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Napster to Filter by Filenames
mE123 writes: "Zdnet is reporting that Napster said that they would voluntarily block songs by filtering the filenames sometime this weekend. Because no one would ever spell Meta11ica wrong." Meanwhile, back at the ranch, FSF legal eagle Eben Moglen is wasting no time getting the word out about Napster alternatives.
Could you explain more about the MD5 sum? Text searches are easy (as long as it's for exact text), and in this case all they have to search is the names submitted to their database. If it can do the name searches to match requests to available files, it can also look for the name in a blocked list.
.01 second of silence to the end of the file and change the MD5 sum?
I assume MD5 is some sort of file checksum. That is, you have to fetch the file to find it, rather than just looking at the database listing. That puts quite a load on Napster's pipes. Maybe you have to add up all the bytes in the file to calculate it -- that's quite a computational load, plus it means Napster has to download every file they list, and takes a lot of bandwidth. Or maybe the MD5 sum is pre-calculated and embedded in the file header?
In any case, couldn't you just add
Posted this idea several weeks ago. Figure I might as well post it again.
It is conceivable to have a name obfuscation server to allow secure file renaming such that the original name cannot be easily deduced from the obfuscated name. Usage would be as follows:- user opens 'obfuscate' client, types in title and performer name: Enter Sandman, Metallica.
- 'obfuscate' client contacts server and requests obfuscated name
- 'obfuscate' client returns the obfuscated name: '12f64723ff.mp3'
- user uses Napster to search for '12f64723ff.mp3'
- user renames to whatever he likes
For the absolutely paranoid, the following steps could be taken to disallow 'abuse' by big labels:It would be possible to map part of the renaming scheme and ban certain files but if the implementation is done right, it would be too difficult to do on a massive scale.
you already did. www.boondocks.com
I do not have a signature
and of course the first "band with a mispelled name"...
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Thats a pretty broad generalization thats like saying "The whole Internet movement is based on people who want access to large amounts of pornography"
Sure, its a major factor but its not the only thing driving it. What about independant artists? Or people who want music their computer for their own listening pleasure without having to listen to stream buffering? I have purchased more CDs in the last year because I've had access to more music than ever before. "Hmmm I've never heard anything by 'Band X', let me download some of their stuff and find out." Or better yet. "Hmmm I think I want to buy this CD, is it worth it, I'll just download some tracks and check it out." Mostly I find that the average quality of mp3s out there is low (at least on my Hi-Fi they sound low). A lot of times the volume levels tend fluctuate from song to song making burning a more labor intesive task than it was in '95 (when you could just borrow a buddy's CD and copy it).
Like it or lump it bootlegging has gone mainstream, Napster is just the first battle casualty in a much bigger war.
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crazy dynamite monkey
Screw that. Get a open-source napster client, and change the code to name-mangle "on-the-fly". Hell, change the outgoing search function to mangle, also, and the entire process would be invisible to the user.
How much do you want to bet that the RIAA will outlast Napster by several quadrillion dollars yet?
Excuse me? When exactly did I say Napster would beat the RIAA? I *never* thought Napster would succeed in the long run.
The RIAA is defending the interests of the majority of it's representatives - people who create music. It won.
Wrong. The RIAA won the battle and lost the war. They are now going to cause everyone that uses Napster to move to a P2P technology that they can't shutdown through lawsuits.
Watch and see; it's already happening.
"And like that
I've used Napster to downlaod XX songs (where XX may equal zero, according to my lawyer,) but I don't do it because I don't want to pay for them. I do it because I finally have the chance to hear the songs I've loved on the radio for the past 20 years without having to pay $16 or $18 for the other ten crappy tunes that came with them. I think the music industry has a right to protect their copyrights, but I think they are making a huge mistake in ignoring the fact that their "sell ten songs on the strength of one hit" days are nearing an end.
Just out of curiosity, how many people here would be willing to pay a dollar or so for every song downloaded?
Scratch-o-Matic
Evil is the money of root.
LOL.. this already happens (kinda) look up "house of the rising sun" i got 10 different bands, 2 different songs....
- "yes but can you hit someone over the head with a rolled up internet?" -Foxtrot
Just wait until Webster's dictionary sues Napster for violating its copyright on words in the english language.
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A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Now the author can sue napster (and the RIAA) for illegal restraint of trade
Napster is a privately-owned service. Despite the legal wranglings and the much argued right NOT to be distributed, there is certainly no automatic right TO be distributed. No law prevents Napster from restraining your trade on Napster servers.
Really, I don't see how Napster has any liability to the willing participants at all since the service is free
Nuff said.
You're using her as bait, Master!
The irony here is that Napster's LYING about the jtechnical challenges of MD5 sum blocking is what led to this. They've maintained MANY, MANY times (in sworn declarations, even) that MD5 sum blocking is impossible. The above link has their VP of Engineering, Eddie Kessler, stating "Given the large universe of MD5 checksums, it is impossible for Napster to monitor the checksums when we process thousands of new files a second. Napster's service would be rendered unusable under such conditions." But now, it's suddenly possible to block based on a TEXT SEARCH, which is much more computationally intensive than an MD5 sum compare? Can you say "perjury," boys and girls?
Anyway, I'm just amused by the fact that they're being hoist on their own petard. If they hadn't protested overmuch that MD5 was impossible, and just done it, they might've been able to keep it going for the indies. But text compares are gonna kill the service - once they get 50,000 bands in there (and millions of track names), EVERY file you try to share will match SOMETHING.
I would subscribe to the existing service, but not to this. Are you listening Shawn?!
sulli
RTFJ.
are copyrighted by us...
Great. Now the legions of Napster will be forced to learn l33tsp33k just to download their m3t4ll1c4 mp3s.
/me *smack*s his head
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I don't think they have much to fear as long as they still own the radio airwaves and mainstream music video exists. This is how they have managed to sell singles embedded in full length CDs/Tapes/LPs for years.
I do not have a signature
Sure, it's a helluva lot more work, but it certainly beats renaming files completely.
26 new bands put out a CD this week, all supported by the RIAA. The bands, A, B, C, D, .. Z all are eager to hit the music scene and have had napster ban their MP3's matching their names.
Really though, what about a band like "Hole"? I can't trade any song that has "Hole" in the title? Or the one name artists, like Monica and Brandy.
You're forgetting the possibility of out of band indexing, such as a web page with keys for song titles, or even tools that automatically munge your MP3 names to something unintelligible and then write an index file named with an .mp3 suffix.
The only certainty is entropy.
I'm not a lawyer, but I would bet that attempts to actively subvert napster by misspelling names might pull liability from Napster to the user. If napster works hard to prevent copyright infringement, the users that are perpetrating that infringement might be more likely to be held responsible. Meta11ica does know those names, and they might head for them instead of napster. Especially if napster cooperated with companies.
-Moondog
I can just imagine all those young song bandits out there resurrecting this "encryption": Nun! Gur Erghea bs Ebg 13! Whfg vzntvar gur ubeqrf bs crbcyr ybbxvat sbe: Oevgarl.zc3 Zrgnyyvpn.zc3 rgp.
http://www.ucomics.com/boondocks/viewbo.cfm?uc_ful l_date=20010226&uc_comic=bo&uc_daction=X
I do not have a signature
I wish everyone would just let Napster die.
The entertainment industry would try to push CPRM and similar systems onto us no matter what, but with no better rationale than 'its going to make us richer' the politicians would probably strike it down. Now the RIAA/MPAA will claim CPRM is an 'anti-piracy' measure as opposed to 'screw-our-customers' system. PLEASE, GIVE UP PEOPLE, YOU ARE ONLY MAKING THINGS HARDER ON YOURSELVES IN THE FUTURE; if internet users appear to be a bunch of thieving pirates (as the entertainment industry probably puts it), then we will get screwed over and over again. There will be more battles for our freedoms which will need fighting. Lets make sure our situation is LEGALLY WATERPROOF next time. This whole p2p thing is a huge mess imho.
I don't like letting big business control me any more than the next guy, but please, realise that with their huge budgets they have an unfair advantage over us. If we are going to fight them, we must make sure we are on very solid legal ground. If we are not we are doomed from the start.
To the FSF: please choose a battle where a win is definite; you lose this one and we're all screwed.
M4nd4t0ry mi55p311ing! I love it.
sulli
RTFJ.
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A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Right now, Napster is king, right? If they are shut down, it's like taking out a dictator - it leaves a power vaccuum that someone will immediately try to take over. Fifty million users? That's gotta be worth something. New programs will arrive in droves, every kid out there trying to be the next Shawn Fanning, with an idea that will beat the RIAA.
People will just use these new services. You can bet they won't be as easy to hit as Napster, which never even tried to hide. Napster, by the way, is far from perfect. The new services won't have to try too hard to be BETTER than Napster.
IMOH, the RIAA should have struck a deal, kept their market share, and gone to the subscription system. By blowing Napster away, sure they "win". But they lose control, and will just create new adveraries. The next guy that steps up will be ready. They RIAA is betting that it can outsmart the combined programming skills of every computer programmer that likes music. Goooood luck.
What some people don't realize is that all the Internet does is share files, for free. You have to do extra work to make it NOT share them, and you have to do an absurd amount of work to make it sell them!
The RIAA got so focused on wiping out Napster that it forgot to look up and realize that the world had changed. It was their 1950's era thinking that did them in, "If we just stifle this technology with laswuits, it will never be an issue for us and we can keep doing things the old way".
They had never seen anything like the Internet.
However, I your solutions impractical and unoriginal
Point (1) on labeling mp3's is already implemented, as Id3 (and id1, and id2). This doesn't
Point (2) Server's being "Key protected". This is a given, if you are trying to secure a server from access. Maybe there is more to this??
Point (3) Seems to be a lot of hand waving about how maybe if we put 1 and 2 together something might work.
A lot of companies have been trying to do something like this mainly a group called SGMI, it's a complete failure. It will continue to fail. I firmly believe that there is absolutely nothing anyone can do about programs like napster. napster will die soon, then something else will prop up, they will try to crush that, then another will spawn. Eventually they'll stop trying to crush it, and make there own that is: Legal, Easy, and "Cost Effective".
-Jon
Streamripper
this is my sig.
I use another one. Audiognome. http://www.audiognome.com/
:). Sometimes it returns thousands of music in one query, unlike Napster's 100-music limit. It's worth a try.
It's a napster-compatible client on steroids, and without those dumb limitations of the napster client. The good thing is that it can connect simultaneously to other networks that use Napster protocolo, such as the infamous OpenNap, MusicCity, and tons of others, that, added, can have more users than Napster itself. So, instead of querying one server, it queries tens of servers, that are not being sued
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Roses are #FF0000, Violets are #0000FF, find / -name '*base*' |xargs chown -R us && mv zig greatjustice
Just rename your mp3s to their hex values. Problem solved.
Douglas Adams
1952-2001 :(
However, since online music trading can't be ended, that tapering of the boom will be blamed on the trading that hasn't been shut down.
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Do ya feel happy-go-lucky, punk?
If the spelling is so disguised that napster cant
locate it, probably the customers wont too.
You'll probably get endless euphenisms for
popular songs like there for sex and drugs,
but you can control the bulk of things.
but even in that sense it was still people who wished to profit from the activity. There never has been a word for someone who wanders through the landscape passing out copies of sounds recordings, free of charge. With that criteria missing, it is an often mis-used word. I share music files, I'm not a pirate.
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+&x
The difference between Katz and napster users is napster users exchange other peoples IP for free, Katz wanted to do it for money.
Napster wanted to make money off of their service. That was what Metallica objected to most strongly.
I have yet to see a shred of evidence that the music industry is losing money because of Napster.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
A) Why are they saying that blocking text is hard? Every story I've read on this says "it's difficult to do blah blah blah"... It's easy to say "display this song unless it says 'metallica' in the file name". Although, I suppose once you get 10 or 20 thousand titles to block it'll slow down. They should just not index them from the users when they log on to Napster and it won't be an issue.
B) What about the "legal" songs by Metallica? The bootleg live mp3's, independent remixes and such that they're losing no money over? It would block: "Metallica - Enter Sandman (live 3-2-2001).mp3" and "Metallica - Unforgiven (bob's garage techno mix).mp3".
When will they realize that it's impossible to stop this, and embrace it? I had downloaded well over a gig of MP3s (over a 28.8 dialup, no less) before Napster even came out -- they can't ban FTP (even though they'd like to).
ScrO!
You people need to learn to stop saying NAPSTER obtained stuff. None of the files you obtain using Napster software is from Napster. It's from your friend across the street. Fact remains here that Napster is just the middle man. Connecting person to person. The RIAA doesn't understand that and because of that what they are doing is fighting the people, not Napster. I wonder what 57 million people (voting or not, imagine for a second that even half of those people are registered voters) can do to the RIAA's bank account. The RIAA instead of trying to look at its current business plans and listen to the people, chose to fight them. For that it is inevitable (because everytime someones loads up napster they are saying that the RIAA's current model is poor whether they know it or not) that the RIAA will die off. They haven't won any fight; all they did was postpone and probably even make the movement stronger.
My take on it is that they should of made a deal with Napster because out of those 57 million users not all of them wish to steal. Infact most of them don't see it as stealing, many of them would love to pay 10 bucks a month to download whatever the hell they want. It's more convient, easier and they get only the stuff they want to hear. That's what all this boils down to. People don't want to go out and buy CD's anymore and the RIAA just doesn't get that. It's just not college kids using Napster. It's everyone.. People in general, Old, young etc. That in itself says something.
I'm not against the RIAA or against Napster or for any of them. I just see it as survival of the fittest. RIAA vs NAPSTER is how I see it. The only outcome I can logically come up with is above. RIAA has just sealed its fate.
Flame if need be.
Cheers
"That makes no sense," said Russell Frackman, lead counsel for the record labels. "That's trying to fix it after the horse has already left the barn."
This coming from the lead counsel of the record labels, in response to Napster filtering filenames only after they have appeared on the site.
I think the horse left the barn MONTHS ago. Score -3, Obvious.
"Before the wreck, I never knew how to type with my face."
What I would *really* like to know is, when all the Napster hoopla dies down, are people still going to be interested in Artist's rights? I find it rather amusing that the RIAA uses 'artist's rights' as the flag under which they are currently doing battle (yes, that is an oversimplification I know).
Quote from ???: "There are lies; there are damn lies; and there are benchmarks."
My ex boyfriend used Napster, and it upset me greatly. He was stealing music, plain and simple, from the record companies, and therefore from the musicians, the artists.
We should have more respect for the artists. Don't use Napster. It is wrong.
They fuck you up, your relatives
They fuck you up, your relatives
They probably do it to you because you are worthless.
Eben Moglen sure doesn't waste his time, or ours - the article will be written in ten days from now...
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Unselfish actions pay back better
You seem to think that if Napster is shutdown, suddenly P2P clients suddenly stop working.
He didnt say any such thing.
"You seem to think..." is another way of saying, "you implied." Implications are ways of saying things without actually saying them (since you seem to need the dots connected for you).
He said you're a lying, stealing sack of shit and nothing in your reply indicated otherwise.
Now that he clearly did not say, since *I* don't even use Napster or any other P2P client. I have hundreds of legally purchased CD's already converted to MP3, and no time or inclination to waste using Napster to download any more.
Sure, I occasionally download a song from the net that I didn't pay for. I've also recorded songs of the radio in the past, and borrowed CD's from friends to make recordings.
But YOU are missing the point. The RIAA signed their own death warrant today, whether you believe it's right or wrong to download music that you haven't paid for...
-thomas
"And like that
Don't get me wrong, I'm generally against the way most people use Napster...however, this is just a stupid way to solve the problem. How long will it be before some script kiddie puts 6,000,000 single character text files name "Metallica-Enter Sandman.mp3" in his music directory and brings the filter to it knees? Napster is not fair to the artists or the record companies, however, the record companies brought it on themselves gouging us in order to increase their ability to pimp Britney Spears--
Agreed. I don't think md5sums are a possible way of filtering though, because every rip of the same song is going to be a little different.
Care about freedom?
I'd rather be lucky than good.
Not that I expected any less from a bunch of common thieves.
As opposed to what? Corporate thieves? Those who bribe politicians for legislation? Those who fix prices in an attempt to avoid fair market prices? Quit acting like the music industry is so fucking squeeky clean. They are much bigger thieves than any of us will every be by downloading some songs from Napster. They steal millions from us and from the artists whose rights they claim that they care so much about. They're hypocrits and you've bought into their bullshit. The fans are the only ones who give a shit about the artists. Until we have a system that let's fans contribute directly to the artists for their work, both artists and fans will continue to get fucked by the music industry.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
Our name is "A", I better tell napster to stop blocking people from trading our stuff
1. Lurk in musical genre-themed chat room.
2. Look for users with good connection speeds/small ping/large number of shares
3. Browse through their shares.
4. Yuse tha fzzy logyc patrn-recognition systm God gave you.
... and we end up exactly where we used to be in the pre-napster era.
The whole point of napsters success and the reason why it began to trouble the big players in the music industry is that it is simple enough for the average windows user to (a) find and get the music he wants and (b) to offer his own collection for redistribution at the same time.
Making (a) or (b) even slightly more complicated and the whole scheme will collapse as it is unable to produce the necessary snowball-effect to attract a critical number of contributing users.
Fair use can go along way, but when there is so much of it going on and there is money being lost... who is going to win?
Ok, but the evidence suggests that the music industry is MAKING money, not losing it.
There is no evidence that they'd be making more money if Napster wasn't there, and some evidence that the opposite is true.
The songs I have downloaded from Napster fall into three categories:
1) Songs I already own on another medium that isn't convenient to transfer into my computer, or that is tucked away in a box somewhere.
2) Songs I have wanted to listen to, listened to, and then deleted as a waste of my hard drive space.
3) Songs that I wouldn't buy if they weren't available via Napster; I'd just do without them.
Napster hasn't prevented me from buying a single CD. The lawsuit against them, OTOH, has. I suspect I am not unique.
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They will be in Pig latin, or some rot variant
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
On the one hand, I agree with your post in that I think it's ridiculous to try to limit the potential of the internet, and free speech and all that.
On the other, though, is the fact that this is a product that they sell, and naturally they want to protect that position. I'll probably get lynched as a troll for saying this, but I've made two observations:
1 - the argument in the past has been to say "What if I'm downloading legal music that's not mainstream, and thus not owned by the RIAA"? The answer to this question is that this filtering shouldn't affect the "legal" music, so it's a non-issue.
2 - "what if I own the music I'm downloading, since I bought the CD"? Well - if you've got the CD, I guess you can either rip the tracks yourself, or use the my.mp3.com service. If you've already got it, why do you need to download it?
Let's be realistic here - yes, music is overpriced, and I feel that we do have the right to have the music in any form we wish once we've purchased it, but the recording industry is trying to protect themselves too.
Taking this further, we don't have the "right" to buy a piece of software (say, a copy of Quake3), snapshot the ISO and distribute it. We don't have the right to go and download that snapshot if we haven't bought it. Nor do we need it if we have bought it. Id Software earned their right to sell it (at whatever price they want). If you feel it's overpriced, then DON'T BUY IT! Feeling that something is overpriced does not give you the right to steal. This applies to music too. If enough people stood up and refused to buy, then they'd be forced to respond to the market.
If you already have it, then you don't need another copy either. Obviously we haven't been doing a good job of telling the RIAA that their music isn't worth the price, judging by the fact that sales were up last year.
You can accomplish anything you set your mind to. The impossible just takes a little longer.
This filename filtering system could very well mean the demise of Napster. And the beginning of the Gnutella renaissance.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
If you take that reasoning not too much further, you could sue all the backbone internet providers because their networks could be used for piracy. The court which tried this case would be favorable to shutting the internet down for that reason.
Likewise it becomes very easy to shut someone down if all they do is tell you where to find stuff, and even if that process is automated. The implications of a corporation with whom you have never entered into a contract being able to thus control your speech (Even if what you are doing is perfectly legal by the way, because your ISP will never stand up to the threat of a lawsuit) is chilling.
Of course, it seems that these days, money outweighs justice in our legal system. Perhaps they should redo that statue of the lady with the blindfold and the scales so that she has a big stack of $100 bills on one side of the scales.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
There are several public domain musical recordings, iirc. Works created before a certain date (before copyrights were as they were today), are automatically put in the public domain. A great example of this is the books in the gutenberg project (project to digitize public domain books), who includes many works that were around before copyrights such as shakespeare's *ORIGINAL*, not translated, plays. This includes the music sheets (the notes) of mozart, beehtoven, etc...(sp?), however the recordings themselves are not, unless released by the owner.
There may be some very old recordings before said date (guessing 70+ years ago?). Additionally, artists of anytime can decide to release music into the public domain (a choice of the artist, NOT the government, don't blame them). Under fair use laws is included the right to parody, so one can make parodies, but there is some gray area there.
As for the future, eventually, when the copyrights may expire, the copyright owner may decide to release music (talking 50 or so years from now) but simply deciding not to renew it. IANAL, so I would like some clarification on this, as well as how many times a copyright can be renewed.
Am I the only one who thinks that the obvious solution to this filename filtering is to use an encryption layer between the client and the server? Filenames could be posted to napster using a changable encryption and then searches could be conducted by encrypting the search pattern. Viola, napster has no way to check what the filenames are and could claim that they aboslutely can't monitor what the users are doing. Not only does the file not pass through napster, but the filenames don't either.
dude! please clarify! ever hear the phrase "pay the bearer on demand..."
as for "won't work" - you're not giving us much to go on there either :P
btw, steven king made a cool half million this way, and what's more, he still owns his work. I guess if the NY Times says it's a failure it must be true - they wouldn't have any reason to make us think artists can find an audience without the help of large corporate publishing consortiums, would they?
I have a better question for you. Should it be illegal to swap music that's copyrighted but no longer in print? It's almost like the RIAA wants to tell you what you can and can't listen to.
--- Don't ever trust a woman until she's dead- B.B. King
Just wanted to point out that legal downloads from musicians who WANT you to download can be found at:
IUMA
UBL (Artist Direct)
mp3.com
vitaminic
mp3.fr
rollingstone.com
Amazon.com has a free downloads section in the music department
And for money:
emusic.com
An engineer who ran for Congress. http://herbrobinson.us
However, if Napster simply opened their code and their database, we would see Napster mirrors spring up all over the place.
I think thats the solution, rather than pure P2P, which is flaky at best given the current internet protocols. Unless someone comes up with a P2P replacement for basic things like TCP/IP and DNS, file sharing will continue to be handled best by servers.
So I say, mirror Napster. But would they open the code to allow the technology to survive. If so, we should embrace them. If not, I say the solution lies in mirrored servers, not P2P per se.
No, Thursday's out. How about never - is never good for you?
Nope, it isn't. The '1337 speak' we know today evolved from conventions of long, long, long ago, before large online services where around -- we're talking early 80's here. And, back then, we -- err 'they' didn't "leetify" every word, just a few, like "thanx" "kule" etc.
It was a sign that one was 'at home' when in the BBS world.. now it's just irritating.
Hilary Rosen's speech was about her love of money and her desire to roll around naked in a pile of money.
If this is true and enforceable, this could be a huge benefit of napster. Non RIAA artists should be able to take advantage of this new medium to get their names and music out! The EFF et al. should be prepared to fight any effort by the RIAA to block us from accessing non-RIAA music.
sulli
RTFJ.
If Napster and the RIAA really want to come to an agreement and make something that works, then first RIAA should 0wn Napster and then they should scrap the file sharing aspect.
They've got the skrilla for the space to store all the music they want to be made available in a central location (with mirrors etc.. but centrally controlled) and give access for either a monthly fee or price-per-track. (not per download.. networks are too flakey.. I'd pay to be able to flag a track for download any time/any number of times)
I'm sure little Tammy would love to be able to download all the Brittany Spears she can stand for a flat fee. The industry is happy, Tammy is happy, and Brittany is happy.
The downside is that they aren't going to have every song in the world to download (that's what OpenNap etc.. will be for), but the upside is that they can make all the files high-quality un-cut rips of the tracks.
If they did that, I wouldn't mind signing up to snag a few tracks for a few bucks if I knew they were going to be high-quality tracks. I'm much too lazy and too cheap to go to the store and buy whole CDs.
Matt
2. Look for users with good connection speeds/small ping/large number of shares
3. Browse through their shares.
4. Yuse tha fzzy logyc patrn-recognition systm God gave you.
It would be easy enough to write a shell script that would go through all your mp3 files and make a random misspelling in each. Ditto if they ever start checking MD5sums, write a program that changes a single bit (maybe in the comment field of the ID3 tag) for each file.
Karma: Bored. (Thinking about resurrecting the "Anyone else is an imposter" joke.)
This is really the crux of the issue and a possible way out for Napster. Really, they don't need to stop the piracy -- they just need to transfer all liability from themselves to the pirates, and what better way to do that than to require an explicit action on the part of the pirate to move from legal activity to illegal activity.
If they host a system whose primary advertised use is a directory service for the trading of files, and a subset of users independently devise an encryption scheme for their titles which Napster does not natively support, than Napster becomes no more liable than IRC.
From CNN.com:
"The new proposed Napster, slated to launch this summer, also would have limitations of 128 kilobytes per second and lower for sharing files, which would hamper both the speed and quality of music being swapped."
I read this as meaning only 128kbs or lower MP3's, as opposed to transfer speed, which would effictively kill off high quality CD burning.
Well, any form of credit payment (which is the norm for electronic commerce) is nothing more than a promise to pay at a later date.
Ccard companies factor a given amount of loss due to error, fraud, etc, into their business models. It is perfectly reasonable to suggest a model in which a subset of users paid. If that subset could be accurately predicted, even better.
In either case, you are forgetting the time-honored system that puts the bread on the table for everyone from waiters to strippers: it's called _Gratuity_.
The more you tighten you grip, Rosen, the more MP3s will slip through your fingers.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
Now I know that the popular attitude here at slashdot is that all the members of the RIAA have a collective IQ of a retarded rock. I want to respectfully disagree. Record companies do not have dumb CEOs, and they do not have dumb lawyers, to survive in the business climate, you have to be smart, and lawyers who make more in an hour then I make in a week probably graduated near the top of their class.
For a thought exercize, lets give the RIAA the same numbers we are looking at. As far as I can tell, Napster isn't hurting the music industry. CD sales are still up. Napster has introduced a lot of people to different bands and singers, its a good source of promotion. If Napster is hurting sales, its by a tiny percent. A mere blip on the revenue chart.
Therefore, why go after Napster? Any move against Napster makes the Opennap and gnutella-like networks much more popular. Instead of having one big localized target, the RIAA will create many small targets, often with no central location. Gnutella, for example, is not killable by the RIAA. Even if they would get all the ISPs in the world to block the default Gnutella port and start scanning for search requests, Gnutella could shift over to ports 21/23, and start encrypting their data. The RIAA must know this. Yet the RIAA moved against Napster. Why?
If Gnutella/OpenNap is a threat, logic dictates taking Napster and corrupting it for the RIAA needs. Napster has the largest chunk of the pie through its popularity, a nice fee-based service with high-quality mp3s would keep Napster popular, and hinder the amount of users flocking to non-Napster alternatives. If RIAA/Napster had 128+ kbps encoded songs on a central server with correct names and no trunciated files for a mere $5/month usage fee, it would be very competetive.
But the RIAA didn't go this route. They decided to kill Napster. This suggests to me that they have some plan to attack OpenNap/Gnutella. I have to admit, I can't see how they can pull off a successful attempt, for the reasons I stated above, but unless the RIAA are idiots, they have a plan. Maybe new laws going into effect (but how would they be inforced), new monitoring devices built into new hard drives, or maybe a new cd encryption scheme...
Of course, maybe I'm wrong and the RIAA is filled with idiots. But I don't think so.
But what's to stop the RIAA from buying lotsa computers, downloading the obfuscate client and figuring out the obfuscated names? The crypto's not going to work (the trust question), and the RIAA might be willing to set up clusters of UltraSPARCs to run the server if a client-intensive system is used.
And if a slow server response is built in, people will quit using it...
If napster itself doesn't survive all this attention, I can guarantee you that the napster idea will survive beyond all this legislation. There is far too much consumer interest in the idea of napster for it to die off, no matter how much the business execs might be afraid of it. Wherever there is extreme mindshare, there will be success.
If Napster doesn't have a workable business model, one will be created by market demand that serves the same need.
I bet right this instant someone is working on a small program to automatically rename all of your mp3s.
Read in the filename.
replace "o" with "0"
replace "l" with "1"
replace "e" with "3"
replace "a" with "4"
replace "s" with "5"
replace "t" with "7"
Save the filename.
That would pretty much obscure any file out there while makeing it fairly obvious to anyone who added you to their hotlist and was browsing through your collection.
We have the best government that money can buy.
Ok, who wants to share their 'ZC3' files with me? :)
Or better yet, hack the client to do it all automatically, of course. I'm not fudging all my filenames on MY disk. I suppose I could get really good at reading ROT13 native, though.
-Vic If you can't figure out my email, then don't.
I think Napster represents a small number of users who download mp3s. Napster is not the only way of getting mp3s...so there must be tens of more millions of people getting mp3s from other sources. Napster may die .... but mp3s will never die.
Sounds like you're re-writing aimster.
Lover's Arrival, The
Lover's Arriva1, The
Lover's Arrival, Thu
Lover's Arriva1, Thu
Lover's Arrival, Tha
Lover's Arriva1, Tha
Lover's Arrived, The
Lover's Arrival, Thy
Lover's Arrival, THX
And we all lust for cyborg monkey!
He's our man!
They fuck you up, your relatives
They fuck you up, your relatives
They probably do it to you because you are worthless.
Insane has no 'i'.
Please stop APK.. you're only hurting yourself.
ever hear from Jennifer? whatever happened to her after that creditcard spree she did to you? (and how are those 'fatties' holding up, still got a nubile teen to roll 'em for ya?)
Gnutella sucks
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can anyone say "steganography plugin" ?
--
You can be an atheist and still not want to succumb to some weird cross-over sheep disease -- AC
Yes they are; you'd have to have a list to figure it out. That would have to be a separate system outside of Napster, which is how it would have to be anyhow...
That's why I'd rather just go with OpenNap.
Will the real Bruce Perens Please Stand Up
I have nothing much to say about napster except: "What did you expect?!?" I'm mostly just showing off my new sig, which, for all you people wondering, is completely true.
The truth about Michael
Now will this keyword blocking continues when the fee-based napster starts? Now I have a song that I have written called "Metallica - Unforgiven.mp3" (yes, it's really called that, and guess what it's about). What happens if I pay my $20 a month or whatever to access the napster network to distribute my own music and my song gets blocked?
Stupid Cheap Guitars
So lets say I have a file called file.mp3 In order to make this fairly decryptable, yet random, let each user pick a offset number and tack it onto the front of the "encrypted" string.
here is an example with an offset of 4 attached to the front of the string and then use ASCII values for the characters plus the desired offset.
Example: Filename = file.mp3 Offset = 4:
4-106-109-112-105-50-113-116-55
or
4-(ASCII 'f' + 4)-(ASCII 'i' + 4)-(ASCII 'l' + 4)-(ASCII 'l' + 4)-(ASCII '.' + 4)-(ASCII 'm' + 4)-(ASCII 'p' + 4)-(ASCII '3' + 4)
this, in my opinion would create a LOT of filenames that napster would have to block.
I guess I got a little too much out of that affadavit for Robert Philip Hanssen. (the part about a pre-agreed on offset on all numerals in the communication)oh well.... I guess this is what happens when I haven't slept for 3 days.... I ramble out stuff like this :)
Steve
What about MojoNation ?
Now that is some funny shit. I have moderator points and if the post wasn't already at 5 I would have helped it
Brilliant.
and Doktor Druh.
--
Je t'aime Stéphanie
There are a million ways to get around this, like index files, or MD5 hashes. However, is it worth it?
I think OpenNap servers are going to be the way to do this for a while, at least until Gnutella scales again.
Will the real Bruce Perens Please Stand Up
Would you, however, go into books a million and photocopy every book in the place and make copies of that to give to anyone who wanted one?
Now the question isn't whether or not anyone would do this, but whether or not one should be legally able to do so? I don't see any reason why they shouldn't. If I can use my own resources to provide to you something that I have taken joy from, why is that wrong? (with the "profit motive" totally removed from my actions)
Just to head off your software developer example, if someone uses the code you write to make money, you should be compensated. And you also (like many musicians) get paid while you write or perform.
Producing the music isn't a problem, there is already much more music produced than any one person can every listen to (and that's in only their own country). The problem is one of distribution. That used to be a huge problem and a huge business sprung up to solve it. Now it isn't much of a problem, except that the distribution industry has totally taken over the music one (and become one in the same, it was a huge problem). Extricated them will be a difficult and painful process, mostly for that industry.
--
+&x
Didn't the OpenNap servers get a cease-and-desist order recently? I could be wrong but I seem to recall reading that.
If the RIAA had its way, the only thing coming down the Internet pipe would be ads, and the only thing going up would be credit card numbers. It's good that people are looking for alternatives to Napster, but it would also be wise to develop some kind of activism against attempts to limit functionality of the Internet (which is what these rulings really are) before it's too late.
Just like abandonware, no doubt the labels will either sit on these songs or re-release them every once in a while in a "best of", genre mix, As Seen on TV collection, or other such obscurity.
It'll probably also be aggregated with a pile of stuff you don't want to listen to. Wait a minute, they do that with albums now anyway, never mind.
...when you're writing a game...tweak the difficulty of "Easy" to something [your mother] can cope with. -- onion2k
Two possible intrepretations: Either that the backend encryption that I read into will limit transfers to only 128kbps encoded songs (forget VBR) or less, or that putting a speed cap means that a cable modem user either has to decide either to download lots of poorly encoded files, or download few high quality encoded files, implying the tradeoff between speed and quality.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
woot!
I am older than the founder of napster, even though I am just in college. He is of the generation whose culture it is to believe that there is a distinction between material and intellectual property.
Hence, no injunction will save that.
Napster will do many things that can clearly be intepreted as an effort to curb piracy issues. People who want to deliberately avoid piracy can use the protections. Napster is essentially setting guidelines that if followed will prevent accidental commission of illegal behavior.
However, they will still leave the loopholes (misspellings, etc.) for folks who choose to define IP differently than the government and RIAA do.
napster is rightfully shifting blame for piracy away from the technology and towards the pirates- the users.
Goat sex free since 2001
Cool, thanks. Check out from 2/21 on, a bunch of RIAA and Napster stuff.
Q.
I'm not saying that Napster isn't cool and fun. And I'm not saying that the RIAA isn't a bunch of assholes. But honestly, did you really think that Napster had a workable business model?
_____________
I don't want free as in beer. I just want free beer.
While I admit that I haven't got a copy handy, I recall that one of my compatriots on a copyright issues mailing list looked up pirate in the OED.
Evidently, it actually has been used to refer to what we think of as copyright pirates for several hundred years. Certainly during the time that 'arr matey'-type pirates were also very notorious. While it's pretty pejorative, I think that it is a valid label, having had that much tradition behind it.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
Who goes on and just does a random search for "metallica"? You'd come up with 300,000 songs!!!
Nap$ter is as good as dead anyway. I find IRC much better for what I'm doing. (downloading full albums from underground hardcore bands, then buying them if I like them. (yes I actually do that))
Click here to read too much about my personal life
The 128 is the max speed that Nap$ter will allow, not the max speed of the modem, which is why this will affect cable modem users more than anyone else including DSL ones.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
On the positive side, bandwith will double with all Napster users denied.
so metallica become m3tallic/-\ or somesuch. This is going to waste more of their resources than is worth it. But in the end, if the trading drops a level to the more able types who can find it, then maybe the heat will die off.
Even if everyone used this, then that would mean Napster would have it too, and could then ban those alias files also.
Rader
How long do you think it will take for a coded alternative naming system to be developed? Someone will create an index of codes that matches songs/artists and post it on the web.
Want to download the latest Metallica hit? Just go to the index site and you'll find that the code is MX459. Then hop on Napster and search for the code. They'll never be able to police this.
As long as Napster is still up and running, people will find a way to get the name stuff on there. The only way to fully stop the sharing is to kill the site. Everyone knows that.
...All I can say is that my life is pretty strange...
Forget things like supply and demand, forget economics, forget common sense. Napster has some pure insight. What we are talking about today will someday be called "napsterism". Napster is among the first companies in the world to realize that service and profit are inversely proportional! In the head of the average person, this means nothing, but when this simple fact is given to Napster, its implications begin to arise.
Yes, my friend. Napster has come up with an ingenious solution. It will get the RIAA off their back and they will make huge amounts of money. See, when napster had a good service, they made no money. If you apply the simple principle mentioned above, you, like napster will arive at the same answer: In order to make money, napster must nearly eliminate all service whatsoever.
They will still make money from the poor people who decide to pay. It will be nearly impossible for anyone to use the thing anymore. In the near future, we will go onto napster, and, without any reference, type in "HeEcYbcYj", which means Metallica. Most people wouldn't be able to figure it out. But hey, they are paying for Napster - It has the best name of all the file sharing programs. This is where it gets even better. Books like "Zen and the art of using napster", "Finding songs for dummies", and even "God's little instruction book on Napster" will be released in order to cure "innapsteracy", which will be a growing problem in America.
In the end, Napster won't be good for anything except for the schooling of con-artists. You won't be able to get any songs that are popular, it will be slow as hell, nobody will use it anyway, but Napster will have made some money. The music industry won't care anymore - napster has been removed as a threat - and they got paid 1 billion dollars. Napster won't die, it will live in the name of all scams throughout the USA!
/whois John Galt
Today is the closing of a parenthesis opened before this sig, before this story, before this existence that is me (as if
But you're also right. Of course they're not idiots! To say they are idiots is just stupid. Of course they're not, obviously it takes some brains to make so many millions of dollars fucking over so many thousands of people.
However, that doesn't in any way mean they have a clue what they are doing. They may have some good business sense, but they don't know shit about computers, the internet, hackers, rackers, or pirates. They don't know the lengths they will go to, they don't understand their personalities, they don't understand the technology, and they sure as hell don't understand the people who are just fucking fed up with them and will do anything to fuck them back. That's simply not their expertise.
They MAY have a plan to try to stomp out gnutella/opennap/freenet, etc. But they will never pull it off. No one will, ever. If they start monitoring all the time, people will switch back to irc, run ftps and trade that way. Then when they dump billions and billions into monitoring everything going on on IRC, then we'll start encrypting all our data.
No, you're just giving them way too much credit. Of course they're smart, maybe even brilliant, but that doesn't mean shit. When it comes to the internet, etc., they're just fish out of water.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
Oh my, I can just see it now. "Your honor the napster users seem to be getting around the block by using a language they call leet hackzor."
----------------------------------
"We're sorry, but the website you're trying to reach has been disconnected."
Your rant is one of the best posts I'vew seen on this subject yet...
"That's not even wrong..." -- Wolfgang Pauli
There was no mention of how the filtering would work. Is this exact match? Key words?
I know napster would like to have the RIAA provide a long list of full seng titles in proper case. This would be great for avoiding the filtering mechanism by changing a letter, a case.
The RIAA would love to see keyword searching. That search for 'Metallica One' should be enough to filter replies (at least I am sure that is what they would assert).
The injuction may dictate which method Napster has to use to prevent its early demise. Maybe a happy medium between the two.
Any thoughts?
I just felt a strange disturbance in the 'Net. 5,600 files just cried out in pain, then all was silent.
--Never trust a guy who has his IP address tattoed to his arm, especially if DHCP.
No injunction will ever CHANGE that. not "save."
need coffee.
Goat sex free since 2001
Let's think about the possibilities, shall we?
etc.
m374ll1c4
MÊTÄ££ÌÇÄ
[M]et{all}ica
acillateM
There's no way this would ever work well. Nice try, Napster, but no cigar.
I hope they have very clever filtering sw, because here's a potential problem. Let's say someone like the bands "Mira" and the singer/songwriter "Mirah", and that these groups are fine with having their music traded on Napster, but that the amazingly oftenly mispelled (as "mirah") Mariah Carey doesn't want her stuff on Napster. If they're not careful and keep they're filters pretty narrow, they could end up blocking more than they mean to. However, I suppose it would be hard to prove that something *isn't* there when you don't know if it should be, and the only people who knows what should be there is Napster. Guess I answered my own question -- damn me.
just my blog and pix
I cant spell.... I have to use a spell checker on just a google search...
Bad Spelling = Workaround
If thats all it takes, then this has to be the weakest block yet...
Being as 37337 as I am, I'll just hide my s0ngs. ;>
so basically alot of consumers are simply recouping that money because nowhere in that settlement did consumers get any money back.
as for "but then again, who the hell am i?", if you are a citizen of the united states, you have every right to your opinion of law as the record companies execs. the fact that they have money shouldn't play any part in law making. but these days, in washington, money is what's doing the law making.
This reuters story states that the hearing is over, and that an injunction draft is on its way. They tried to delay the injunction to make this new 'filtering' system, but they were unable to sway Judge Patel to delay the injunction.
Napster is over guys. Quit posting about it.
--
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
Why do we have 5 huge record companies with 90% of the recorded music market? Because of the fact that to get music to the shops, it used to be necessary to have a distribution system which spanned the entire country. The bigger you were, the more efficient you could make this system and the greater it became for new entrants to the market, if only because of the huge capital cost which would be involved in setting up another competing network.
Napster really does change all this. By distributing music in this way it knocks out two big pillars of huge recording companies - the distribution system mentioned above and the cost of actually physically producing CDs. That's why the music industry is so scared of it. They know a very large amount of the whole market is going to go the subscription route eventually - but they want to put it off for as long as possible, both to protect their own revenues and because, I think, of a general fear of change.
So I think it's irrelevant to criticise Napster because they want to make money. There's nothing wrong with that, because some proportion of that money has to get back to the artists somehow. But by bringing in this new business model in the long term, will result in cheaper music.
Mersault.
Cyborg Monkey was probably the one that posted this, under a different name, to try to gain popularity.
They may want to block song by artist (inclusive) or by song title, which means that either you can't share a song with the right name, or no one will find it.
What we need to do now is come up with a naming standard to work with the new Napster filters. From renaming every mp3 from "Metallica" to "napMetallica" or something similar. Can Napster be held responsible if they don't know that napMetallica isn't a real band? Just an idea since trying to get around the filters will work best if we can decide on a standard first.
Now we'll just have to misspell the song names. How are they going to track M*tallica or me*allica or whatever?
-3Suns
~~~~
The Revolution will be Slashdotted
Legal, schmeegal! The truth that the government and most people don't seem to realize is that unenforceable laws are at their best worthless. At their worst they have a corrosive effect on the peoples respect for and power of the rule of law. A law is only as good as the governments ability to enforce it and the peoples willingness to obey it. What it boils down to is that the DMCA, UCITA, and most newer laws that restrain the free flow of information in this day and age are just bad laws that encourage civil disobedience. They will be either stricken from the books eventually or end up as laughably quaint as some legendary local ordinances like it being illegal to step on the cracks in the sidewalk, or that FLA law that says a man can't kiss his wife if he has bad breath.
On a more sobering note, bad laws like the anti-drug laws encourage the fleecing, criminalizing, and oppression of the poor while padding the pockets of the rich and corrupting the government. I may not be able to stop bad laws from being put on the books, but I won't obey them if I can get away with it.
In a Salon article just after the Napster decision, Moglen had the best insight: RIAA is killing its own industry here. You go, lawprof.
InstaPundit! Ahead of the Curve Since 30 Minutes Ago
they'll probably just have a keyword list of all popular artists... I know they can filter because they filtered out "wrapster" inquiries a looong time ago, hehe.
~ The Irony is, The only reason I'm not at Berkeley right now is because I was on acid during my SAT's..
It seems like everyone responding to this thread 'understands' that there are ways to get around file name screening. Yes there are ways, napster knows it and the RIAA knows it, but they don't care.
Why, you may ask?
Its very simple, and represents the problem they have with napster; its simple, mainstream and promotes causal pirating of mp3s.
Many people here remember the days before napster, having to search ftps and sharing them with friends. The RIAA didn't care, its difficult and time consuming. For many people its just not worth the time. That is why this will work.
And i still have opennap.
On a side note, i think this whole article just shows the lack of understanding of human nature 'geeks' and 'nerds' really do have.
Please don't moderate me down because you do not agree with me.
It is real hard to hear substantive aural differences once your encoding bitrate is 128 kbps or higher. That is unless your hearing is extremely sharp. The "crappy sound" of most mp3's if they're encoded at 128 or above is more due to crummy sound reproduction in the computer (noisy sound card, cheeepass2000-model speakers, etc.).
--
News for geeks in Austin: www.geekaustin.org
News for Geeks in Austin, TX
"Strong am I with the force...but not that strong"
If a thing is worth doing...then it's worth Overdoing...
LOL
For example, I might suggest (warning, blatant
plug) you take a look at emusic.com,
which has a pretty big collection of different
kinds of music available fairly cheaply (e.g.
a three month sub at 15 bucks a month gets you
unlimited access to the collection). Amazingly
enough, the artists actually get some money out
of this. A strange thought, eh?
A lot of the chatter about Napster seems to
center around the idea that it might or might
not be hurting CD sales, but what about MP3 sales?
Is it possible to make money selling music on
the web? How would you do it in a world where it's
eaisier to find non-legit copies for free?
(And to me, there's an even scarier thought:
It's actually relatively easy for Napster to
police their users *if* they were inclined to
do it -- e.g. there's that MD5 signature that
Napster built into the system, originally to
deal with interrupted downloads. But they
refused, and now they may be legally shut down
and various less centralized systems may be
put in use. What's the next move of the RIAA?
Will they start going after people running
servers? Will they start pushing for a
re-engineered internet without that pesky
anonymity feature?)
Anyway, Full (ha) disclosure: Yeah, I work at
emusic these days. Simultaneous disclaimer:
I don't speak for emusic, and vice versa.
Many people share large numbers of songs on Napster, and to have to go in and re-name(or misspell) 100 or more files is a huge hassle, if you want to still be able to share them. But either way I think this is a moot effort to curb sharing of copyrighted files....everyone start re-naming!!
Through the perception of illusion, we experience reality.
Before listing your shared music on Napster's directory servers, ROT13ster applies the obvious transform to the titles. When searching for music on Napster's servers, ROT13ster uses a special ROT File Lister that applies two behind-the-scenes searches, one with the exact search term that you used and another with the ROT13'd version, and then splices the two search results together for display.
That's right, a system could just be set to check for ROT13'd versions of titles as well, right? Problem: ROT14ster. And for those who will say that there are only 26 ROTXsters, any number of additional permutations can be constructed that will preserve the utility of most partial search terms, and all exact matches.
But having a whole bunch of fragmented possibilities won't do any good, you say, because then how will people know which one to choose? Simple solution again. Provide people Multiple Access Options in their File Lister, so that they can select a whole set of title transforms that they will perform searches on. Make the functional input description of each transform a text string that could easily be copied from a web page.
Now what are RIAA lawyers going to say, "We submit under penalty of perjury that user Gr00v3y was illegally sharing the music of Britney Spears, because using information gathered ... um ... from the web
site of one 3L33T H4X0R in the country of Elbonia, we could perform a
text transform suggested ... so that the title matched with
Oops_I_Did_It_Again ... so Gr00v3y must definitely have been violating
a RIAA copyright, definitely. Please cut his connection."
An easy-to-construct ROT13ster File Lister, along with Multiple Access Options, makes it impossible to muzzle file trading through the Napster servers by attempting to match song title characteristics. That's right, the correct response to any such attempt is ROTFL-MAO.
When you're the richest man in the world and not a single senator speaks up on your behalf, you know you've got problems. - Jeff EisenachMy idea is why don't we just encode an ACL into the MP3 and encrypt it. Use something similar to filesystem security bits and a password agent that allows the owner of the file to authenticate and play it forever, but when transferred to another machine, it will not play unless the user either has a CD to verify against the copy, or enables the file through online purchase. At that point the ACL is replaced with a new one containing that user. The user can also add a few other users to the ACL and purposedly share it with maybe 3 friends, but no more. Perhaps the other 2 entries in the ACL can expire after a certain amount of time or date.
And don't forget gnutella! They can't possibly shut down gnutella.
The only thing this ruling will do is hurt the company (i.e. Napster) itself. That's it.
Wroot
You sir, are a cocksucker.
A much more viable attack is to write a client that lies about the MD5 sum, anyway. There are two basic ways to do this:
1) Write a client that always lies with the same MD5 or from a small set. This would be automatically defeated, because someone would complain about one of those MD5s, and then all songs represented would be blocked.
2) Write a client that lies with a different, random MD5. This is easy to defeat simply by having Napster not share any MD5 it's only seen once. This provides a little chicken and egg problem, but I think it's much less of an issue for the useability of the system than what's been proposed.
RIAA v. Napster Is founded on some people can use it for piracy so it should be shut down. Since it is users trading music, all Napster's delivering is indexes.
Contributory copyright infringement. The primary use of this is to pirate music published by the Big Five labels. If you want to promote your band's music or discover independent music, there are better tools such as MP3.com. They'll even manufacture CDs for your band that contain Red Book audio plus a CD Extra track with MP3 files.
I post on Slashdot. I also post on Napdot, but under a different handle.All your hallucinogen are belong to us.
Will I retire or break 10K?
s/blah/bleh/g finds all occurences of "blah" in a string and replaces it with "bleh".
(And the fallacy of course, is that if Napster were *sincere* in wanting to police the name space, they would track whatever renaming standard you were using, and incorporate it into the name filter.)
1) Will duplicate a set root directory structure, and copy all the files (basically mirror it) and rename the files (with long filename support) like this /music/filename.mp3 --> /music/emanelif.mp3.
2) and a proggie that will accept user input for a search, and convert between the normal and backwards names and start napster searching.
What is hysterical is that this will backfire ridiculously, or at least it should. If we end up with a Napster where you can only trade stuff that RIAA doesn't own.... Here's a news flash, gentlemen: I can buy that crap in stores if I really want it. If the only music I could get on Napster was indie labels, bands that support napster, and unknown artists -- that sounds pretty cool to me! Sure I like a lot of the RIAA stuff and would love to have access to that as well (especially the stuff you can't even find in stores), but if they want to take it off Napster, let 'em. That means many of us will spend more time discovering new artists. And new artists have an easy means of distribution, without worrying that people will be too busy downloading Metallica to find them. And guess where RIAA labels will eventually come looking to find new artists to sign. Having already built followings via Napster, these artists will be in a lot better position to call the shots of their contracts, and a lot more knowledgeable about the way the industry exploits artists. In some ways this is not that different from what college radio did in the 80s but it is much more dramatic and far-reaching. The recording industry will never go away but it just might become what it really should have been in the first place - a tool for artists.
s/l/1
s/a/4
s/s/5
There! Problem solved. =)
------------
CitizenC
Something like a boolean search string? Those are used in genealogy databases since so often, a particular surname can be spelled many different ways, a boolean search assigns specific numbers to sets of similar sounding letters and turns up everything that could be even remotely phonetically related. It generally does a good job at taking spelling errors into account. Seems like it would work better than anything else for napster because of it's speed and ability to overlook misspellings.
-nt
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
To stay ahead of fuzzy matching algorithms, just F,O.L.L.O/W T;H'E P[O]R|N S-P=A,M.M/E;R'S.
drscholl has had both a filter and block feature implemented in Opennap for quite a while; `block' being a more recent addition, and devnull has a perl script that takes care of users sharing undesirable material for months. Maybe Napster should pay attention to it's open-source counterpart more frequently..
ROT13, anyone?
EBG13, nalbar?
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
For example: Radiohead-Creep.mp3 becomes Enqvburnq-Perrc.mp3 (keep the extension, silly) It takes about 5 seconds with this link: http://www.pflock.de/rot13.htm
Ban titles that have been spelled in l337 5p34k!
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
Sounds pretty similar to SOUNDEX and related algorithms which attempt to find a "canonical form" based on the approximate phonetic content of a word.
So, "Wolf", "Wolff", "Wolffe" all collapse down to the same thing. Etc...
--Joe--
Program Intellivision!
With the large number of blackhats likely to be in the population of those pissed-off about the way things have been going, I'm surprised that the RIAA and its major members still have intact web prescence. Not that I'm advocating or condoning civil disobedience as a means of political action. Oh, and I'm also surprised to see that the MPAA site is up.
I disagree somewhat, but for complex reasons....
What the RIAA members do well are contract negotiations with musicians and distributors, plus creative accounting (almost as slick as the movie industry), and deploying lobbyists and lawyers to (a) buy favorable laws and (b) win civil suits. Signed musicians make pennies on the dollar from sales of their works. So do music distributors for selling CDs, etc. The big music publishers take most of the money to feed their bloated egos, but add very little value. Their talent for writing contracts at both ends of the chain keeps them solidly in the middle, taking the big money. They create artificial scarcity by controlling the CD presses (and what goes into them) and the physical distribution of music on (overpriced) CDs.
They have been (and still are, but are learning) clueless about what technology, specifically ubiquitous PCs with good digital sound cards and CD-R/RW drives, and the Internet, makes possible.
Having been blindsided by advances in both the sophistication and pervasiveness of technology, they're trying to use their familiar means of lobbying and lawyering to hold back the tide. If only they could negotiate iron-clad contracts with every person who owns a PC requiring them to pay through the nose every time they used their sound card, everything would be just fine for Big Music!
Well, they're working on this. CPRM, and now its stealth replacement proposal at the T13 Committee, are one front in this battle. The SDMI effort is another, perhaps related, approach to locking up digital content. A new CD format is yet another.
But all these initiatives are doomed to failure. Let's suppose the best cases (for Big Music) are realized: the DMCA and like laws bought by the digital middleman companies are upheld in courts and extended by treaties to the Common Market and Japan and Taiwan, etc.; equipment manufacturers are bullied/bought-off to include obscure keys in mainboard/CPU/hard-drives/CD/CD-R etc. hardware; criminal penalties are applied for circumvention, reverse-engineering, or whatever work-arounds....
It will all be futile. Why? Because the second and third worlds don't care about or observe the niceties of digital rights, that's why! The day after all those shenanigans are worked up in smoke-filled back rooms around the world, China will be building fabs to build kit that strangely fails to implement all these extra protections for Western media and content. They'll be ecstatic! And so will all the people who prefer to sample music first before they buy a high-quality image (this class includes nearly all music consumers).
So, the mainboard, perhaps CPU and hard-drive, certainly CD-R/RW and soundcard, that you'll want in 2010 will come with a "made in PRC" sticker on it, and they won't respect Big Music copyrights. Or, it might say "made in Nigeria" alternatively.
The rest of the world won't allow domination by corrupt first-world based media middleman fatcats.
No need to shoot 'em, just ignore 'em - that'll kill 'em just as dead.
How about adding filename scrambling into napster clones, and if possible patched into the official client? The client could automatically scramble (say using rot-13, I knew there had to be a useful use of rot-13!) the filename when it announces what songs it has to napster servers as well as automatically scamble the search query.
So when you use this method you'll actually be searching for Zrgnyyvpn but the user will believe they are searching for Metallica.
Of course changing the encoding method every so often would be a good idea so Napster doesn't decode the request, then filter it.
Anyhow, there is already a tax on tapes I believe to "offset" the piracy aspect. As for the ratios, I think you're probably right. With tapes though you may have to go back 5 years or so before CDR became popular. I honestly don't know how many people use tapes anymore. I haven't bought any blank audio tapes in well over two years. Conversely I buy blank CD's regularly, though for legitimate uses such as backing up games patches for example so I don't have to re-download them at a later date on my crappy dialup connection.
---
Filtering based on a title containing a major-label artist's name will also block covers, remixes, and other versions which refer to the "banned" artist. And what about song titles containing similar strings with no artist name attached? Or artists whose names are similar to others?
(Inkubus Sukkubus - pagan goth band. Incubus - hardcore-funk band.)
This attempt at a fix will end up making no one happy.
My idea is not to make copyright infringement immposible, but to have a system that encourages legal copying, while discouraging illegal copying. Napster does not - it warns users not to trade copyrighted music, but fails to identify what is and isn't. It doesn't even try, leaving it to the record companies to do so.
I believe an ideal system would include copyright information as a basic peice of information, like Napster does with file size and encoding rate. If a track is not copyrighted, it should state why (public domain, recorded live, or copyright allowing free digital copying).
Point 1 (Digital Files with copyright info) is a rough attempt to describe such a system. The idea is to put the copyright info at the front, so the client software can quickly determine the self-declared copyright. This seems to me to be an essential component of a legal system - even more important than any encryption.
Point 2 (Server software that is key protected) may have been confusing - I was talking about the user's file server, not any central search engine / server. The idea is that, while my server is running out in the open, only those with a key can actually get the files. Possibly, the server would not even announce what files are availible unless the outsider knew the key.
This simulates the meat world, where I only know someone's CD collection if I know them personally, or if they announce it to the world.
This leaves space for third-parties to offer services (Point 3). One service woud be key management, so I don't have to remember keys. Another would be search engine service, so I can find others that share my tastes, and they can find me. Any such search engine would generate a huge amount of requests for keys. Another service could manage key requests, either through simple forms (to prove you know me personally), or bundling requests in a conveinent manner.
The fourth point is about client software, outside of the personal server. This software would manage ripping CDs, implanting copyright information, creating compilation CDs, and other tasks. There is existing software that does all this, but there is no standard way of enforcing copyright. If stand copyright maintance becomes common, the record companies could loosen the belt, offering sample tracks, etc, knowning that legal clients would respect the copyright.
No, it's not a perfect system, not even very original. It's just that I have fallen for trading online music, and I am trying to imagine a system that allows me to do it legally.
Does it prevent piracy? Of course not, just discourages it and offers an attractive alternative. I believe it to be technologically impossible to stop piracy, and the only alternative it to make the benefit/risk balance fall more in the copyright owner's favor. Right now, it's very much against them (lots of benefit, little to no risk for pirates, while legal purchasers look like fools).
We often say that GNU and open-source is about innovation. If we can create a system that looks legal, smells legal, and can be used legally, before the record companies and Microsoft come up with a solution, we would be justified. I think we would have a product to be truly proud of, and that would seriously influence any final industry solution. I propose we beat them to the punch, before we get slammed ourselves.
time to go download "|V|E74LL1C4 - |_|nf0rg1v3n"
.cig - what you do after winning a good flame war
It's an interesting idea, and would be a good component of a legal system. Of course, it would have to platform independent...
I'm afraid Microsoft will implement it before Linux does, and Linux user's won't care, and Linux will go a little farther to earn the reputation of the pirate's operating system.
We won't like Microsoft's implementation. I think we should beat them to a solution.
The point that some of y'all are missing here is that if someone misspells a song name or artist, how are other people going to find it through napster? Any systematic method (as some here have mentioned, index files, etc) would be just as easy to filter by as the name, and wouldn't be used anywhere nearly as widely used as Napster itself.
-- dR.fuZZo
I think it's significant that this bit is not used by Napster. They display file size, track length, and encoding rate, but not copyright information. A legal system would note this, maybe save the data in a more convient format for quick lookup, and make it part of the search information.
Of course, many rippers probably also ignore this bit. This is why the whole system needs to be designed, from the ground up, to respect copyright and user's rights. If we don't do it, the industry and Microsoft will create a solution that takes copyright into account but not user's rights.
I think you're right that the RIAA people are probably not stupid. However, I think for the last 100 years the way to success in that industry has been to have a mindset that says "control everything as much as possible". I think we're still seeing their instinctive reaction to Napster, which has appeared on their horizons as a threat to their control.
Only if/when they see that will they put together a more rational response. This is typical of how large organisations ("dinosaurs") react to big changes. Only a very few big businesses know how to react to change well. (Microsoft is the most scarily good example I can think of - look how quickly they have embraced XML, and their competitors are only just realising that it wasn't a decoy tactic).
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
Your l33t r3n/\m1NG sk1llZ will make all your s0nGz impossible for others to locate, somewhat defeating the whole point of Napster.
So is Napster spelled wrong ("Napseter") intentionally in this article to keep it from being deleted from /.?
------------
CitizenC
Certainly, the system can be bypassed. No digital system is impervious to determined pirates (or government agents). The point is to make a system where the legal path makes sense, and has benefits over the illegal system.
If you want a clarification of my general system idea, check out another post.
Well, I think you're real dumb. (just kidding) There most certainly is an appreciable sound difference between, say, 128kbps and 256kbps. You'd have to be deaf or only listening to death metal not to notice the quality difference. I realize some encoders are not so great (frankly, I never understood the bemoaning of the loss of the Xing encoder, since the files it produced sounded like shit to me, but I digress), but even 128kbps vs 256kbps within the same encoder is an appreciable difference -- especially in music with a lot of acoustic instruments. I have some Mannheim Steamroller pieces I encoded in a variety of bitrates with GOGO, and 128kbps definitely colors the sound with unwanted artifacts.
Yes, 128kbps is tolerable for the majority, but please don't tell me that you have to have golden ears to hear the difference -- you don't. Personally, I prefer 256kbps, as HD space is cheap and plentiful and I don't want to bother with any possible quality problems at 128kbps. I don't do any internet trading anyway.
ummm thats the very reason why i side with them. They are, unlike the RIAA, making an effort to start a distribution system. Id gladly pay. but if the riaa wants to dick around and stall in hopes of reaping more profits out of overpricedfixed cds then they lose. Let there be piracy. Let congress declare digital music unrestricted. Maybe then they will get their asses in gear.
You do have a point. But you're not really illustrating a problem with filename/spelling filters - rather, the inadequacies of identifying a piece of music by a filename rather than, say, an ID3 tag.
Once you can look at an MP3 file and properly distinguish artist from trackname then your argument is irrelevant:
Artist: Michael Jackson
Song/Trackname: Thriller
vs.
Artist: Stephen King
Song/Trackname: Thriller
Result: No problem
Artist: Flying Naked Chainsaws
Song/Trackname: Metallica Stinks
vs.
Any Metallica song
Result: No problem.
I think Napster should make it compulsory for MP3s to have ID3 tags before they can be shared. This would make their filters more reliable and be a service to the rest of us who prefer to have MP3s with populated ID3 tags. With an ID3 tag editor built in to Napster this would be no real burden on the users either.
--
--
Rare Window - free your photos
I fully expect, of course, once Napster has been effectively shut down, to see millions of dollars more revenue for the music labels. That will surely happen, right? I mean Napster has cost the RIAA members untold millions in lost album sales, right?
Right?
Gee, you think? I don't recall ever saying it was from Kenobi, or from anybody at all, for that matter.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
1) uploader design the key mapping
2) display the mapping in some script language and screendump it, add noise so that the representation becomes difficult for machines to interprete.
3) user grab the pic, key in the mapping to their programs. from here on the program can behave exactly like napster.
...although that will make the intend of the sender less defendable.
True, and this sort of thing is why Napster is likely never going to survive in any way that allows copyright protection to be circumvented.
The RIAA is now crowing "told you so" that Napster now "admits" they can block copyrighted files, after having always maintained that they could not. I wouldn't be surprised to see Napster come out and state the obvious truth that they havn't done a 180, but rather that that are not now blocking copyrighted works - only blocking certain file names.
If Napster is to survive they will have to come up with a scheme that while allowing fair (non-infringing) use actually *does* protect copyrighted works, and that can only mean either some kind of digital watermarking and verification or perhaps some kind of verifiable public key encryption.
IF there genuinely is an argument that Napster is good for CD sales by letting people preview stuff they'd never have otherwise tried, then the only way to get the attention of the record labels and make them go along will be to kick them where it hurts (in the wallet).
If RIAA succeeds in shutting down Napster, how about a pre-agreed comsumer boycott of CD purchases for a 1-month period after it happens? I would imagine that RIAA might suddenly see the light, and decide that previewing music isn't such a bad idea after all...
Normally I agree with FSF philosophies, but I don't understand why their lawyer would openly advocate the flagrant misuse of copyrighted music when we depend on campanies to abide by our own "offensive" copyright: the GPL.
Suppose the author of one of the Napster interface programs (say Napigator) decided for privacy's sake to build in a function which took the names of all of your shared mp3s and using a one to one conversion/encrytion (hell he/she could even use pig latin) reported all of your mp3 files that way to the napster servers.
:)
Then suppose the author incorporated the reverse conversion into the search function of the same program. The Napster filter wouldn't suspect a thing and the whole process would be transparent to the end users.
Of course napster could then be ordered to filter this out - then the author picks another conversion - then filter - could go on for a while.
However, it is likely that the neural net will need to be expanded rapidly as 31337 H4XX0R 5p311ing becomes commonplace. The Neural Net, now known as SkyNapNet, employing heuristic algorithms, will cross a as-yet-undiscovered threshold and mankind will marvel at its own ingenuity as it gives birth to 'AI', spawning a whole race of machines.
It was unknown who fires the first shot, us or Jack Valenti. We do know, however, that it is us who scatter billions of CDs of Metallica's 'Kill 'em All' over the earth.
A lone intrepid robot, reprogrammed by the rebels, ventured back into time into 1980's Los Angeles. There he began gunning down every Shawn Fanning in the phone book...
--
--hongpong.com
Call me a conspiracy theorist, but it looks to me as if the record companies just found a nifty way to filter out not only their copyrighted works, but anything else they would like to censor. I seriously doubt that they will publicise the list that is to be filtered. First they capture Napster, then they lay their evil RIAA seeds of destruction.
....move along....nothing to see here....
Bard?
--
#include "stdio.h"
Eventually, it'll provide pseudoanonymous filesharing along with strongly encrypted communications. Currently i'm in the prealpha stage (was happily coding along on the file indexer when i decided to reload /.) Codebase is in C++ with clients for linux/unix and windows. The IM part is pretty complete, and working fine. I'm working on the file sharing now.
If anyone reading this would be interested in helping out with this project, please email me! (henrik 'at' abelsson 'dot' com)
-henrik
http://www.audiogalaxy.com
Use it, love it, sleep with it.
You just run the little proggie on a linux or windows box that connects to them, and you do all of your searching and queueing through their web interface. I just let it run at work on the fat 90Mbit/sec pipe, and sit at home on the DSL and download everything to work.
Plus, you don't get all of those annoying connection errors that you get with Napster.
Need Free Juniper/NetScreen Support? JuniperForum
With Napster, users weren't/aren't attempting to obtain any revenue from other's IP - simply have open access to it much like they do with radio, except with greater personal control of what they listen to.
I would have no problem with people using my /. comments for an academic assignment - but if they want to make money from it - I want a cut.
That's the key point that folks are missing. "Pirates" in the original form, robbed shipping channels and resold the goods to fill their own pockets. Napster, and other similar service users are not reselling these songs - so they are NOT "Pirates". Copyright law was designed to prevent "Pirating" of IP - a recording company that steals my "amatuer" song and has some pimped-up Britney-esque singer make them $ off of it without due compensation to me - the original and lawful owner of that song. It was the equivilent of the recording companies that were the Pirates - not listeners - and it was the artists that were to be protected - not those companies. Somewhere along the line, whilest noone was paying attention, the table was turned.
I AM, therefore I THINK!
Well, as far as I am concerned if they do this smart, they can even exclude wrongly spelled names. For a database search on names we did "degradation" on phonetics. For example "muller" and "müller" and "muler" (yes, german program...don't kill me for that) would become "muler". Quite a simple algo was behind it and it worked very well (That means, the client was satisfied). If they included such algo's, then even misspelling would be catched. Yes, technically there are just hash-codes, I know...
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
It seems fairly clear that Napster's efforts to do "just enough" to get by aren't working. Measures like this can only delay the final stroke. It is safe to say, (IMNSHO) that Napster is pretty well screwed, it has served its purpose, and it is time to move on.
The struggle is and will continue to be, between market forces and governmental forces. Adam Smith tells us that demand varies inversely with price. Thus, at a price of 0 the demand is extraordinary, therefor if a product is offered for free, no one can compete.
The RIAA takes the opposing side of this, pushing the music industry away from perfect competition and towards a regulated market (with copyright laws as the regulators).
A market in perfect competition generates a given benefit to all consumers and producers in the market. The sum of these benefits is the benefit to the society as a whole. Remember that.
Now economic theory allows us to mathematicly show that price controls (which is what these copyright laws boil down to) are bad for a market. Anytime these controls are put in place some of the benefit to the customer and some of the benefit to the producer evaporates.
Now in the pefectly competitive market of MP3 music distribution prices have been forced to production costs (the hallmark of any perfectly competitive market). That means that the producer (ie whoever is suppling the MP3s) is gaining no benefit. But the benefit to the customer is huge, society as a whole benefits.
Unfortunately, Napster, while in the moral right (at least as far as society as a whole goes), is not in the legal right. It is thus appaulingly clear that Napster is going to die, it is only a matter of time. However, Napster has laied the foundation for a much more diverse and powerfull file sharing network to take its place. What we have seen is only the first of many legal battles. The next battleground won't be the courts however, it will be Congress. Get out there and vote. We Napster users could form the single most powerfull loby in US history if we get off our asses and try to change things. Price controls are no different than any other law passed by Congress, and they can be overturned.
This has been another useless post from....
Killfile(TGK)
No trees were killed in the creation of this post. However, many electrons were inconvenienced.
Someone should set up a site with a database of song codes for files and make a shitload of cash from the page views. Page view whores of the world... run with it.
Someone provide a link which does not require registration for this strip, please.
--
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I've read so many posts about people renaming the songs using alternate cases, letters, etc to slip through the filter.
The RIAA knows this, and so does Napster. And Napster cannot afford to let this happen.
So Napster will, most likely, cease to exist as we know it in the very near future.
I'm a high school senior and In the past 6 months Napster has helped me expand my musical tastes past the pop-rock alterna-crap that's being played on the radio 24/7. I have discovered new genres and the music of indie artists and found music which is no longer availible commercially. One recent example is the soundtrack to the movie Tron by Wendy Carlos. It was originally sold in lp and cassette forms but never remastered into CD format due to the extreme degredation of the master tape and Disney's unwillingness to put time and money into spooling the tape up bit by bit. I was able to find the entire score on Napster in just a few minutes. I do feel guilty sometimes by downloading artists' songs but in my experience Napster is a tool that expands the musical bredth of its users and provides a easy way to find obscure live, rare, and little known tracks.
====
If all comedy comes out of tragedy, let the killing begin...
====
"white bread, redneck, chicken-shit, motherfucker" -- Dr. Dre on "Straight Outta Compton"
This is an interesting link. It seems that now the RIAA is siding against censorship, but only because the censoring could affect the RIAA's income...
Do you like German cars?
Seriously. They can't block a song that is SUPPOSEDLY by J o h n W i l l i a m s, if the only match they have in their database is John Williams. Either that, or we're going to rename files to Joe's Garage Band, and download it regardless of what it actually is. (Hm...I didn't know "Joe's Garage Band" could play Duel of the Fates!)
Well, it was not that algo but something very similar. Thank you for the link, next time I have to implement something like that I'll keep this one in mind :-
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
RIAA: All your song are belong to us
How can this get a +2? It doesn't even make sense!
They stuck me in an institution, said it was the only solution, to...protect me from the enemy, myself
Matt
ROT13 should keep em guessing for a few hours :)
But still less dense than an A.C.
I'm sitting on a big campus network where there are literally thousands of mp3s shared over SMB. That's an alternative to napster right there. So is freenet, gnutella, and their ilk. Paying for music may be the only legal option, but it sure as hell isn't the only available option.
0 1 - just my two bits
RIAA: "Oh no! They're systematically changing all the letters to numbers! Whatever will we do!?"
H .
s/1/l
s/4/a
s/5/s
RIAA: "There, problem solved!"
No, you need more entropy for that to work. However, the more randomness you introduce into the system, the more difficult it will be to find anything(using plain text searches). Perhaps this will be good, though, since it will reintroduce some of the eliteness that existed around the internet "underground" prior to the existance of the new-and-improved-easy-to-use-internet-TEN-point-O
kickin' science like no one else can,
my dick is twice as long as my attention span.
Withdrawal before climax is very ineffective and those who try this are usually called "parents."
the only alternative he mentions is OpenNap.
--
--
You are a fucking moron.
Technically:
:-)
The weak side of Peer-to-peer nets organized as Napster, is that a central server is however needed to know where pc with dynamic IP are located. The central server may be controlled by Napster Inc, lawyers, majors. A model like Gnutella, where servers are avaible (or, I think, OpenNap), could be better: people determined to fight for free-access culture could install a server on their pc, and not only the client, and users wanting to access digital-ware, as it is their universal right, could connect one of such servers.
But, yes, what about dynamic IP? Possible soulutions:
1) If one has an home page, may place there its current dynamic IP, updated in some automatic way, by the involved pc (i.e.: the dial-up connection scripts etc.) More powerful solutions are possible, dependently on what you may install on hosting server (cgi and so on). Program should be developed for that. Or has someone already working for that? I read SlashDot, but I have no news about.
2) IP could be requested by email, since email addresses are static. I imagine a server program, working via email. When a user wants some mp3 and needs a Napster server, knowing you provide a napster server on your pc, and knowing your email address, he may send a mail with sometihing like "Subject: IP-request" and the answer could be managed automatically both by your pc (checking mailbox periodiccally), and the email sender (using IP for connecting to your server)
The whole question however, is making ptp more decentralized, completely eliminating the need for a central server to connect. Does anyone know about already existent effords toward that direction?
Politically:
I think somewhat of what they call piracy (of course, not all piracy) is a form modern "proletarian expropriation", a way to get what the power negates you. I have learnt computers and programming and IT technology with strongly sw copyng, with no regard for copyrights. Otherwise, I would have not been enough rich to get all what I've needed to study and learn.
However this is the past: now a new revolution is coming. Now we have a new free access / free production / free sharing culture (someone calls it "GNU economy"), and I think it should be extended to all immaterial productions, all digital-ware, all the digital steam of the IT era. If sharks of majors close their copyrighted songs to free access, getting that way an intollerable amount of profits, we must promote the model of free-software and Open Source among artists, telling them it's more ethical, that they will be more indipendent and free from big-business industry, and, tough they won't become incredibly rich, they could get some "clean" money rewards anyway, and living happy or more happy anyway...
Long Life to Richard Stallman!
Zak Mc Kracken
Metallica -> Meta11ica
... shit, nevermind, the hax0r script kiddies will come out through the woodwork
L's to 1's, O's to 0's, E's to 3's
Without articles like this, we wouldn't know when to jump onboard for one last orgy of downloads. :)
Does anybody know what the average amount an artist makes per copy of an album? By average artist, I mean the ones we hear on the radio, the ones who get their music frequently downloaded on Napster.
I think they make at most $0.25 per album if they're on one of the big five labels. So for an album with 12-13 songs, each song gets them two cents. Which would mean that in the worst case scenario (the scenario that the RIAA is assuming) every song on my computer is causing the artists to lose two cents. Not the individual artists, the whole band, so in a five-piece group, they're losing 0.4 cents per song. My collection is robbing the artists I listen to a total of $30.50, then. Actually, about 75% of the songs were ripped from CD's I bought, but for the sake of arugment here let's pretend I got them all from Napster.
I've since bought several albums based on the fact that I could listen to the artists' music first and see if I liked them. For example, I had never heard of the Brand New Heavies until my friend came over and downloaded a few of their songs. I have since bought two of their albums because I knew what songs were on them. Same thing goes for Jaco Pastorius, Pancho Sanchez, and Jimmy Smith. I downloaded a bunch of Grateful Dead songs and then bought a few albums based on which of those songs I liked best. And I can't be the only person out there who has done this.
But how can these artists make back the $30? Well, I plan on going to see a few groups when they come to town. That costs me $30-$50 per ticket, and maybe the band gets a couple dollars from that. Maybe more, but that's a conservative estimate. If I "stole" two albums first to see if I liked the music ($0.50) then went to see them play once, they'll make $2.50 more because of Napster and it's variants.
Once again, let's review:
This model is not going to disappear because of the RIAA. It's too big. The only people who stand to lose are the record companies, not the artists. And I don't even think they will lose, unless they keep angering the public (their customers). If they die off, it'll be from their own PR, not from P2P.
I really hate signatures, but go to my website.
Alright, I concede the point that there are ways around this scheme... but how are you going to find all of your pirated, illegal mp3 files that you want to download and not pay a penny for? I may have tried out Napster for, ahem, educational purposes and, believe me, I would be lost without an accurate search engine. Joey likes to spell it "metalllliccca", but Suzy likes to spell it "metal3233zca". So, like that, stealing becomes much harder. And last time I checked, Napster's search engine doesn't support regular expressions.
If Napster started filtering by MD5, it would be a trivial task, on the order of a few hours, to write a daemon or Windows service that monitors a directory, and every 30 seconds changes the id3 comments field on every mp3 to a new, random value. There are 30 bytes in that field, so there would now be something on the order of 1.77e+72 possible MD5s (minus hash collisions) for each individual rip, without interfering at all with the text search capability, playability or identifiability (otherwise) of the files. Also, this number is within a couple of orders of magnitude of the total number of possible MD5 hashes (which are 32 bytes long), so there would inevitably be hash collisions with many other, perfectly legal files even if you SOMEHOW could block all those possible MD5s. (Hint: It's completely ridiculous. There are not enough particles in the visible universe to represent that many permutations even at one particle per bit!)
So when Napster says it's technically infeasable to filter by MD5, they're not lying. As soon as they legally committed to such an attempt, it would become instantly unmanageable if even a small percentage of users deployed the type of tool described above.
- The max transfer speed will be limited to 128kbyte/s. While I know that is above the limits for some DSL connections, it's well above max cable speeds. In other words, while some may still get more bang for their buck from the flat monthly fee, the high end has been reign in somewhat to about 10x the typical 56K modem user.
- There will be a fee to burn Nap$ter-obtained files to a CD or to transfer them to a portable player, which definitely means they're going to put an encryption layer somewhere at the user-end... probably meaning that any users of non-Napster-blessed clients, mostly those of opensource, will either be restricted by the file list from this article, or won't be able to talk to the blessed-Nap$ter clients without breaking DMCA.
(No, the dollar sign isn't meant to be derogatory to Napster, only that it's shorthand for the non-free version).
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
create a napster proxy.
;)
:)
it does a hash on ( gmt hour and file name ) so that when you go to the napster server, all your filenames get translated. using proxy A
when you want to do a search, someone who uses a proxy asks for Metallica which gets translated to 0x12982. When a reply is found saying it found the file, it goes through proxy B which unscrambles the file name and bam, you can preserve file names
interesting in theory, prolly no one will actually do it
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ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
Good point about CDR. The media may change, but the reality will not. If people can copy, they will copy. How can anyone really expect to stop it all?
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~~ the real world is much simpler ~~
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Give me LIBERTY, or give me a check.
The RIAA is making the worst possible enemies they could dream of making...computer users. Quick question, whats the best and quickest way to bring down your corporate networks and infrastructure? Answer, piss off a few hundred thousand hackers with nothing but time on their hands and vengeance on their minds.
so there!
I am the very model of a modern major general!
2) also, What about covers, remixes etc? if i want the southpark version of Mortal Kombat theme, would it get filtered to?
- "yes but can you hit someone over the head with a rolled up internet?" -Foxtrot
Homos
"Cowboy, Kneel"
TIMMY!!!
-atrowe: Card-carrying Mensa member. I have no toleranse for stupidity.
It's just a news article about a noteworthy development. I don't recall any editorializing bemoaning it's demise.
I'm guessing this is a last gasp attempt by Napster to prove good faith in the coming lawsuits. Whether it works or not is not important because it will look good on the court transcript regardless.
But if I had to guess, this is going to be very effective in the short term and probably throughout Napster's final days. I'm not about to start going through my files and renaming them just so that other people can download them, nor will I bother running a script or program to do it for me because it's not going to improve the selection of songs I can steal from other people.
Napster worked so well because it put no appreciable burden on the user for sharing his or her files(as long as his pipe was fat). As soon as you add a cost for the average user to share his stuff with the rest of the world, he won't bother if he can still download for free.
I think we're going to be surprised at how well this name filter works.
Filtering by name? Something tells me this wouldn't satisfy the record companies. They know as well as we do that you can just rename all your files. And somehow I think the court will realize that too. Filtering is not a REAL solution to this problem, it's a token gesture. Like that billion dollars Napster offered. Get real, Napster.
On the other hand, by forcing people to rename their files, it makes it just that teensy bit more difficult to find files. And as we all know, many Napster users have never even heard of "FTP" and have no idea that MP3 sharing dates to well before Napster. Hence, this little bump in the road may be enough to prevent them from using Napster with any degree of success.
[Anyway as for myself I'd rather just go to MP3.com and get my music legally. So what if you can't download the latest N'Sync album for free... who wants to listen to N'Sync anyway? I'm more interested in classical piano, and there is a lot of great music available for download.]
If Taco and Hemos have there way, there would be no more ownership of anything. Not of music, software, bandwidth, or even hardware! Gone would be the incentive to create anything, and we would be reduced to the technological/creative Dark Ages.
Running Linux, of course.
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"How many six year olds does it take to design software?"
dinner: it's what's for beer
I can just see it now...
Headline: Napster is being sued from parents worried about kids misspelling everything.
Parent:"My kid can no longer spell because he was using that... that Napster (crying)"
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Mod up a post Rob doesn't like and you'll never mod again
This might be a stupid question and it might have been dealt with, but why not just move the whole company to another country? EU or some pacific island, that is not under laws that RIAA can lobby as they like?
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"I'm surfin the dead zone
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"I'm surfin the dead zone
In the twilight, unknown"
Music has been around a long time and musicians have made a living for much longer than record labels have been around. How is it the business of playing music doesn't change for lets say the first four thousand years of our history, musicians are paid when they play their music. Then all of a sudden around 75 years ago musicians have no problem changing the way they do things, all you have to do is play it once and sit back and watch the money roll in. I bet New Kids on the Block are still making money from sales outside the USA (inside the US they're known as The Backstreet Boys). Now we live in a different time. Pirates do still exist but they do business different these days. Musicians need to get with the times. Napster invented file sharing like Al Gore invented the Internet. So Okay, Napster can block Filenames. What I wanna know is what is next? What if they decided to get into the music business and started signing musicians? What if they got the quality musicians from the other labels to sign for them? Is there any better promotion on the Internet going on? How much did they offer the music companies to get off their backs? What if musicians could decide what songs they wanted to make free and available?
Or perhaps they should have made Napster an Ad-Ware program and funneled some of the profits to the record labels. All-Advantage has paid a lot of people to look at ads, am I to assume that Napster would have any problems getting advertisers to believe that their ads would be seen?
Standing On The Shoulders Of Giants,
Standing On The Shoulders Of Giants,
The Benevolent Besik
This script will encrypt a song title in a person-readable yet machine-meaningless form. You could use something like this in a "pirate" napster client. Better yet, someone should write a napster client which renames all of your files with a real encryption, and then the client is needed to decrypt them.
'Most men would sooner die than think, and most men do.'
The strips:
Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday
Saturday
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A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
dumbass.
They fuck you up, your relatives
They fuck you up, your relatives
They probably do it to you because you are worthless.
The filename filters seem to be installed now, if anyone still cares. It appears to be quite effective, and it's easy to discern which labels sent in names.
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I like to watch.
I'm still waiting for your fist to visit my crotch... I'd like that... really.
They fuck you up, your relatives
They fuck you up, your relatives
They probably do it to you because you are worthless.
I'm guessing this is a last gasp attempt by Napster to prove good faith in the coming lawsuits. Whether it works or not is not important because it will look good on the court transcript regardless.
But if I had to guess, this is going to be very effective in the short term and probably throughout Napster's final days. I'm not about to start going through my files and renaming them just so that other people can download them, nor will I bother running a script or program to do it for me because it's not going to improve the selection of songs I can steal from other people.
Napster worked so well because it put no appreciable burden on the user for sharing his or her files(as long as his pipe was fat). As soon as you add a cost for the average user to share his stuff with the rest of the world, he won't bother if he can still download for free.
I think we're going to be surprised at how well this name filter works.
That sneaky bastard Lars came out with a song called *. Now Napster has blocked *.mp3. Damn.
Umm, doesn't that same argument apply to just about everything that can be duplicated, including software? Are you arguing for the legitimacy of warez sites? After all, nobody can prove that I don't already own the software, chose not to register it and that I lost or destroyed the media. But nobody is fighting for the right to pirate books or software or videos. What makes music so different? Jason.
It seems to me that Napster's position is untenable. Although there are some possible legal uses of the service (such as trading public domain MP3s), the illegal uses are more numerous, and there are no protections in place to prevent illegal use. Some may say it is up to the individual to avoid illegal uses, but there is no mechanism in place to determine which uses are legal and which are not. There are no copyright stamps on MP3s, as well as no public domain stamps, which make it too easy for an individual to unwittingly break copyright law.
Having said that, I use Naspter, and I believe that some of my activities are legal, while others are questionable. Here they are, in order of possible legality:
I may be able to argue in a court of law on the first 3 points, but I would be compromised, because while I was legally using them, others could copy them for illegal purposes, and I, in many ways, would have enabled it.
What I am looking for is a legal way to do these things, but on a massive scale. I think a legal service would have the features:
Such a system has many components, and may be difficult to implement, but the creators of such a system would have ample proof that they encourage legal uses while discouraging illegal uses. I think they would be in a much better position than Napster is, with more possiblity of survial. Now that many people have experienced the ease of trading digital music, they will hunger for a legal way to do it.
Some will say that I should just set up a home FTP server, but such a soultion will never catch on - it has to be a single purpose server, that takes care of it's own security. Others will say, why don't you make it yourself - valid criticism, but I don't have the time or talent. I'm just looking to see if others think it is a good idea, and maybe someone is already working on it.
Yeah, this may not directly relate to the story - I wrote it before hand, and, since I want people to read it, waited for a new story. Maybe I should have submitted it, as an Ask Slashdot?)
abstract: A potlatch is a gift festival and an economic system based on abundance, gift, and reputation. The potlatch protocol describes a decentralized peer-to-peer micropayment system based on digitally signed XML promissory notes, aggregated for settlement on an open market. It provides an economic framework that builds upon the "infinite supply" of digital products rather than opposing it, and argues that such a framework is both appropriate and necessary.
If this happens how long would it be before we start seeing rot13 type filenames? Instead of Metallica you would get Zrgnyyvpn.