Slashdot Mirror
Napster Offers $1B For Music-Swapping Rights
An unnamed correspondent writes: "CNET is reporting that Napster has offered to pay the music industry $1 billion over 5 years for the rights to unlimited music swapping. That works out to $1.67/month/user with 50 million users." Here's coverage on FoxNews as well, which says: "Under the proposed settlement, $150 million would be paid each year for the first five years to the major record labels -- Sony, Warner, BMG, EMI and Universal -- with an additional $50 million alloted annually for independent labels."
>> When Windows crashes, at least it lets you click OK first
And if you're lucky and careful, you can get an amazing amount of stuff done before you actually click that button.
High-speed Road Trip (18.000KPH)
Plus, there's now an mp3 encoder (LAME) that is open-source, meaning that anyone can compile it and use it; gone are the days of paying Fraunhofer IIS royalties for "their intellectual property".
Fraunhofer Group still owns patents in the United States and other countries on the process of "Overlapped cosine transform plus Fourier transform encoding, followed by psychoacoustic quantization and entropy coding" which is a necessary and irreplaceable part of MP3 encoding. This is why Ogg Vorbis doesn't use a Fourier transform but instead a finer cosine transform.
All your hallucinogen are belong to us.
Will I retire or break 10K?
because 1.5 million per year would just about match the money Britney Spears uses on het velvet toilet paper.
Gnutella being nobody, nobody pays nothing, and it's for unlimited swapping of any file, not just mp3.
-- javaDragon is an instance of JavaDragon.
First, IANAL, yet.
Artists have never been entitled to say what happens to their works, at least in the USA. Now, they are granted the sole, assignable right to make commercial copies of said work. Similarly, they are granted by law royalties for public performance of their works. That is the extent of their entitlement, to my knowledge.
Copyright, based on the clause in the US Constitution investing Congress with the power to secure a limited monopoly for artists and inventors "to promote the useful arts and sciences", is not an absolute grant nor a property right. It is a limited monopoly, granted by Congress. This stands in contrast to legal systems in other countries (e.g. France) wherein the foundation of Copyright is a "natural right" - a non-assignable (IIRC) right of authors to dispose of their works as they see fit. This is why French directors and authors always get the final cut of their works, if I'm not mistaken.
Our system recognizes different "natural rights" (like freedom of speech, and the press), and the foundation of our copyright system is pragmatic - designed to promote progress and the creation of new works, not to ensure an artist has total control over a work they have created (there are good philosophical reasons for this I won't go into here, but for a start, consider that neither art nor invention exist in a vacuum). I would further argue that the philosophy behind the Constitutional basis for copyright would find the current copyright regime (which rather than encouraging new works, encourages an "everlasting gravy-train" mentality among copyright holders) abhorrent.
I am not a lawyer, this is not legal advice, blah blah blah.
-Isaac
I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. For Entertainment Purposes Only.
They will piss on this offer.
---Technology will liberate us if it doesn't enslave us first.
1) Recording artists could distribute their music online in an encrypted format of some type (MP3 or some successor with better audio fidelity).
2) Joe and Josephine User download this music and pay for it using a truly useful micropayment system (now that would be an interesting Open Source project).
3) The bulk of the micropayment goes to the actual artist, not to the media conglomerate.
4) Joe and Josephine get the music they want.
Arguments against this concept:
A) People will still find a way to beat the encryption. Of course they will, just like people burn CD copies of their music now. The music companies still make hundreds of millions of dollars every year. At least this way the artists are getting their cut.
B) Peer-to-peer technology will kill this concept because people will just slide past the encryption and then post songs on (Napster, Gnutella, whatever). Not if you make the encryption tough enough that it becomes more trouble than it's worth to hack the encryption and then post the songs on a server somewhere.
The heart of the matter is that there are three principal actors in this drama: the record labels, the consumer, and the artists. The record labels have been getting fat on profits that are based on control of the means of production (sorry, Marx). The consumer has become greedy with Napster (hey, why not get ALL of my music for free?!). The folks getting screwed are still the artists.
Let's think about the people who give us all this great music, and let's come up with something that works for them. My guess is that if it works for the artists, it will work for consumers. As for the music companies, they can choke on their own greed.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
The record companies are asking for $100,000 per copyright violation.
No, $100K per work violated, the maximum statutory damages under US law. There are likely less than 3 million unique RIAA songs available through Napster.
All your hallucinogen are belong to us.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I agree wholeheartedly with your message except for the following:
>This is the internet, we aren't going to pay for something that is already free.
I think this is a dangerous sentiment. Internet or not, you've got to be willing to pay an artist a fair price for a hard day's work. Unfortunately the RIAA cronies are so entrenched in protecting their monopoly that they refuse to sell me a song (unlimited license) for $1 a pop. Had they done so they would be trillionaires, but their minds are hard-wired to refuse anything that doesn't have a guaranteed increase in profit margin, regardless of revenue. People would gladly pay just for the sheer convenience. However the old, grey, small-minded monopolists decided to steal from us, and the internet community decided to steal back. Now they get nothing, and I'm happy. I know I've bought my last music until the system is changed. The RIAA will not get $20 per CD from me, nor will they even get my $1 a pop for an unlimited license. Am I wasting my time? I bet the first Napster subscriber thought the same...
---
Napster works because it is easy to use-- no copyright protection stuff, passwords (beyond one you type once and forget), identity proof, etc. I can use it on all of my computers without any problem. Remember when computer games and software were like this? Right, before they became such huge business (software companies argue before piracy grew).
An on-line music service that is a major hassle is a no-go. I'd pay a lot of money for a Napster that gets me legal, high quality songs. I wouldn't pay if it is a pain in the ass to use. If I can't connect from home because I forgot to log out at home, that sucks. If I'm paying and it's using a peer-to-peer architecture, I expect some kind of credit for the disk space and upload bandwidth I'm losing (how cool would that be for both the consumer and company-- a product that gets cheaper the more you use it).
-m
Do all of this, and I will give you my piece of the billion dollars. Until then, back to Half.com for used CDs.
What would get people to pay? Honor. Honesty. I know that some people wouldn't pay, and that is their business.. but I know for a fact that, if asked, I would be more then willing to pay like $50 a year to have full access to Napster.
------------
CitizenC
It's practically impossible to find the independent labels who, under this scheme, they would owe money to. Also, this assumes that the record labels ARE the law. If one small independent record label didn't want to participate in this deal, could they sue Napster and cause the same contraversy there is now?
It would be entirely impossible to pay all the right parties. This is a half assed attempt to make something kosher. That would be like me paying microsoft and adobe for the right to pirate commercial software. They say they'll pay 'independent labels', but how do they know EVERY ONE? If I burn cds of my [hypothetical] band and sell them at [equally hypotheical] shows, and then someone pirates my music on napster, will they pay ME? I don't think so. And in fact, the membership fees that people would be paying while pirating MY MUSIC would be going to the big record companies. So, this brilliant bussiness model we've waited so long for napster to tell us about gives the big record companies the better bargin. Fuck that.
___
The way to see by faith is to shut the eye of reason. --Ben Franklin
The most important part of the article...
"The $1 billion fee would be the equivalent for the industry of selling another $5.4 billion in CDs, since the labels would have no additional production and distribution costs associated with that fee, he noted. "
Something for nothing for life + 95 years, and the major labels are fighting this. Really, that's been a lot of people's argument since the beginning. Something for nothing. But who is paying for the protection? And who is getting it?
--
+&x
A buck 67 is still to much to give to the labels. I'd be happy w/ 10 dollars a month if 95% went to the artists.
Until then opennap it is.
Yep, I never spell check.
More incorrect spellings can be found he
I'm sure many DJ's would be willing to pay for access a high bandwidth distribution system to allow them to download hifi versions (CD quality at least) of whatever they want. Radio stations would use the same or a similar service.
And for the DJ that has the vinyl version....two thumbs up. The good DJ's can tell what a crowd wants in spite of requests. A good DJ is on top of the current music scene and knows the relations to the past. I doubt they would dislike access to a huge collection.
Y
no sig.
For the forseeable future at the very least. If the Buck-oh-five estimation of the price is on target, people will be scrambling to pay.
One reason will be the assuagement of conscience. Now you're use of Napster is ethical and untouchable, no more sting of guilt. I think this will actually be quite a compelling reason, even though it won't get much airplay. Most people don't like to feel like their having their fun at the expense of the folks who give it to them.
Plus let's not forget you're also getting the most convenient and efficient way on the planet to test if that new band's CD really is worth the 15 or so Shekels you're thinking of shelling out.
Sorry to be such a napster booster here (I don't work for them!) but let's also remember that for many people, a cheap way to legally get as many mp3s as they can swallow means the end of their cd collections. Why should I spend so much on CDs when I can get a mother of a hard drive for my mp3s? Not that $1.67 really bites into the CD budget anyway. A lot of people think that mp3 is good enough. And as the codecs make the music smaller, making digital more convenient, more are likely to think this way.
It'll just be ultra convenient. Gee, only 50 million? think it'll stop there when your potential clientele includes every online person on the planet? If the RIAA buys this deal, it will be ALL GOLD.
I understand that there's a certain animosity toward the RIAA in the online community as a whole: that's to be expected. What I don't understand why, with this current decision on Napster's part to distribute music legally, people are screaming outrage over artists' rights, acting as if the RIAA is muscling around and essentially enslaving their artists.
Contrary to popular belief, members of the RIAA don't send agents to the houses of talented artists and threaten to break their legs unless they agree to be represented through them. I also find it very hard to believe that any artist expects that most of the revenue from their music will come back to them: I'm certain those members of the RIAA that they CHOOSE to deal with make this very clear. This in fact is fair: The artists put in their talents, but as history has shown, the excessive marketting and management provided by the RIAA are most costly and more effective in such a lemming market as North America (thus we have such successful groups as the Backstreet Boys and N*SYNC). Artists are also VERY rarely locked in dark basements and forced to make music without food or water while chained to microphones and handcuffed to instruments. Simply put: The artists who work within the RIAA aren't forced into unequitable treatment or abusive circumstances without some say of their own, and while all the money doesn't go to them, I can't think of many artists under the RIAA's overseeing that've resorted to an impoverish lifestyle without some poor decisions of their own.
Realize, of course, that if prices for CDs weren't "artificially inflated" as the FTC suggests, artists would make even MORE money and marketting would be almost nill, with most of the actual revenue going toward paying for meager marketing and standard expenses.
Anyway, back on topic, selling the rights to the distribution of their music isn't abuse of the artists on the RIAA's part, as I'm certain that such issues are covered in initial contracts. Heck, if people're opposed to the RIAA allowing distribution of music across Napster, than why aren't these same people protesting the use of artists' music on radio stations? Most of the time they have no say in that either! What injustice! Sure the situations are different at heart, but aren't the principles essentially the same?
Anyway, I'm sick of people acting as if this is some huge controversy and injustice on the part of the RIAA, both toward consumers and artists. There's nothing new in this scenario that hasn't been going on for decades within the industry: the only difference are the players... or rather, one of the players.
If you're so intent on defending the rights of the artists, stop attacking those few that actually voice their own opinions, such as Metallica. Otherwise you're simply a biased hypocrite.
You just dont get it do you!
People won't have to pay!
all it takes is one big isp somewere
in the world who decides to try to
bundle their service with legal
free access to music via napster..
and then raise their rates 2-3$ a month..
and the snowball is rolling.
Is it just me, or is giving Napster your credit card information a Very Bad Thing. Think about it...once they have your credit card information, they have everything about you. By They, of course, I mean the RIAA and company. Fork over your information, and Napster suddenly become a little less anonymous. Lets take it step by step:
*We know that the RIAA and musicians can track who is downloading what on Napster.
*You give Napster your financial information.
*We know that the RIAA and certain musicians can muster superlative legal power.
*Is it so impossible that they can get this information from Napster to "ensure that their requirements are being met"? Sure, there are probably laws about this kind of thing. Hell, there are alot of laws...millions. Has this stopped anyone with enough money yet? No!
*Lets say you download more of a certain album than the lawyers or tracking services would like you to.
*Suddenly "NapGuy986" becomes "Joe "Evil" Pirate of 123 Main Street, Your Town, USA. Phone Number 867-5309 Goes to F University, drives a Honda, penchant for very progressive magazines." and so on and so forth.
I don't know about you, but I'm not paying for this thing unless I can drop by CVS and have them cut a money order for $2 for the pleasure.
"These people look deep within my soul and assign me a number based on the order in which I joined" --Homer re:
'cause both are going to be around. I think it would be an incredible experiment in *cough* communism vs capitalism. On the one hand you have the free (price and action) service. Open source clients and servers, run by volunteers, faith-based organizations, or governments (where aplicable). By their nature, profit and it's motive are forbidden.
One the other hand you have Napster II, a pay service, sanctioned and serviced by the major labels and major corporations. They have the benefit of being able to profit and will most likely have a better, easier-to-use service and the added benefit of tons and tons of existing capital.
Can the two systems co-exist? Given a totally free market, which one would prosper? A challenge, perhaps?
[don't read too much into the commie stuff, please]
--
+&x
This is going to fail for one reason best described by a cliche, "There is no honor among thieves."
Free Techno/Jazz/DNB/MI Music by guys obsessed with monkeys!
Ok, so let's say everything works out as planned. They pay the record companies, et. al., $1 billion over the course of 5 years. What happens after that? Who get's all the money. Does that mean that the Napster people stand to make another $1 billion over the 6-10th year for themselves after that??
If Napster wants to go to a pay-per use method, then what's the point of peer to peer sharing? If I'm paying $2-$10 a month for this service, I expect *quality*. I don't want to have to try to download 10 different versions of the same song to get a download rate faster than 5KBytes/sec. I don't want to search through lists of poorly/incorrectly named song files. If I'm paying for it, I want 30KBytes/sec minimum. I want full 320kbps MP3 files. I want *every* song from *all* of the record labels participating. I don't want to see only what is on the hard drives of the other people who are on the same server as me. The reason Napster succeeds is that it is free, so everybody has a low expectation for the quality of service. If your cable TV only worked certain times of the day, and some of the channels were intermittent, you would not be happy. But for antenna channels? You just keep adjusting those rabbit ears as best as you can and grin and bear it. Why? Because you don't pay for it.
You'd be amazed how many rich suburban kids use Napster for the convenience, not because they don't want to pay. If anything, paying would make them feel better about downloading the music.
Yet another reason the RIAA's artists should be releasing their albums in high-quality MP3 bundles, for a fair price (I'd say, $5-7 per album, with 50% or more going to the artists themselves would be fair to us and fair to the artists).
People will pay if it's CONVENIENT and UNENCUMBERED. If either of those two things fails to exist, they will STEAL. This is why Napster is successful. This is why other similar services will be successful in the future. The RIAA can get it's act together and profit, or keep losing control over their content as they have been.
"And like that
Ok...this is what I think is going on.
Napster is offering One Billion Dollars. To the average human, that sounds like a hell of alot of money. Wow...A Whole Billion Dollars..Just Imagine!
To the RIAA (non-humans), that's a drop in their Bucket of Relentless Riches +2.
So Napster is saying "Here...we're going to give you a whole Billion Dollars if you leave us the hell alone".
The RIAA can say "Ha ha ha...we PISS on your measly billion...begone with you!!"
At which point, the RIAA looks like huge bastards.
Napster can then say "See? We tried to be nice...tried to appease them, but they shot us down"
Film at 11, and suddenly everyone in the world finally sees what greedy jerks the RIAA et al are!
Personally, I like that.
"These people look deep within my soul and assign me a number based on the order in which I joined" --Homer re:
In fact I think the artist will be worse off under an all you can eat plan. The pie is just going to end up being more thinly sliced leaving artists with the skinniest one.
Record labels have historically screwed the artists and this isn't going to change that.
Matt.
If you believe in compensating the artist use Fairtunes.
What would you be willing to pay for legal access to a huge database of music? Think about what highschool and college kids are currently spending on pagers and cellphones. Generally more than $5/month! Therefore it is a reasonable concept to assume that many people would be willing to spend $5-10/month to access large music databases legally. If Napster pulls this off with RIAA approval, the entire business will change. Napster will be able to checksum your downloads to be sure they are "certified versions" and eliminate the partial download problem that is a major problem with the existing system. They will probably make enough cash to host their own certified servers for access to the hottest titles, allowing tracking of bonus payments where appropriate and keeping the service useable. More importantly, companies will be able to market Napster enabled stereo systems that have phone and ethernet jacks and huge hard drives for collection storage (wireless on high end models). The song info database will be designed for easy search/access to that favorite tune. Imagine going up to the DJ at your local party/rave and not being limited to his/her personal collection.
And the best part of all of this...the record companies will have less power to force songs down the throat of the consumer as more users will just select the download songs similar to those in my collection (based on a song rating/review system) for my listening pleasure.
Think of the many ways that this could benefit the music lover. Payment based on download activity has the possibility of weakening the crushing grip that record companies have on "popular music". We might be able to spread the wealth a little and prevent me from having to switch channels every time Brittney or Eninem (sp?) or whoever is being pushed at me by the record biz, and instead allow me to create my own database and find similar music (sprinkled with new suggestions, thumbs up or down Tivo style) and enjoy it.
I want Napster to become mainstream. It will change everything! For the better!
no sig.
Yeah, well, you & I know that. The fatcats aren't that smart. What they'll do when they get whacked by a cluestick is another matter.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
It is a lot cleaner than the older versions!
:)
Get it for OpenNap servers!
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
yes AOL claims 27 million users, unfortunately this number includes a lot of previous users, but even assuming the 27 million, earthlink the second largest isp only has about 5 million users, and the average isp has less than 500 thousand users, the is probably total only a little more than 50 million people on the internet. napster is more likely to have around 5 million users, which would bring the cost up to about $16 per user, which is not a particularly unreasonable sum. of course the down side of all of this is that the artist won't see a dime unless they sue their label for their share, which of course means no more releases until their contract runs out and they can switch labels. also napster and the riaa will of course have to go after all the other sites providing a similar service, but with the napster precedent that shouldn't be much of a problem.
I think that is great. I guess it sounds like the RIAA has won, but who cares? They are happy, and for less than the cost of a real CD, I'm happy. And when it goes legal I will be more inclined to open up my DIRs to my T3. Of course, economics 101 tells you of the 50 mil only a small fraction will stick around. Half are kids, a fourth will go elsewhere. That will bring it up to the advertised $5 which I think it still a good deal if the quality matches what they promise. Count me in.
--------
--------
It's OK to be social, just don't tell anyone about it.
Remember also that Bertelsmann holds a pretty big percentage of AOL Europe's shares, so there's business ties between AOL Time Warner and Bertelsmann already.
And you of course also are thinking of the deal between BMG(Bertlesmann) and Napster. BMG already is on the side of Napster making deals and I would have to think an alliance with AOL-TW would put TW in a pro-Napster deal position. That is two of the five. Boy, I can't wait til all five of those companies do away with the formalities of being separate entities and merge. But, seriously do any of the Big 5 of the RIAA have significant stakes in competitors to AOL, which would make a Napster-AOL-RIAA deal bad for them?
It seems to me that Napster is suffering from an excess of lawyers and MBAs and seem to have lost touch with the demographics of their actual user base. Somehow I doubt that most of those 70M users are going to be willing to help Napster Inc. recoup that $1B. Free music, like free love, just isn't the same when you have to pay cash in advance.
It will give other file sharing proggies the time necessary to mature to the point where they are better than Napster......
Unfortunately, this action, if approved by the Music companies, will mean that the RIAA will focus their attentions on the other file sharing apps on the 'net.....
Feed the need: Digitaladdiction.net
They sort of have a Daffy Duck mentality when it comes to money (Mine! Mine! it's Mine! All Mine!)
Watch them shoot the goose that lays the golden eggs rather then give it up to anyone else. Even tho the goose was never theirs in the first place.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
There are about 270 million people in the US. AOL has 27 million members paying $20/month.
2. What's going to stop people from sharing Napster accounts?
Napster might well cut a deal with AOL where all AOL users become Napster members. AOL would pay Napster around $50 million a month for this and would maybe raise its rates a dollar or two. Remember AOL is now AOL Time Warner one of the Big Five recording companies.
The logical extension of this once Napster does cut a deal with the RIAA similar to the one that Napster proposed for $1Billion, Napster becomes an attractive target for buyout/merger with AOL-Time Warner.
Imagine going up to the DJ at your local party/rave and not being limited to his/her personal collection.
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
I feel the need to clarify this a bit...
There is no such thing as arresting small-time copyright violators here in Belgium.
(1) Indeed there *was* a threat from the IFPI (www.ifpi.org: "IFPI is the organisation representing the international recording industry")
(2) But that threat was only to a small number (100) of users, who had received a warning before
(3) Everyone and his brother says IFPI is not able to identify these users unless they violated the privacy legislation
(4) And, most importantly: Marc Verwilghen, our minister of justice, has declared that the prosecution of small-time piracy has the very lowest priority. This places it, I think, just above cannabis use.
So the whole thing is just some FUD from IFPI.
This sig under construction. Please check back later.
I think you have a good point, but I also think the RIAA may be overplaying their hand. No matter what happens to this particular company, the rise of Napster was a watershed event for the music distribution industry: Millions of people have learned that it is feasible and easy for them to use the internet to move music around.
No matter what happens now, people will still know that. And just as importantly, Napster's size and user volume provided a lab for exploration of how to do it - software, legal issues, pitfalls, hype, arguments pro and con, incentive for copycat technologies, etc.
So whoever starts something new is standing on Napster's shoulders. They don't have to deal with the huge hurdle of explaining to the public what it is and how it works and why it might be fun to use. They don't have to do a lot of the development. They only have to deal with the legal issues.
And there are two ways that can go down. One, someone with a lot of money can make an offer the RIAA can't refuse, and it happens above board. If that happens, okay, well, fair enough. Everybody probably wins, or at least nobody loses too much.
Possibility number two, however, is that it goes underground. Someone comes up with a FreeNet or a Gnutella or an OpenNap that works, that scales, and that doesn't have an address where papers can be served. No other industry has ever faced anything like this before: A ready-made, prepackaged illicit adversary with infrastructure already in place, where millions of educated, well-to-do people have demonstrated that they have no moral problem with lending their participation and support.
If the distributors are smart they'll hedge their bets and sign. If I worked for Napster this would sound like blackmail. As it is, it's just some friendly advice.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
1. Is it likely that they're going to get 50 MILLION people to pay this? How many people are there in the US, like 400 million? Less? (yes, I know the Internet is global, just for perspective)
2. What's going to stop people from sharing Napster accounts?
3. Is subscribing to this new industry-sanctioned Napster going to mean that what was formerly called "pirated" mp3s are now legal to own? Ie, is this buying a license to own MP3s for CDs you didnt' buy because you bought a Napster subscription? Am I allowed to then trade those MP3s via a non-napster (freenet, gnutella, or something else) system?
4. What kind of crazy license/agreement am I gonna have to sign to subscribe? I can't wait to read this agreement. I have a feeling, knowing the RIAA, it will not exactly be equitable, and birthright forfeiture may be included.
W
-------------------
-------------------
This is my SIG. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Napster was and should stay a voice that shouts, we need to break the corporate mold, screw the DMCA and all the legislators, the hell with the copyright laws that were written in the 1700's. This is a new age, the myths of old, like the railroad track sizings are outdated and stale.
Napster should steer away from this direction and loop back to it's roots. LOOP LOOP LOOP!
They really need to not do this. If they do all their base inch fan and support are belonging to corporate america and not us!
More race stuff in one place,
than any one place on the net.
A tenth of a billion if you live anywhere else in the world, and define your numbers according to world standards...
Grumble grumble grumble
You'd be amazed how many rich suburban kids use Napster for the convenience, not because they don't want to pay. If anything, paying would make them feel better about downloading the music. I should know, I'm one of them.
this of course brings up another issue. if the figures are based on 50 million people, well, let's be honest here. of the 50 million people who use napster, there is a large number who, if required to pay a user fee, will simply pirate service. i know i'd be more than happy to spend up to about $50us per year for napster, since i save that much on CDs i dont buy since i only want 1 song. $1.67 per month comes out to about $20 per year or something. in essense, the fee would have to be raised to make up for what's lost to piracy.
.cig - what you do after winning a good flame war
Open source clients and servers, run by volunteers, faith-based organizations, or governments (where aplicable). By their nature, profit and it's motive are forbidden.
Er, no. Profit and its motive (greed) are encouraged under both. While many Open Source projects are produced for altruistic reasons, the recent explosion in Linux is aprtially profit driven. Programmers (and documentors, and managers and even marketers) shave to eat, buy mountain dew, and other things that require money, and are encouraged to do so.
Why on earth would you think otherwise?
It keeps record companies flowing with $$ and the independents will be happy too.
First problem is that this will almost stop the whole notion that Napster is built upon a system where the middleman (record company) is removed. However, they no longer will be removed and will be very necessary for musicians to get any fianancial reward for putting their work online.
It's most likely that Napster will split the $50,000,000 a year for indie labels up in a manner where an indie label would have to register with Napster, and then Napster would be able to include them in the deal in which $50,000,000 is allocated accordingly. Unless Napster offers rewards for individuals who are keen to go around the middleman, the artists will have to sign up to a small indie label and eventually these labels are going to get large and no longer seen as an independent thus making Napster just an entry field in online music distribution/subscription without getting rid of the labels and all we would be left with is pretty much the same as before except you can download songs off the net at a cost from a source which is a record label not the artist themself.
As a musician I think that would suck.
Oh, and if it's cracked, the record labels wouldn't go along, even if they initially acquiesce.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
why doesn't a company form outside of the U.S. with a napster type server, like one of those online gambling companies that evades U.S. and other countries laws. If someone did this then everyone could switch over to it and napster would be so screwed cause then no one would pay the X dollar amount a month for a subscription and everyone could enjoy the scalable architecture of a napster like system again. I know this sounds unfair to music artists, but that isn't the question, the question is: Since there is so much money to be made, then why hasn't this been down ?
http://www.vanillaafro.com - take me seriously and I will shoot you
This leads to the question... If Napster gets this rubber stamped by the RIAA, anybody else who offers the ability to exchange MP3's other than Napster now becomes "Enemy number 1" to Napster. Is their next move to try and get some kind of patent on searching/trading MP3 files between individual users online, so they can use it as ammunition against potential rivals in order to recoup their $1B promise?
--
Unix is user friendly, it's just selective about who its friends are.
Does Napster really have 50 million users currently paying them $5 a month for their service? If it does, that would make them much bigger than some giant organisations - its like having 20% of all US consumers! I know they have users all over the world, but seriously the biggest group must be Americans, due to the cost of bandwidth in most of the rest of the world.
It certainly isn't common knowledge that Napster is such a profit power-house. So assuming that they don't have their users all signed up, who is going to give the $1billion to bribe the record companies not to take them down?
I don't use Napster myself, so please excuse me if I am a little out of touch with the Napster user experience.
So there I was. Naked. In a refrigerator. With a potroast on my knees. Smokin a cigar. That's when it got REALLY weird.
If Napster controls transfer and playback (via their client), I would say that it can work.
However, if all MP3s that weren't created by yourself (read: downloaded over Napster) are encrypted, you will only be able to play them with Napster itself (or any Napster-enabled software). Apart from the fact that this will exclude any non-Windows users (I guess the industry couldn't care less about that), people will not be able to use their favourite player / jukebox (big minus because we know how much people love their skins and similar crap), they will not be able to use standalone MP3 player etc.
Seems the next logical step ;)
W
-------------------
-------------------
This is my SIG. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
This won't change whether or not downloading copyrighted tunes suddenly becomes justified, since the copyright laws haven't change. Rather the question becomes WHICH songs are now legal.
Not all artists are part of record lables represented by RIAA.
Some artists want no part of the MafRIAA.
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
First of all, some of the revenue per user can be recovered from ad banners. An alternative option can be selected by those users who wish to avoid seeing any annoying banners and have them pay a small monthly fee for the privalage.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
So, Napster would expect me to pay $4.95-$9.95/month (as the news.com article says) to share the songs I have on my hard drive, using my bandwidth (which I also pay for)! Also, by paying for the service, I'm going to expect a certain quality from the service. I don't think that it is unreasonable for me to expect transfers to always complete (even if someone else wants to log off), for the service to only list complete songs (so I don't download a 4.3MB file to find out that the correct one is 5.2MB and I miss the last minute of the song) and for the service to have the songs I wish to hear.
Don't get me wrong, Napster is a good service, but I'm currently willing to put up with those limitations I listed above because the price is right. If they are not able to fix the service to protect my intrests, then I will find another solution.
Doh!
For whatever reason, RIAA won the court case, and Napster's business looked like it was going to be squashed.
Now, all of a sudden, sums of $1bn are being talked about and thrown around, and RIAA are acting like pussycats. Now, the last time I checked, accepting money in return for the protection of a business was called 'protection racketeering'. Granted, RIAA have a group of lawyers who can make this sound like the most legal protection racket you've ever heard of, but surely such a defender of principle as the RIAA shouldn't be adopting methodologies from organised crime?
I ranted on here a long time ago about RIAA being a cartel, moving towards a system of increasing profits by charging high prices for generic, manufactured material (cheaper than real artists, remember), thus trying to charge more money for 'product', which, as far as I'm concerned, is vastly inferior to 'music'. It looks like they've neutered the first wave of resistance to their plans.
Those of us who came to Napster via the cluetrain will move on. OpenNAP is still around, as is Gnutella (which needs a serious re-working, but is still viable). What saddens me is that for once, we had a chance to say to the mainstream that there was a better way than The Man's, that there was an alternative, that occasionally building a better mousetrap does work. I just hope we get another chance to say it soon.
PS. I know that RIAA's principle had to do with giving money to the artists, but I have a feeling that a large chunk of this $1bn will actually go to lawyers.
- "How do we do it? Volume!" - The Bursar of Unseen University.
You misunderstand what Napster will become: it will mutate into a vast pockmarked pimp for crypto-protected ''product'' that will only play the places you paid for. They don't want to ''change everything for the better'', they just want to be allowed to live so they can shovel cash at the bloated cold-eyed Lords of Contracts and dream of their exit strategy of selling out to sleek deadfaced shinybeetle chequestrokers.
The Forces of Darkness have embraced crypto as a means to extend enforcement of arbitrary limitations for profit (moving it into Windows for example, with driver signing: DRM content will not play unless all your drivers have the crypto to prove they are ''legit''; Intel are pushing a design to encrypt the actual video data between the PC and the display unit) and things will get plenty worse and more restricted before they get better.
The only upside is that so far pushing the crypto into the eyes and ears of the users is not currently economically feasible, otherwise they'd be looking at that too; that means that ultimately the content can always be hijacked if a modest loss of quality is acceptable.
$1 billion over 5 years is $200 million per year
.)
That's $4.00 per person per year, figuring 50 million users (sure there are . .
That's $0.33 per month.
But they'll still never get it.
I wonder what Metallica will say about their wanting 'control of distribution' argument now...
They'd apparently be in the $50 mil going to independent artists (the ones who own their own music).
All your hallucinogen are belong to us.
Will I retire or break 10K?
1) Napster doesn't have 50 million users. It's the same thing as the ICQ/AIM or MSN or Yahoo or just about anyone on the web's numbers. Multiple accounts, forgotten accounts, abandoned accounts all take their toll on the real number. Sure, Napster has a lot of users, but no where near 50 million. I myself have 4 from testing the Napster module for perl. I forget the actual numbers, but ICQ has something like only 5-6 million real users for the tens of millions of accounts.
.agrippa.
2) Charging people for what they previously got for free on the internet won't work. It's been proven time and time again. Napster might be able to make this model work to some extent, but not in the sheer quantity needed to even approach payment on their settlement. At $9, they need a little under 2 million monthly subscriptions. At $5, they need a little under 4 million subscriptions. Those are big numbers for an internet subscription service.
3) There are free Napster alternatives. 'Nuff said.
4) Quality of content. If you're going to pay, you expect your download not to time out or mrHaX0r01 to not cut you off in the middle of the download because he's rebooting his machine. We put up with these inconviences now because it's free. If my phone company started disconnecting my calls in the middle of conversations I wouldn't be too happy. There is a level of service expected when you pay for something, and I don't believe they have that level of service to attain the subscriptions necessary.
Enjoy your Napster while you can. This settlement offer shows that Napster knows it lost and knows its royally screwed. There is very little chance that Napster can raise over $200 million a year profit to pay for this, and the record companies know that.
You think the only thing they are going to do is bank on subscriber base? Are we all so short sighted that we can't see that they are going to use this to push advertisments on us while we use it? That is more money! 50 million eyes commands a large sum of greenbacks. I think we are all being a little short sighted about what napster is about to do. They will have a virtual strangle hold on mp3/aac propogation on the net, at least legal.
They will attack those that are not napster, and the music company will do so as well. With that kind of subscriber base they are laying the foundation for music videos, movies, etc...Who do you think the movie industry will go to when compression gets good enough to push it over broadband? I would think they would goto napster, the guys that have the 50 million base allready in their backpocket.
If they get this they will become the next AOL of the internet, pushing it with the newest killer app to hit the market and sucking up the others as they go. This is only the start if they side this over on the music community.
Listen to your music, but what them become and empire.
Neck_of_the_Woods
Neck_of_the_Woods
#/usr/local/surf/glassy/overhead
Lets go over this. Who is going to pay the $1B? The users? yup. What users? Well the users who decide to pay the $9/month so they can download mp3's off other people who pay $9/month! Stupid. Wait? I thought the new napster server will be a central server that you can leech off of unlimited? No thats emusic.com , soon to be another casaulty dot bomb. Whose going to pay? Those that are stupid. You can still use napster without a napster server. Napster is a frickin IRC server, The server software is available. Napigator and others will let you use your favourite "pir8" napster-based server for free still. These servers will run in countries where they can exist legally. So whose going to pay this $1B? Well if they are lucky and get 10% of the subscriber base, that would be just fine and dandy. Wait emusic already is trying to do this? They are failing. So why would napster succeed? They won't. Are you going to pay $9/month to leech off others who pay $9/month? Hell no. Better come up with a new business plan , napster. It's not realistic, it's not going to succeed. This is the internet, we aren't going to pay for something that is already free. Why not start charging to read and post at slashdot? Cause it would be out of business in a month.
===sam=== free nessus vulnerability scan = www.vulnerabilities.org
The point is, that deep down, the RIAA is smart. They know that the great percentage of the music traded on Napster wouldn't be purchased anyways. Its not money they're losing, they're just afraid that their loyal purchasing crowd might SOMEDAY drift into that environment and they'll start losing real sales. At least with a monetary figure attached to the service, people will be less inclined to switch over to it over purchasing CD's.
However, the RIAA isn't about to start admitting that napster for the time being probably is generating more cd sales than stealing them, but they would rather lose money and keep a stranglehold on the market rather than let that market drift away from them.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
Well, by their actions I believe they have admitted the need to reach some kind of agreement with the record companies. That basically gives the power to the record companies. If I was the record companies, I'd simply hold out for as much money as I could squeeze from Napster.
I bet it ends up being a LOT more than 1.67 per.
I think this is a very good idea. I don't buy much music now, because I like to dabble and don't listen to a particular song for more than a few weeks. For access to a huge library of music like Napster, I know dozens of people (including me) that would pay up to $10. That's a lot more than many people spend on CDs now, and in the end, something like this might allow the record business to make *more* money.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
--
Top Most Bizarre/Disturbing Error Messages
For an industry reporting revenues of $15b a year in the U.S. alone and deathly fearful of the internet it seems that $1b over 5 years is small potatos compared to the perceived loss of control.
Somehow, I don't think the Luddites will accept...
If the music industry is losing sooooo much money to people pirating music, then why do all the big newspapers GIVE AWAY their news stories on their websites?
Ever heard of:
The Detroit News (My hometown rag)
The London Times
The New York Times
USA Today
The L.A. Times
The Boston Globe
The list goes on and on.
It's obvious to me that these newspapers are generating their own revenue by advertising themselves. Music artists have it easy because the LISTENERS do most of the promotions when they rip/encode to MP3!!!
IMHO, this whole napster thing looks like one ingenious publicity stunt to sell MORE records.