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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.
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.
M4nd4t0ry mi55p311ing! I love it.
sulli
RTFJ.
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.
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
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.)
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.
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 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.
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.
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"We're sorry, but the website you're trying to reach has been disconnected."
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!
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.
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.
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.
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
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
Bard?
--
#include "stdio.h"
It is worse than that. A non RIAA artist should be able to apply to get the ban lifted in a second.
A non-RIAA artist should be able to use web services like napster to become heard. This is fair and proper use of a service like napster. This non-RIAA artist can claim to be using napster as a medium for becoming known and for distributing their work.
A non-RIAA artist should be able to make a song, even a parody song with a similar name to a RIAA order blocked song. This non-RIAA artist can then sue napster and the RIAA to get the blocking released so that the non-RIAA material can be transmitted.
The non-RIAA artist can sue the RIAA for the $$$ of potential future career money the RIAA is cutting them out of by blocking the medium.
Spelling of a title cannot be used as a reason for blocking non-infinging material.
Example:
A famous horror writer, a Mr King perhaps, wants to distribute chapter 1 of his book online for free. As an added bonus the author decides to read it and creates -> thriller.mpg. This file is copyright but released free to everyone as a publicity stunt to get everone hooked and to buy the book. Mr King plans to save marketing costs by using the napster transmission medium to spread the word.
Opps, napster blocks this file. Now the author can sue napster (and the RIAA) for illegal restraint of trade. This was not material the RIAA had control over, nor was it anywhere close. File names are generally short and descriptive, thriller.mpg is appropriate for the reading of a horror story and in no way implies connection to any music titled similarly.
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
Matt
- 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:
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?)