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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.
you already did. www.boondocks.com
I do not have a signature
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
Just wait until Webster's dictionary sues Napster for violating its copyright on words in the english language.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
--
+&x
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
"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."
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...
--
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
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
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.
In any case, couldn't you just add .01 second of silence to the end of the file and change the MD5 sum?
Or...you could...
Any number of things could change the MD5 for the file... I don't think it's very realistic to do checksums to validate mp3s, as any single song could be encoded by any of at least 5-10 different encoders, at any number of different bitrates...the number of md5 sums for any SINGLE song would be enormous -- multiply that by the millions of songs the RIAA wants blocked...
Then again, blocking every string used in a song title will be nearly as bad - and will unfairly stop independant non-RIAA artists from LAWFULLY distributing their music via Napster.
In short, a lose, lose situation.
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.
-
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Sounds like you're re-writing aimster.
Dear Friend , This letter was specially selected to be sent to you ! We will comply with all removal requests ! This mail is being sent in compliance with Senate bill 1621 ; Title 6 ; Section 304 ! This is NOT unsolicited bulk mail ! Why work for somebody else when you can become rich in 10 days ! Have you ever noticed people are much more likely to BUY with a credit card than cash and more people than ever are surfing the web ! Well, now is your chance to capitalize on this ! WE will help YOU use credit cards on your website & deliver goods right to the customer's doorstep ! The best thing about our system is that it is absolutely risk free for you . But don't believe us . Ms Simpson who resides in Washington tried us and says "I was skeptical but it worked for me" . We assure you that we operate within all applicable laws ! Don't delay - order today ! Sign up a friend and you get half off . Thank-you for your serious consideration of our offer . Dear E-Commerce professional ; Your email address has been submitted to us indicating your interest in our briefing ! If you no longer wish to receive our publications simply reply with a Subject: of "REMOVE" and you will immediately be removed from our database ! This mail is being sent in compliance with Senate bill 1618 ; Title 7 , Section 306 ! This is not multi-level marketing . Why work for somebody else when you can become rich within 79 days ! Have you ever noticed more people than ever are surfing the web plus nearly every commercial on television has a .com on in it
! Well, now is your chance to capitalize on this .
WE will help YOU process your orders within seconds
and turn your business into an E-BUSINESS ! You are
guaranteed to succeed because we take all the risk
! But don't believe us . Ms Ames who resides in Georgia
tried us and says "Now I'm rich many more things are
possible" . We assure you that we operate within all
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a friend and you'll get a discount of 20% ! Cheers
.
can anyone say "steganography plugin" ?
--
You can be an atheist and still not want to succumb to some weird cross-over sheep disease -- AC
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
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.
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
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.
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:
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.
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."
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?
No injunction will ever CHANGE that. not "save."
need coffee.
Goat sex free since 2001
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
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!
"Or maybe the MD5 sum is pre-calculated and embedded in the file header?
As I understand it, that's essentially the situation"
So? Edit the md5sum without changing the file. Sure, it won't check out at the other end, but you're using a hacked client for a reason, right? It's not like MP3s refuse to play if you have a bad checksum - try playing a partially downloaded one some time (works great!).
Become a FSF associate member before the low #s are used
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
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.
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 EisenachA 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.)
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. =)
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CitizenC
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.
Most people are not going to bother re-ripping to tweak a files musical fingerprint -- in fact most people probably wouldn't bother switching to a different service that doesn't have the MD5 sum feature. So your problem in most cases would boil down to looking for the occasional mutation in the MD5 sums. Every so often a new copy of the same music will pop up with a different MD5 print, but there's ways you can look for those.
(That point about automated pyscho-acoustic techniques is not as far-fetched as it sounds. I wouldn't claim to know how they work, but from what I understand the technology exists already. I would guess the main trick is to come up with some decent heuristics to apply it without having to do complete downloads of every MP3 in existence.)
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.
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.
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 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"'
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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.
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...
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...
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--hongpong.com
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)
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.
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A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Matt
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:
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.
--
"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
The strips:
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Tuesday
Wednesday
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Friday
Saturday
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A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
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.
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.