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Courts Gives Napster 72-Hour Deadline
Several folks have submitted a variety of stories proclaiming that Napster has been given 72 hours to remove copyrighted materials from its servers. Meanwhile, websites are cropping up everywhere to encode filenames to simple things like Pig Latin, as well as more complicated stuff. No doubt open-source Napster clones will have that built in within a few days.
Sure, why not? I would truly, truly, truly love to see the RIAA attempt to sue every individual Napster user who has ever posted or downloaded a piece of copyrighted music.
me too, but what would actually happen is this: the riaa might sue a couple people. the rest of the people would see this and back down-being that they are willing to stand on the civil disobedience pedestal until it becomes inconvenient. this is typical of the apathetic populous here in the us.
alternatively the riaa might threaten the isp's who will cut the cords of their users. reguardless of wether or not the riaa has a legal leg to stand on is irelevent. many of the ips would cut the users so that they dont have to go through the legal hassels. not to mention the aol/tw connection. the folks at time warner call over to aol and say: "hey cut the user who had this ip address at this time. he's a violator".
the us legal system can take alot. look at the "war" on drugs. in the last decade the number of people in the us prision system has increased dramatically. many of these folks are in for minor drug charges and come out alot worse than they went in.
in my opinion the us has become a subsidiary of corporations and the population is happy to be told how to live by watching mtv/suvivor/etc. anything that might be worth the time will infringe on their convenience and we cannot have that.
give me convenience or give me death.
use LaTeX? want an online reference manager that
-- john
I've talked to a knowledgeable person who works in the record industry and they tell me that the feeling there is that music sharing has already won. The music industry may be able to shut down Napster, but they've lost the war. There are hundreds of ways to share music files now and more are on their way. There is not just an entire generation of music fans who have begun to think differently about intellectual property laws, there is now Joe and Jane six-pack who want to share Led Zeppelin MP3s.
Those of you who whine about musicians being ripped off by online music sharing are still missing the bigger point. This controversy is about music *distribution*. Napster and others like it are a new, easy-to-use technology which removes the middleman from between artist and fan. Nobody is crying over the record companies and the profits they are missing out on. More and more people are beginning to understand that music distribution is controlled by 5 to 6 companies and perhaps a few more retail outlets (i.e. WalMart). If anybody has been ripping off artists it's been record companies and their monopoly. If a small band lose its contract, it is destined for oblivion because the alternatives are few. We all know who bland FM radio is with its limited playlists that are designed to sell us a select few artists. Never mind the fact that most of the FM dial is owned by 4 or 5 major companies.
What can you do? Keep sharing music. Buy CDs from small labels and distros. Go to a concert and pay to see a band. If you are a programmer, help develop open source P2P software. Set up a server to host MP3s and movies. Turn off that corporate radio station and start your own pirate station. Several years ago there were hundreds of pirate stations on the air in the U.S. It takes less than $1000 to start a station with your friends.
Finally, don't get depressed about this because our side is winning!
Now answer me this: how can they tell it's "infringing?" Just because it's copyrighted doesn't mean it's being infringed upon. There's a possibility, yes, but... well, here's a ferinstance:
I bought Blue Man Group's album, Audio, last month. It plays fine on my portable CD player, but put it in the CD-ROM drive, and it misbehaves. I can't even rip it. I have a license to make fair use copies of it, so presumably, if I can find MP3s of this album, aren't I entitled to download them?
Similarly, the Beatles' White Album. I bought that on vinyl, and later on cassette. Am I really required to buy it AGAIN to legally download MP3s that other licenseholders have made?
Forget the technical problems for a sec, and just look at the legal presumption of guilt here.
I'm offended. I really am.
I can see the fnords!
1) That's misquoted. Napster doesn't have anything on it's servers.
2) What Napster is required to do is block all ifnringing materials from being searched for.
3) The Record companies must furnish napster with a list of what to block.
So.. what the court ordered was that napster had to bock all infringing materials the record companies told it about. Isn't that what napster said they would do in the first place?
Sounds fair to me anyway.
At the risk of repeating myself, I must say that while the RIAA thinks they have won this round, in the long term they will lose to the march of technology. They can't legislate it out of existence. And frankly, if Napster continues to operate with all the RIAA's list of songs blocked, it is still a terrific tool. Perhaps more so - and here is where the RIAA's egos are getting in the way of them having a clue about what they are doing. The RIAA's list of blocked songs? Guess what: I can buy that crap in stores. I don't need Napster to find my precious Britney songs. If I want super-leet pirated copies I can tape that sh*t off the radio. If the only music I could get on Napster was indie labels, bands that support napster, and unknown artists -- well, that's a lot of great music. I say let the RIAA take their stuff off Napster; we're better off without it. Sure I like a lot of that stuff too but my point is that Napster (or a Napster-like clone that adequately filters copyright violations) is a great means of distribution and of discovering new artists. And guess where the RIAA labels will come looking for hot new bands to sign in a couple years? Having already built followings via Napster, these new artists will be in a lot better position to call the shots of their contracts, and some may even tell the RIAA to f*ck off.
One of the only things that has kept the general non-evils-of-copyright-aware public out of this mess up until now is the fact that it has been relatively difficult to trade MP3's online.
I mean, if you know more than absolutely nothing about the internet, you can download agent or x-news and point it at the MP3 binaries groups and get a wealth of high-quality audio, that has usually been encoded by people who know what they're doing. The same goes for IRC channels.
What Napster has done is to remove that first little bit of knowledge necessary to start yourself down the good-intentioned road to MP3 hell. It's all point and grunt. Even Journalism Majors can use it. My step-dad can use it, and that's pretty damn scary.
So Napster's effectively gone away. If Mr. Berry's figures are to beleived, this means that the RIAA doesn't have a few ingenious crackers and hackers on their hands trading MP3z on undergound IRC and Usenet channels. They have 30 MILLION FRUSTRATED, ANGRY, PISSED OFF users from all classes and races! Worse, they have a veritable legion of crackers and hackers who want to support these people's dirty MP3 habits in order to make money/points/karma/etc...
What's the old saw? If one man owes you a lot of money and won't pay, then he's in trouble, but if many men owe you money and won't pay, then you're in trouble.
This applies here. It was one thing for RIAA companies to pick on the hackers. Now they have visibly, audible, and a finacially insulted the American Public as a whole. Now all that's left is to whip the addled mob into a blood-thirsty frenzy.
Good bye, Napster. You'll make a wonderful martyr.
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The whole nation is reeling in ambiguity today, as the Perfected Tenses have disappear entirely from the English language. What was once thought to be restricted to those of lower socioeconomic status has spread viciously throughout America.
A Dr. Hanfkopf was interview today. He say "Television has probably contribute more to this than anything else. The TV people have let these people be hear without ever having correct them. My God, now it has happen to me!!!
Moral: There is no excuse for anything less than mastery of the language by those who use it.
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