the track was labeled.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
My girlfriend is starting a new job today. Up until last Friday she worked in an independent record store that is going out of business near a large college campus.
From the stories she's told me, while the recording industry has been doing a fine job of hobbling itself (higher prices, no returns for retailers, clueless/unfriendly/unhelpful store employees, clueless store owners), no small part of the demise is due to students downloading and burning their own CDs. People are ballsy enough to walk up to the counter, ask her for a CD, write down the tracklist, and them mention that they need to get the CD from Napster. Others loudly mention to their friends that there's no need to buy that CD; they'll get get it off the Internet for them.
Last year my girlfriend went to work for the store full-time and it was rare that she'd tell me she had a slow day. Since around March of 2000, that rarity became the norm. A store that on the average went from consistently making a couple of hundred bucks a day went down to $40-$60.
And it's not just her store. There's about 4 independent record stores in the area. The store she worked at is going out of business. The store across the street is not renewing its lease. Another store is going out of business.
Like I said, the recording industry is doing a fine job, largely independent of the Internet, to kill itself. However its practices have been around for awhile. The new variable of Napster and the Internet-at-large is having an impact.
My apologies for the stupid moderator that burned your karma: you should have gotten +5 insightful.
Perhaps you are right: thinking up new features for a non-existant search software is a waste of both our time, and the software developers time.
Perhaps not. Think about it this way, by my building such a list it helps the engineers in two ways: it shows that I support their software enough that I want to contribute in any way that I can (I can't code for balls), and perhaps I can think of something, as a user, that they may not have thought of. Are either of these things bad?
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Rami
rJames.org - illustration
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I'm aware that the software is "in beta" (as it has been for months already), but would somebody please tell me whether or not the project has lived up to any of its hype since it first came out? Are there any Freenet developers here who might be able to shed some light on what its current status is? Is there a concrete timeline where it will move from Beta into some semblance of production? Is there any attempt at creating a global list of keys or a search function (for those keys whose authors want them to be public)? The idea itself is incredibly interesting, but I'd like some assurance that for all the hype, we're not looking at another example of vaporware.
First, Freenet is _not_ "in beta". While I know the terms are abused completely, AFAIK "beta" generally means something that is close to being finished / feature complete. Freenet is still in the experimental stage, and likely to stay there for some time. As far as the hype goes, it has certainly lived up to everything that I have hyped it as (an interesting idea with a long way to go). In many ways, the amount of interest in the project amongst the press and geek circles has led to a hyping that has happened completely without the assistance of the actual developers - I don't know how many times I have a crinched after reading "Freenet will save the world" posts here on Slashdot. Of course Freenet is not a panacea, nothing ever is.
And no, there is no timeline for "some semblance of production". It is a free software project, and we are going to continue working on it on the rate we are able and can afford, and hopefully/maybe the day will come when it starts being truely useful. If I were to venture an optimistic guess I would say come back in a year, but don't quote me on that.
Is Freenet vaporware? There have certainly been days when I have been depressed enough by amount of work remains to feel that it actually is. Nothing is for sure in life, and nobody can be sure that Freenet will work as well we would like or even at all. So no, I can't give assurance to contrary, only say that we are working as hard as we can on glimmer of hope that we are really on to something. What more should I be doing for you?
As with most things in life, a balance must be struck or else abuse will run rampant. As I recall vaguely, last year some consumer advocacy (sp?) groups won (or I thought they won) a case against the big record companies, proving that they were overpricing CD's.
From my understanding it cost just pennies to produce a CD, and a few bucks to market it (say, $4-$5 total) Most markup is 50-70% above that so a CD should cost anywhere between $6-$9. Few CD's cost $9, most are in the $15-19 price range. (there are exceptions I know)
I have not seen a significant reduction in the price of CD's, has anyone else?
On to making my point. Until now there has been no counterweight to the high cost of purchasing CD's. Now there is. Just hook up to Napster and get your music for free. Normally you don't download the whole CD, just one or two songs. Napster is the first counterweight to the old business model.
The new economy isn't about technology so much as it's about a companies ability to be dynamic and USE technology to further increse profits. The recording industry, instead of finding new solutions is going back to old tactics (lawyers & courtrooms)
ok, two responses actually:
1. The companies blame the software because it is the easiest target, and also the highest profile [you get a hell of a lot more news coverage suing Napster than suing Joe 1337 h@X0r].
2. I am still somewhat surprised that folks, especially around here, don't see the larger issue... yes, some people will always want to have something for nothing, but I doubt 20 million plus Napster users [as an example] are ALL morally bankrupt hooligans out to rip folks off. From personal observation, I'd say most are just fed up with the music status quo, seeking either music that's actually worth $20 a CD [when CD media is dirt heap, and most musicians come almost as cheaply after the companies finish with them] or a fair price for what is currently available. Think for a moment here, the music companies make BILLIONS of dollars in profit. Taken as a whole, the music industry is larger than many COUNTRIES. This huge sum of extra money has to be coming from somewhere, and simple laws of nature state that for every dollar in profit they make, someone got ripped off a dollar [since by definition profit is a sum of money above and beyond manufacturing and distribution charges, meaning basically that profit is whatever the difference bhetween the price of the product is, and what it is actually worth]. So, in the end, aren't the companies to blame, since if they weren't screwing us all so harshly, most of us would be more content to do things the legit [ and typically easier] way?
-={(Astynax)}=-
-={(Astynax)}=-
"Darkness beyond Twilight"
FSP became the protocol du jour for illicit activity (and some legal activity as well) but things changed a bit. It was no longer easy to find sites and they often involved bartering, give me a good piece of software, a good site or a good picture and I'll give you a link to a good site. The BBS scene had this already of course, they often enforced upload to download ratios.
FSP dried up as well (I don't even know if FSP is still around) due to the same pressures as FTP clients. Other peer-to-peer architectures showed up, Hotline and others. They all were self restricting in that it wasn't automatic that you could access copyrighted materials. You had to click banner adds, submit software and agree that you weren't a Fed (har har, has anybody even researched whether a federal agent has to reply truthfuly, especially to a form letter?)
Napster changed this a bit, it was only meant for one thing, and that was to facilitate the exchange of music. It didn't enforce restrictions on what you downloaded and since it wasn't a true P2P, more of a peer to server to peer, it was easy to find what you wanted. The central server handled the searching and host details for you. It was possible to get what you wanted without worrying about keeping up with the scene. It's a tool that the adepts would enjoy using, but didn't have a bar of entry that will keep out the casual users.
I could easily set up my dad with Napster on his Windows box if he were the type of person who listened to music. He probably wouldn't even realize that there were copyright issues involved. It's easy enough and risk free enough that he probably wouldn't care. Most people won't lift a CD out of a record store, the risk is too high and there's a stigma attached to it.
The agencies such as the RIAA are scared, and they should be. Previously they could rob their customers blind since most people really had no comcept of what the value of their products were. With prevalent sharing of music people will realize that the distribution costs are minimal, there will still be some fuzziness on production costs but not enough fuzziness to justify paying over a buck per song.
The present scenario where a bag of money is handed over to the RIAA companies, who grab most of it, then handed down the corporate chain with each successive person getting a smaller and smaller cut until the artist (the person who actually CREATED the music, who had SKILLS that most people do NOT have) gets only a penny or two will have to end. Maybe not tomorrow, but soon.
Chris Kuivenhoven is a thief, beware
try out bearshare. It also gives you quite a bit more info than nappy, including country of origin for the computers it connects to.
It alleviates the problems or complaints the articles author had with the Gnutella network (manually finding servers). I've found it to be rather good, but quite a bit slower than Napster. The protocol seems to be coming along, but I believe it will always require more bandwidth than a napster like central server. Regardless, as broadband continues to roll out, these services will only get better, more pervasive, and even more difficult to stop. They will replace or compete with mainstream broadcast media within 10 years. Unless those folks decide to compete seriously in individual digital file delivery.
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Please enter the code at the bottom of page 317 of the liner notes.
My other sig is extremely clever...
See Free Haven for resources on real P2P development.
When a Court orders the shutting off of Napster, it shuts off the server(s) and the system is gone. The judge doesn't have to enter your home to shut down the whole system.
On correct implementations of P2P the court would have to shut down at least N-1 nodes of an N-node network (or break links so that no 2 nodes can talk to each other).
I have a question: Why does the media continue to blame software that can be useful for filesharing and maybe even enterprise use in the future, for piracy? So, P2P doesnt work all that great yet. Big deal! The pirates still have FTP and usenet. It amazes me how the media is so quick to blame a computer program for the theft of copyrighted materials. Seems like its the convenient thing to do these days. Shouldn't the person who steals the material be scrutinized, and not the software that is used?
Given all of the recent cases of distribution of copyrighted works, there is still no good solution that I can see. Years ago when copying tapes and pirating software was in its infancy, the companies just wrote it off as a loss and didn't think much of it since it was a relatively insignificant percentage.
:)
Now that music and software piracy is really taking off, they're starting to actually look into solutions. And from my point of view, I think that there is no solution, and it's all going to come down to the trust/honor thing. The record companies obviously can't prevent digital distribution from taking place, and they're going to actually address the issue soon rather than turning their backs to any possible solution that isn't 100% in their favor.
I think that the only current solution is offering the material online for download with a fee, and just assuming that the majority of users will get it this way legally, rather than resorting to piracy. Granted, there are always going to be some people who will copy the material from others, but the same can be said about people who steal music from record stores. Something's going to have to change, and the ball is in the industry's court.
But then again, we all knew this
This article pretty much gets the facts right. Unfortunately, it really doesn't matter. The Big Media companies don't want to hear this. They want people to believe that piracy is absolutely rampant on the Internet, that they're losing billions in sales of CDs and DVDs, that record stores are going out of business because of MP3 trading. Because if they can successfully make that case, they can get legislation passed -- like the DMCA -- that gives them more and more control over content and distribution on the internet.
Companies like Bertelsmann and Warner and the rest of the MPAA/RIAA crowd want to turn the internet into yet another passive, advertisement-filled medium. They don't want people - users, consumers, eyeballs - to decide what to send across the net and what is available for viewing or hearing. They want to decide that for you, and make you have to pay for all of it.
And the best way they can do that is to demonize the freedom of the internet, to show that really the consumer is better off if they run everything. So they don't want to believe that Gnutella doesn't work very well, and that Napster isn't hurting sales.
And they don't want you to believe that either.
The article points out that most of the discussion about peer-to-peer focusses on Napster and Gnutella which pretty well misses the point of P2P entirely.
Well worth the read. (The comparision between the meme-spaces of the Free Software Foundation and the Open Source Initiative are also quite interesting.)
From the link you quoted, my emphasis:
;-)
(talking about Mojo exchange) "At that time, the debtor pays up by transferring a digital coin from his account on ***the Mojo Nation token server*** to the creditor account."
For a mojo to have any value as a unit of currency, it has to be a scare resource - you can't just let users create their own. Hence, it must be controlled by an entity, in this case AZI. If AZI vanished off the face of the earth, the value of a mojo goes with it pretty quickly - although your stash amount (if signed by AZI) could be validated without AZI, it couldn't be modified. Hence, my comment that it is very close to Napster in style.
Better than Mojo (IMHO), is karma
Mike.
Tales from behind the Lagom Curtain
(cirka 1994)
The Internet works -- just not all that well. And that's good news for BBS and online services like Compuserv and Prodigy.
Mind you, the concept retains its geeky appeal. It's not just the prospect of communicating with anybody you want, phone companies be damned. There's also the techy coolness of the idea -- direct linkages between millions of computers, without the clumsy mediation of some central BBS service. A slick idea, but devilishly hard to execute.
[...]
Keep in mind that the Internet is still under development and bound to get better. But as long as it remains a pure network system, with no central service or company to keep tabs on the network, the Internet will probably never be as slick and efficient as AOL. Which is why Internet style communication may not be quite such an apocalyptic peril after all.
> Napster is not peer-to-peer, it is client-server architecture.
If it's wrong to call Napster p2p, it's equally wrong to call it client-server. Napster is a mix.
Traditional Client-server would be something like FTP - one server, lots of direct connections with clients. Star shaped topology.
Pure p2p is gnutella - god awful topology, connections all over the place, all nodes are "equal".
Napster is a bit of both - client-server for queries and direct communication for transfers. This is an important point, because if Napster was purely client-server, they would be hosting content, and thus clearly would have been shut down a long time ago for holding all those mp3s.
> Free Net and Mojo Nation are P2P.
Doesn't Mojo nation have a central broker for handling Mojo's (ie a bank)? It's just like napster in that sense.
Mike
Tales from behind the Lagom Curtain
The author of this article has a point.
Peer-to-peer file downloads are still a long way off from being useful in any way.
I'm really curious whether or not people have actually managed to use Freenet in the way it was intended. My own attempts at using the network found that: (a) There are almost no reliable lists of keys/files available. This is important since the network is not searchable. Without a list of keys, Freenet is a useless exercise in creating encrypted data that can never be decrypted. (b) The network is slow to use and even when I attempt to find published keys, they don't work 80% of the time and another 10% of the time it's too slow to be useful.
Thus I get about a 10% success rate in grabbing files from Freenet. This is hardly a good sign.
I'm aware that the software is "in beta" (as it has been for months already), but would somebody please tell me whether or not the project has lived up to any of its hype since it first came out? Are there any Freenet developers here who might be able to shed some light on what its current status is? Is there a concrete timeline where it will move from Beta into some semblance of production? Is there any attempt at creating a global list of keys or a search function (for those keys whose authors want them to be public)? The idea itself is incredibly interesting, but I'd like some assurance that for all the hype, we're not looking at another example of vaporware.
Keep in mind that the entire model only works if people actually *request* the keys. My understanding of the model is that files only move from place to place if they are requested with some regularity. Otherwise they just sit, taking up disk space on somebody's machine, until their lack of use causes them to be overwritten by more important keys. For the moment, all I've seen is hype about this project with very little substance.
I agree we are on the beta version of life with p2p. However, how fast it grows is a dependent on three things.
/. type people are running broadband or Tx, Dx type lines)
The first, as with everything network related is bandwidth, bandwidth, and more bandwidth. Most of the materials being sent around today are large. Correct that VERY large. Most of the connections are small, very small (56k is the upper end, only
The second, is ease of use. The assessment of freenet is accurate. It does have a way to go, but look for it to get there. Dedicated people are working on it and like Gnutella it is growing. Gnutella is much closer, and it is not a stretch for anyone to go to gnutellahosts.com to start the link. Windows update, on-line registration, etc. has gotten people use to this. A little tweak to integration and people would not know it was even happening.
Third and probably the most concerning is the legal issues. ISPs may be protected, but it is only very light gray whether individuals are. It could and will be argued at some point that you allowed your computer to be used for illegal activity.
Will they sue/arrest 9 million Gnutella users? No. Just 10 or 20 really public cases where winning is certain. The worst of the worst which will be used to paint the entire user base as criminal "@ackers", out to steal your files, send you viruses, etc...
Hi! This is the Sig, blatantly attached to the end of this comment.
Well, it's definately calming to know that us poor software engineers have some journalists in our pockets. I guess the corporations can't own EVERYTHING.
Right?
(This post may reflect my general distaste for corporations, the media, and everything in general. Then again, it may not.)
rJames.org - illustration