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More Napster Than You Can Shake A Copy-Protected MP3 At
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Napster Announces Key Building Block of New Business Model Bertelsmann Subsidiary Digital World Services Will Work with Napster to Enable Secure Management of Transferred Files
Redwood City, CA and New York, NY (February 16, 2001) -- Napster today announced progress on the development of a key aspect of the technology necessary to implement a new, membership-based business model supported by the recording industry. The solution, which enables secure administration of transferred files within a peer to peer structure, has been in the works for several months and will be implemented by Digital World Services (DWS), a Bertelsmann subsidiary with extensive experience in innovative digital rights management solutions.
"Today's announcement underscores one key fact: the real questions about Napster's future are economic, not technical or legal. Our alliance with Bertelsmann and the Bertelsmann eCommerce Group was our first important step toward a model that makes payments to artists, songrwriters and other rightsholders. This solution is further evidence of the seriousness of our effort to reach an agreement with the record companies that will keep Napster running, reliable, and enjoyable," said Hank Barry, Napster's Interim CEO.
Barry reiterated that Napster hopes to move to a membership-based service as soon as possible.
The solution the two companies have been working on will maintain the peer to peer structure of Napster, but will allow in the future restrictions to be placed on what can be done with the transferred files, such as limits on the ability to burn music files onto CDs.
"To work with Napster on the design and operation of a key component of its new business model is an extraordinary opportunity for DWS," said Johann Butting, CEO of Digital World Services. "The successful combination of Napster's very compelling user friendliness and popularity with an architecture that addresses the needs of rightsholders will be a very significant step for secure sharing of content over the Internet."
The technology will enable the sharing of MP3 files to which a protection layer will be added as the file is transferred from one Napster user to the other. The Napster client will be enhanced to support this protection. The solution will not use any existing multi-purpose DRM but a new security architecture that is specially tailored to the requirements of file-sharing.
"We are extremely pleased to partner with Digital World Services in bringing together and operating a key aspect of the technology we need to preserve file sharing and build an industry-supported business model. Through this agreement with DWS and the work we have done together to date, the architecture for one important component of our new model is now in place; we are building out this aspect of the system," Hank Barry added.
"We have been working with Digital World Services for several months to design this solution. They really understand the technologies involved and are sensitive to the user experience. We are confident that the new system will allow us to accomplish key goals of the record companies in terms of restricting use, while still maintaining and improving the performance and service levels of the Napster system," said Napster CTO Eddie Kessler.
About Napster Napster is the world's leading person-to-person file sharing community. Napster provides music enthusiasts with an easy-to-use, high quality service for discovering new music and communicating their interests with other members of the Napster community. Napster's software application enables users to locate and share music files through a user-friendly interface, and features instant messaging, chat rooms, and Hot List User Bookmarks. Shawn Fanning, then an eighteen year-old freshman at Boston's Northeastern University, founded Napster in 1999. In October 2000, Bertelsmann AG and Napster announced the formation of a strategic alliance to further develop the Napster person-to-person file sharing service. In January 2001, edel Music and TVT Records joined the alliance. This year, Napster won several Wired Magazine Readers Rave Awards, including Best Music Site, Best Innovative Start-up, and Best Guerilla Marketing.
About Digital World Services Digital World Services provides Digital Rights Management (DRM) solutions and services enabling the convenient use to digital works by making the process transparent for the consumer, retailer and publisher while protecting the owners' copyrights. The company offers clearinghouse services such as rights clearing, financial settlement, and administration of usage information. Digital World Services are experts in the digital delivery of music, content hosting, system integration, project management and distribution platforms. Based in New York City and Hamburg, Germany, Digital World Services is a Bertelsmann subsidiary.
For a fee, which will have to be reasonable (and they seem pretty smart about this part) you get to burn CD's or download to your Rio, but not to email the unencrypted file to your friends. Anybody see the problem here? A CD is the unencrypted file. The most clueless newbie can take this CD, re-rip it, and walla, one unencrypted .mp3 goes right back onto Napster.
The job is even easier if the fee-paying member downloads it to his Rio, because chances are his Rio requires an unencrypted .mp3 (and they must realize, as they seem to realize re: CD's, that users will not accept a system that requires them to buy new hardware).
Then of course there are the spoofing and ID problems mentioned by others. Napster cannot use watermarks or music-recognition software because, remember, Napster itself never sees the music file. The music goes straight from my 'puter to yours, without passing through their server, so if I named the file "medieval - king's singers - greensleeves" but it actually plays Jennifer Lopez, how are they supposed to figure that out?
I don't expect the forces arrayed against Napster to accept their proposal because, clueless as they are, they are smart enough to see how easy this system will be to circumvent. No crypto system has ever lasted long with millions of messages being passed, and it won't be long before someone will build an easy to use bypass and distribute it to 50 million of their closest friends.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
You can calculate a metaphone key. This is a reduction of the word to a more abstract pattern. It's how dictionary.com knows that when you type "thier" you really mean "their".
And, depending on the type of membership that the second Napster user has paid for, he or she will be able to do other things with the song -- burn it onto a CD, for example.
How would they stop you from burning an mp3 onto cd? I assume that these new, protected mp3's can be played in winamp, so how would they stop the "disk writer plugin" that allows you to decompress an mp3 into wav format and burn that wave file onto a cd in cd format?
It will hurt, but it's not the RIAA labels that will be hurt. It will hurt the smaller labels that make true music that's not advertised on radio. That's what the RIAA wants because the smallers labels are "stealing" profit from them by making their artists known.
The RIAA claim they are against napster for piracy, but their real threat is loosing market share because of better artists than theirs.
It's probably true that people who "pirate" mp3s
buy more CD's because of napster, but that's because they found something better to listen to than the music they heard on the radio, in which they were not interested at all. Since they like what they download, they are more likely to want to buy it.
The record companies can judge for themselves how much napster has hurt their sales if the majority of former napster users immediately boycot all CD purchases from major record labels. I believe napster users spent far more on CDs than average. Personally I have vowed to not buy any CDs for at least 3 months. I urge other people who are irritated by the RIAAs handling of this affair to do likewise. If they think they will see a surge in sales as a result of declaring war on their best customers, we need to reeducate them.
http://rareformnewmedia.com/
Why not just create MP3's from the CD's you already own, and avoid Napster entirely?
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
You could just number the songs you share 1.mp3, 2.mp3, 3.mp3 and so on.
:-)
To get an Index of what 1, 2 & 3 are you have to offer a copyrighted song to that user who shares those files.
Both parties can then generate trust.
It would be really interesting to see an article on game-theory specifically looking at strategies for peer-to-peer music Exchange.
Prisoners Dilmma...
SMASH your radio!
So, once they get the names right, what will they do about permutations?
How many people misspell Springsteen as Springstein?
You get the drift. Can't users just misspell, and do it intentionally? Sure, its not a total solution, but it seems like it would work out some of the time...
Support a few technologists in Washington.
The RIAA has won the battle, but they've lost the war. If we can't use Napster anymore, we'll find another way to rip off our favorite artists in peace. It's an inconvienence, but no agency, business or industry can stop us from our god-given right to rip people off. They should ask the software world how successful they've been with warez. After that, they should give the fuck up and let us steal in peace.
I would like to see someone argue to me that ebay should be allowed to list auctions for cocaine or nuclear materials because they're only "listing" and not involved with the actual transfer.
Hoo boy, you sure ruined your post by including the ebay analogy. ebay lists whatever users type in. If they receive complaints, they remove it. And note that when they receive complaints and remove the offending material, they are not fined, prosecuted, shut down, etc..
Compare to Napster, who removed all the people trading Metallica the one time they were notified of anything, and are still getting fined, shut down, etc..
And another note: your argument, while it makes some "common sense", really has little if anything to do with actual law. I'm sure you've noticed by now that the law rarely has anything to do with common sense.
Say what you will about the ethical justification of copying other peoples music, but at least Napster has sparked off an impressive amount of innovative projects. Here is something I came across recently: Docster.
For the goatsex paranoid, here's a short abstract:
Imagine all the researchers you know, with a new bibliographic management tool that combined file storage with a napster-like communications protocol -- docster. Instead of just citations, docster also stores the files themselves and retains a connection between the citation metadata and each corresponding file. Somewhere in the ether is a docster server to which those researchers connect. They're reading one of their articles, and they find a new reference they want to pull up. What to do? Just query docster for it. Docster will figure out who else among those connected has a copy of that article, and if it's found, requests and saves a copy for our friendly researcher.
Of course, we cannot do this. Libraries depend too much on copyright to attack the system so directly. But what if we focused instead on altering the napster model enough to make it explicitly copyright-compliant? After all, many cases of one researcher giving another a copy of an article are a fair use of that article. Fair use provides us with this possibility and it's not a giant leap to argue that perhaps coordinated copying through such a centralized server could constitute fair use, especially if docster didn't compete with commercial interests.
Well, it's still a big leap, but think of the benefits. Say there's an article from 1973 that's suddenly all the rage. It doesn't exist online yet, so a patron request comes to you from some other library, and you've got the journal, so you fill the request. But forty-eight other researchers want that article too. If that first patron uses docster, any of those other folks also using docster can just grab the file from the first requestor. If others don't use docster, they can request a copy from their local libraries, who -- I hope -- do use docster. Nobody has to go scan that article again, and suddenly there is redundant digital storage.
Sounds good, no?
Cui peccare licet peccat minus. -- Ovid, Amores.
ALPINE. No matter what you guys say, it is a damn good solution. The best thus far IMO. *You* get to control the number of peer connections you maintain, the number of queries you make, the rate at which those quries are distributed to the peer network, the number of queries you will respond to from other peers, the number of file transfers, etc. Also the proxy idea sounds damn cool.
Um, AboveNet and UUNet...
Domain servers in listed order:
NS1.NAPSTER.COM 208.184.216.239
[abovenet]
NS2.NAPSTER.COM 63.108.185.111
[uunet]
Registrant:
Napster, Inc. (NAPSTER16-DOM)
1475 Veterans Blvd.
Redwood City, CA 94063 US
The 'work for hire' thing is related but different. The _popstar's_ performance is routinely considered work for hire by the label, whenever they can get away with it. Now, if it's not, that doesn't mean the popstar ends up holding copyright, they have to sign that away. BUT, if they simply sign it away, the term expires in something like 40 years, so the popstar's _grandchildren_ might benefit from earnings from the hit record when, many years from now, the copyright returns to the artist and the artist's estate. (We'll not get into whether _they_ are entitled to profit from it- this time!) However, if it was 'work for hire', the term NEVER ends, and the artist will NEVER, EVER, EVER get their material back. Not in 40 years, not in 400, not in 40,000,000.
The record labels managed to get a rider on some bill that _changed_ the status of many recordings _to_ work for hire, basically taking a large number of existing works and changing the rules under them to give the record industry permanent ownership rather than 40-year-ownership, but major label artists were rightly _so_ upset that they actually organised, lobbied, and got the new legislation overturned by publicising just how bad the record labels were in doing this, and exactly what they were doing. So currently the only artists who will NEVER own their songs are, well, pretty much every new act being offered a contract _today_, including every one in which you don't need the artist's consent to revise the contract.
This very likely includes Britney and the others, so odds are they not only don't own copyright, but they can't and will _never_ own it. However, I can only be _absolutely_ certain that they don't own it _now_. It is just possible that one of the ones mentioned is not work for hire, in which case maybe in 40 years they or their heirs _might_ own copyright to their material.
Did you know that nearly all of the musicians you hear on the radio are technically hired laborers?
The *AA may be frothing about IP theft, but other businesses are apparently booming on it.
I've been shopping for a new hard drive, and I see businesses such as Best Buy describing the humongosity of their drives in terms of how many thousands of 4-minute MP3s you can store on them. (Surely they don't think people are buying drives to store 20,000 MP3s that came from their own store-bought CDs, eh?)
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
well, if they don't want us to share their music, then lets not hand ours over to them. Imagine this as a market position. You can either buy music you cant share from RIAA approved networks, or you can download music that's equally as good from networks that don't have RIAA music on them, and you are encouraged to share them.
I wonder, after having listened only to inependent non-riaa music for 3 years, who's concerts we're gonna go to. Who's t-shirts we're gonna buy.
what a wonderfulo meatspace denial of service condition the RIAA may have just created for themselves. If they don't allow their music on free networks, and good music is on free networks, then they're creating a bariier to entry into the music distribution market for themselves.
That's just plain dumb, and I have no problem with using it against them.
-OR-
if you're a computer criminal with a mean streak (not me, mr man). then I guess you can make it extremely hard for the RIAA to give their lovely blacklist to napster over the internet...."What use is a phone call when you can't speak"
"Let him go, Ralph. He knows what he's doing." --Otto Mann (simpsons)
Most of us use cars to go from Point A to Point B. Obviously there will be some bad seeds who use cars to facilitate killing but not in large quantities. And certainly not enough in so much as to require us to, as you put it, resort back to walking from place to place.
Sure a few people are trading non-copyrighted music on Napster but the majority of us are knowingly trading copyrighted material.
Alright, suppose Napster II becomes a reality and due to some magic, groundbreaking encryption the system survives long enough to function. Why should I share files (music that I paid for) with million other subscribers who I don't even know? If incredibly smart music companies think that I will agree to make my PC a free distribution channel for their music they are very, very wrong.
For Immediate Release:
At a press conference this morning, Napster CEO Hank Barry officially conceded defeat to the RIAA.
"It's obvious that we cannot afford to fight this battle any further. Alright guys, you win. You've shut down Napster. Enjoy your victory."
Sources indicate that a fruit basket was delivered to RIAA HQ from Shawn Fanning at roughly the same time as Barry's announcement was made.
"Seeing as we no longer have any use for the napster.com domain name, we have opted to sell it to Bornagainnapster Inc., based out of <insert name of country with good Internet connectivity, loose copyright laws, and little respect for American lawers here>.
"Of course, hypothetically, if Bornagainnapster Inc. decided to use the napster.com domain name to point the millions of existing Napster clients to their own Napster root servers, the source for which we released earlier this morning, the service would appear to continue uninterrupted to current users of Napster's service. Please note however, that this is entirely the prerogative of Bornagainnapster Inc., and Napster Inc. of America has no remaining control over what happens to the technology we've released into the community.
"It's been a slice. Thank you."
Napster Co-founder Shawn Fanning then announced his plans to relocate to <insert name of country with good Internet connectivity, loose copyright laws, and little respect for American lawers here> to accept a position as CTO with "an unnamed Internet media company".
Okay, so it's a bit far-fetched, but if Fanning and Co. are really interested in seeing Napster continue to survive, wouldn't this be a feasable option? The main reason why Napster continues to dominate other file-sharing media such as Gnutella for MP3 distribution is the existing user base, and simple presentation to the user. It is still, IMHO, best-of-breed for it's purpose, which is providing access to MP3 files. The reason the RIAA has been able to go after Napster, is because of the centralized root servers. Why not just move those servers out of the RIAA's reach? Sure, it will take a little maneuvering to prevent legal difficulties, but I think it could be done...
Opinions?
- Adam
First, the RIAA will, in the near future, have some success at stopping Napster, as one particular service, from distributing copyrighted material. They will accomplish this because Napster is a corporate entity and Napster will cooperate with the courts, because that is in the best interest of their shareholders.
Second, other services, whether they are OpenNap servers, Gnutella, FreeNet, or whatever, will emerge from Napster's ashes and allow people to distribute copyrighted material.
Third, the RIAA will notice that there is not one particular corporate entity to go after in this case, and will take the issue to the legislature instead.
Fourth, the legislature will pass unambiguous laws that declare distributing copyright material online illegal, and there are medium penalties (like fines, and possibly jail time for multiple offenses).
Fifth, some people will continue distributing copyright materials online. Most won't.
Sixth, some people will get caught. Most won't.
The parallel I am making should be clear. This is analogous to the United State's so-called war on drugs.
No, the US can never "win" the war on drugs. Nor can it win the war against distributing copyrighted material. However, it can certainly scare the majority of people into not participating. And that is all the RIAA wants to preserve its profits.
Actually ebay does their own auditing as well. Go search for something like hardcore preteen sex pictures or something along the lines. It may be initially posted but they'll pull it down themselves.
Since I think we all know Napster and the RIAA will not introduce any competant means of blocking copyrighted songs beyond a simple name check on the title of the MP3, the day has finally arrived when that stupid script kiddie hacker type will come in handy. Sure, Napster will block any songs that have Metallica in the filename (ignoring the fact someone might write a song called "I hate Metallica") but will their filters catch:
|\/|3T4||C4
?
No, they certainly will not. In the future the only people who will be able to use and understand the songs available through napster will be these ever-present script kiddies.
It's kind of like encryption, for the stupid.
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RumorsDaily
Like:
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Only 47,000 variations on this track, and 2.5 million songs to go.
I guess they'll have to listen to each one of the last variation just to make sure. Or else face a shitstorm when anther band gets banned for having a song with the same title.
I thought *my* last data-entry job could get mind-numbing.
clients besides the official one, and older napster official clients, will no longer work
on the official servers. But there are other Napster-compatible directory servers that run OpenNap.
All your hallucinogen are belong to us.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Hell you think song titles are exausted? their are always long title names like the band Anal Cunt. With names like "song titles are fucking stupid" "all our fans are gay" "i made your kid get AIDS so you could watch it die" and a ton more so song titels wont run out just be more creative.
I would like to see someone argue to me that ebay should be allowed to list auctions for cocaine or nuclear materials because they're only "listing" and not involved with the actual transfer. That is utter bullshit; by that logic Osama Bin Ladin, or Moammar Khaddafi, aren't responsible for american deaths just because "they werent involved in the actions, they only indirectly facilitated what happened." Try and make a loophole through that and you end up justifying more than you want to eh?
If you want realistic discussion lets be realistic, we all know what napster is about. It's obvious that anytime napster wants, they can go through their servers and find listings of copyrighted materials by the thousands. So, to answer the first question; yes, they are knowingly facilitating the download of illegal material.
The real argument here is: what should napster be required to do to comply with copyright restrictions? _That_ is what i'm interested in hearing argued here. Should they be required to set up a system for copyright holders to request listings removed? Or should it be more restrictive where they are required to compare song names with a database of copyrighted songs? I havent heard much discussed beyond this.
I use napster, and I pirate software, but I would never make such foolish arguments for such selfish reasons. I'm sick of these discussions about pirating and how stupid the RIAA is. Maybe the RIAA is stupid, but they have the law on their side. Why not discuss the merits of copyright law instead?
Even worse, if I want to be the 500th person to make their own recording of "Yesterday" by McCartney and distribute it via Napster I guess I'm screwed too.
Except this time it's by the publishers not the labels. Composers' and performers' rights organizations such as ASCAP, SESAC, and BMI in the US (along with a host of organizations in other countries) control cover rights, as a cover can be considered a "derivative work" and/or a "public performance" of a copyrighted work, and there is no longer a public domain to speak of.
All your hallucinogen are belong to us.
Will I retire or break 10K?
OK, so Napster (and related services) will have to block RIAA-owned songs? And they plan to recognize those songs by name, and maybe (in the future) by some digital fingerprint? The solvent for this solution is obvious: encrypt everything you share, using some asymmetric algorithm. If someone wants to leech a song from your box, let them first get your key (from some keyserver, somewhere). Obfuscate the filenames. Whatever... This is just to say that the proposed method of keeping Napster/P2P RIAA-'clean' does not work. And I can not see how they can make it work either. The cat seems to be out of the bag, it has produced many litters, and its offspring now roam the planet in search for a home...
--frank[at]unternet.org
How about this: everyone knows that the formula is something like := md5(song_name XOR password)
mp3name
and the password is emailed around until "they" figure it out and then it changes.
Oh, and you have to scramble the song itself so that you have to know the password to hear it, so that "they" can't figure out what song it is unless they know the password.
Only 47,000 variations on this track, and 2.5 million songs to go.
I guess you've never heard of Soundex hashing. (Of course, PayNapster would use something more advanced, but this illustrates the point.) It would also have the side effect of keeping illegal (under US "derivative work" copyright law) cover songs off PayNapster.
All your hallucinogen are belong to us.
Will I retire or break 10K?
To ordinary users, approx 50 million of them, Napster feels like it's almost completely anonymous. You make up a fake name and provide virtually no identifying information. Feeling like nobody knows who you are, it's pretty easy to stick those CD into the drive and rip them into MP3s, or at least share the MP3 files already downloaded.
When payment is required, all the comforting anonimity goes away. You'll have to send money, probably with your credit card. You'll almost certainly have to provide your address, since they'll want to do address verification. Now they know who a particular user is. Even if they are able to know user's true identity today, to the millions of Napster users with files in their share folder, it "feels" like nobody can tell who you are. It feels like the worst that could happen by sharing that Metallica song is getting your (free and anonymous) account terminated, and you'd just sign up for another one. It "feels" like nobody could ever trace it back to you and threaten you with legal action. To the millions of Napster users today, it feel like it's completely impossible for the cops/lawyers to ever know it was you. It seems completely free of any risk of ever getting "caught".
It's hard to imagine that such a large number of people will rip CDs or share files that they know are copyrighted, when they've provided their name, home address, credit card number, and maybe even their phone number. My prediction is that the loss of the comfortable anonymous atmosphere will be the death of Napster, not the money itself or annoying copy restrictions. Those just won't matter if the service lacks the right atmosphere that appeals to the sharing (aka pirating) mentalitiy, and that critical atmosphere is (seemingly) anonymous access.
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
- Under legal pressure, Napster implements subscription fees, anti-RIAA-copying measures, etc., etc.
- All the users say "Damn, Napster sucks now."
- The few clueful users who know about using a Napster client with Napigator and OpenNAP tell their friends about it, and the word spreads quickly.
- The RIAA tries to sue, but realizes that since all the technologies they're trying to control are open-source, stopping every service provider is a nearby impossible demand.
- The RIAA is crushed under the weight of its litigation staff, and ceases to be. The end.
The RIAA might have done better to be a little friendly to Napster and just try to control it. There's going to be a day when they miss having one central enemy to push around.Do domain names matter?
You'll get nothing useful. The Secure Audio Path (available in Windows ME and Windows XP) won't play through unsigned drivers, signed drivers turn off digital outputs when Secure Audio Path is open, and some labels may require Secure Audio Path for playback. You'll have to use analog, but with a good setup, analog doesn't suck as much as the sheeple think it does.
All your hallucinogen are belong to us.
Will I retire or break 10K?
How would you decrypt the names ? If you couldn't do this, it would be useless. The problem is, how could you allow joe bloggs to do it without allowing Napster inc. to do the same ?
Going to subscription based would've been enough of a viability challenge. Most people will already forget Napster when that happens, but I hope that some would stay, and it might well both become profitable as well as still be an enjoyable experience.
Now this announcement comes and for the first time ever I'm really starting to worry about Napster's future. Everyone wants real MP3s and the flexibility that comes with them. Computer users may already be beaten into submission when it comes to dealing with copy protection (insert your cd now) but it won't fly that easily in the audio world. This kills any intention I had of joining their service.
Worst is the record companies will claim 'Look, we tried to sell music online, and it didn't work'. Not surprising when what you buy online comes with restrictions that aren't present in other media.
With everything that is going on, if such at thing does not it exist, it is something that should. And it represents a wonderful opportunity.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
It's fairly obvious that only Napster will play back the encrypted mp3s. Sucks to be winamp. And of COURSE there will be no way to play these on alternate OS's....
To mark a file as freely distributable, an artist would have to sign it with a digital certificate and indicate what kinds of right he would like to grant.
OK, I'll be sure to sign all the MP3s I have as freely distributable. Of course, I didn't actually create those MP3s, but how is Napster supposed to know?