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Dear CDDB Users: Thanks For Helping The RIAA!
A reader unblessed with a name writes: "I'll admit that when Gracenote took over the CDDB compact-disc database, I wasn't too annoyed. Now I am. Napster has just signed an agreement with them to use Gracenote's services, and by extension the community-built CDDB databases, to implement its copyright blocking."
The point was that I used CDDB, Napster was not really the issue. I've never used napster, and I have thousands of MP3s.
Your right that there is clearly an arms-race going on. However, the copyright holders have the advantage that if they can't find the track easily, than neither can the general public.
Remember that their goal is to keep piracy levels low. They don't have to eliminate it completely. They will only goes as far as makes sense economically (how much am I `losing' and how much will it cost me to stop it?
take a look @
www.renatager.de
greets
hank
IAAL
It's denying the rights of the artist
And for the millionth time: what rights does an artist signed to a major music label have? Please quote figures on the proportion of Napster featured artists who retains the intellectual property rights on their music.
The vast majority of artists sell all their legal (and moral) rights to their creations, and retain only a limited and strictly contractual right to royalties from sales of it. They don't own the music.
So, if I wasn't going to buy the music anyway (I haven't bought any music since the 1980's), then how, exactly, does the artist suffer? The legal and moral loser is the owner of the intellectual property rights - and that's MegaRecordCorp.
Now, if we're talking about artists that retain their own rights, and distribute online, then that's a different issue. But I doubt you were thinking clearly enough to be talking about that.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
If the RIAA and Napster block this song because it just so happens to be the same as the Piglatin translation of a copyrighted song, can I sue them for blocking it?
Any lawyers out there that can shed some light? Any bands out there that want to release some non-copyrighted material?
MadCow__42 kevin@cazabon.com
I used to have a sig, but I set it free and it never came back.
Yes, at least on NT. edit %SYSTEMROOT%\System32\drivers\etc\hosts .
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Too bad I don't have moderator points today. Can I moderate an entire article as "Flamebait"?
Look people, I know there are a lot of GNU zealots here that buy into the party line, "Information wants to be free!" So the CDDB database gets used by the Bad Guys. So what? That's the price you pay for freely exchanging information -- Someone else is free to use it against you!
Okay, so CDDB is no longer "free" in the GNU sense. That's beside the point. Do you think they're so naïve that they're not also using FreeDB as well? The only reason you know about the Napster/CDDB deal is that they had to sign a license to use the database and someone thought it would be good PR to announce it publicly. I'll betcha a dollar, though, that they also have their hooks into FreeDB and any other GPL'd free-as-in-liberty databases out there.
Freedom is a double-edged sword. You can't grab the moral high ground waving the "Information is Free!" flag, then complain when people use it for the "wrong purposes". That ain't freedom. It's a license agreement.
Chelloveck
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
So this just adds to the apparent death spiral, since by implication friends and communities are for losers.
But strangely enough, that is probably the exact attitude of the marketroids who are abusing the community by ripping off the community effort by selling it.
This also fits in, in a weird way, to the whole Napster vs RIAA mess. Because there is a balance that needs to be reached as far as sharing vs respecting the rights of others. If I am required to share, then is that a fancy name for thievery? Are monopolies (in this case, of music) the means to achieve legalized rip offs?
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
>Yet, you take the work of musicians and distribute and use it against their expressed wished.
I question whether it is the artists express wishes that music not be distributed in MP3 format (which, in and of itself is not illegal, should you own the Music already -- piracy is the problem) or if that is the motive of the RIAA.
It seems many artists (Public Enemy comes to mind) have already done their best to try to encourage this internet music revolution. Perhaps they are unhappy with the current shackles the recording industry puts on them? Maybe they see MP3 as a way out.
>You both put time and energy into creating something intangible, and you both were denied its control.
Copyright doesn't allow you to put a literal stranglehold on how people use your music. Once someone buys a CD they can use the music how they please, although copyright does seem to hold people to personal use only (which includes ripping CDs into MP3 format).
If artists don't want their music put into MP3 format, they can simply keep it to themselves, or perhaps find a less liberal country than the United States (maybe they can convince SeaLand to change their laws?) to harbour their music.
>If you use Napster to download copyrighted material and feel ripped off by the CDDB, then you are an utterly despicable hypocrite.
That is assuming you haven't already bought the CD. I've lost/broken/scratched CDs before, haven't you? Napster is a great way to replace them.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
That being said, the act of publishing *professionally* is usually going to alter this default copyright structure. Since 1978, part of every American recording label...
Unless the 1978 Copyright Agreement was an international affair, how does this compare against the other 95% of the world's population* ??
So far it's being assumed that every creation that is listed in the CDDB was American produced, in exactly the same way that congress assumes that the internet is an American only network.
World population estimation for July 1st 1999 = 5,996,215,340
U.S. population for July 1st 1999 = 272,878,000
Source: U.S. Bureau of the Census
[Steve]
It's funny how many times you have to show your I.D. in the U.S.
...at times it feels like Germany, 1942.
So what? You knew when you submitted information to CDDB that they could have done this. If you didn't like that fact, you didn't have to submit information to CDDb.
Know what else? Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is in the public domain, yet publishers have the gall to sell for profit copies of the book! How dare they! It's available for free, so they're evil to sell it!!
Never take moderation advice from sigs, including this one.
Ok now, this is a little off topic by not by much. In all this talk about the illegal trading of copyrighted music and such on area is left out of the talks. What if I already own the CD/Cassette or even LP in question and I have no idea nor do I wish to learn how to rip a track of of it? As far as I remember, the copyright laws state that I am allowed to make as many copies of copyrighted material that I own for my own personal use and archivial purposes. Now by blocking the trade of mp3's from one user to another isnt it in effect limiting my ability to make a backup of any such media that I already own? Or what if I have the cd but it is scratched so bad it is un playable, so I want to d/l a few tracks off of it to play, perfectly legal but The RIAA has now foreced me to either go without that mucis or buy another copy of it. I think napster is a dead horse now anyway, its just a matter of time before the body stops moving, and as for the CDDB, I only hope that the start tryign to figure out what exactly the mass users of there service want and somehow find a happy place for all in there business model. JMO.. The Original Zaphod
"No A Zaphod, didn't you hear we come in 6 Packs Now"
First off, Napster is complying with a court order. If you like Napster, then you should be happy that this seemingly impossible task is being done via CDDB.
Second, right or wrong, the RIAA has legal claim to their Copyrighted material. If you want to knowingly circumvent that claim, then you need to lose the hypocrisy and admit that you are a thief. If you own those albums, rip 'em yourself you lazy bastage!
Third, Napster has served it's purpose. By comparison to the present alternatives, Napster is crude, inflexible and clunky. Let it go! Don't let nostalgia and hype keep your neophile spirit bound to a dead horse.
Fouth, Napster doesn't love you anymore. As soon as Napster started pulling usernames, well before they signed with Bertlemann, and WELL before this development, they had gone over to the 'other side'. In fact, as soon as they incorporated and IPOd, their reason for being changed. Grass roots my arse! They're a business.
The REAL jabber has the /. user id: 13196
The REAL jabber has the user id: 13196
What you do today will cost you a day of your life
As I understood it the CDDB identified track names based on the overall signature of a CD, including its ID number and the lengths of all the tracks. How can this be used to identify individual MP3 tracks? And, if it is possible, why do we not have a tool which fills in the ID3 tags for totally unlabelled MP3 files, just from the CDDB. This would be very useful. Surely if this were possible, it would have been done?!
How can they be sure that everything on the CDDB is copyrighted? I'm sure that probably most of it is, but not ALL of it. Plus, as anyone who uses CDDB knows, the database is far from accurate, awash with typos and sometimes just outright mistakes.
Still, how long before someone makes a Napster plugin to check your MP3s against CDDB and rename them in subtle ways so that they no longer match?
those of you that are still using CDDB, and are fed up with them charging for community added content, switch to Freedb.org. It's not gonna up and sell the database.
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I post links to stuff here
The real moral is not sharing is for losers, but when ever you do something that the higher ups (ie your employer, the RIAA, the government) might look askance at, try to stay under the radar.
For example, LSD was legal and unknown until the media got ahold of it, in 1965-66.
The Grateful Dead were a great party until MTV's Day of the Dead in 1987.
Porn was free and unblocked by corporate networks in 1996.
I imagine that divx;) sites are going to get targeted next.
Many of you devoted time and effort to contributing to the CDDB database. It hurts to see your work used in a way you didn't want.
Yet, you take the work of musicians and distribute and use it against their expressed wished. How is this any different? You both put time and energy into creating something intangible, and you both were denied its control.
You weren't robbed of the information itself, after all. If you wanted to keep a copy of the information that you submitted to CDDB, it would've been a trivial matter to make a backup. No, you were robbed of nothing.
If you use Napster to download copyrighted material and feel ripped off by the CDDB, then you are an utterly despicable hypocrite.
- qpt
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Domine Deus, creator coeli et terrae respice humilitatem nostram.
Napster is a database? News to me. It amazes me how much people stretch the truth to fit their own little opinions.
I know this will be posted 50 times to this thread, but here it is again anyway: http://freedb.org/. We're rebuilding it, we're rebuilding it better, and cddb can stew in its immoral juices.
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Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
Just in case someone wanted to share files that are on one of those lists, there is a simple way. Just add a Z or Q to the end of each word in the filename of each mp3 you have. Presto, no more filtering of your songs. This works because the Napster filter looks for exact word matches, and if you add an extra letter, it is no longer an exact word match.
Two men can keep a secret if both of them are dead.
--
Dyolf Knip
I found that with DiscPlay 4 I could also replace the list server with ca.freedb.org and it provides me with a refreshable list of freedb servers.
John
John
So if CDDB allows Napster to use their database for free, you'll no longer have any complaints?
No.
The arguments of the pro-Napster clique on Slashdot are so inconsistent it gives me a headache trying to keep up.
Well, slashdot and the "napster clique" are not one person, so what do you expect?
- - - - -
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
So is the CDDB still accepting new entries from random people? What if the new entries collide with something else in the database already? In the event that the new entries don't collide, is there any validation done?
... I think it's time to start submitting some CDDB entries.
Let's take a non-roseyeyed look at Napster. Forget what the Napster apologists have spun out since the RIAA began looking at them - Napster is only good for getting copies of MP3s of songs you don't want to pay for. I'll admit quite readily that I've downloaded copyrighted songs that I have no intention of ever buying. Sometimes, I'll get the song of a band I saw for 5 seconds on MTV, and just MAYBE it'll tempt me to buy the album.
If you take the copyrighted mp3s off, all you're going to be left with is a bunch of crap mp3s of people's bands, which you're never going to find anyway because you don't know what you're looking for. Also, just because a big record company isn't behind a band, doesn't mean that said unsigned band wants the world to get mp3s of its songs for nothing.
Napster is dead without its illegal aspect, for unsigned bands promoting their music, a far better option is mp3.com which at least has music grouped into categories, so you can find songs that bands want you to download, since I believe they get royalties based on advertising revenue.
Goodbye Napster, it was nice while it lasted
Alert: this is not a troll!
All that has happened, basically, is Napster asked permission to use the database, and got that permission. Of course they pay for it's use, which is good. Thus, the company has no excuse to let individuals pay for their services: the costs will already be covered.
CDDB is a public database(sort of). Napster wants to use that database to prevent the illegal copying of music. Of course a lot of moral issues are involved. Should all music be free/Free? Is the RIAA's greed justifiable? Is copying music wrong or right? Who owns information? Etc.
The issue here is none of our business. A company using data from a _public_ database to control the use over it's _own_ application, is up to them. They don't claim to own the information. They just use the information which they have access to. What they do with it is up to them.
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the pun is mightier than the sword
www.rose-hulman.edu/~castlebs
Damn that pisses me off.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
What? Do you live in a cave?
This napster situation isn't just about napster. It also isn't about a few kids stealing stuff through the internet. It's gotten WAY bigger. Hell, my grandma has heard of napster now.
This situation involves the music industry as we know it. It involves every artist that has ever tried to get a record deal. It involves all of the huge mega-corporations that own the rights to all the music that people work so hard to make. It involves fundamental laws of our country and changing them. Hopefully for the better. And most of all it involves power.
Can you imagine what a significant event it would be if the record company's fell and copywrites, by law, would always be owned by the creator? It would open everything up. No more record companies shoving teeny bopper crap down everyones throats. There would be a place for everybody, every type of music. Distributed power. Quality would be rewarded and crap would sink...analogous to how slashdot works.
*pulls head from clouds*
If that not "stuff that matters", I don't know what is.
FUNK!
This could work out very well for Bertelsmann. It's like having a private chain of radio stations that only plays their music. Bertelsmann has around 18% of the music market globally; the top three players are all around that level.
Now, we see the value of CDDB for the filtering that the RIAA wants Napster to do, and the RIAA has been scrambling around trying to compile lists of song titles (probably 90% of the effort in creating a CDDB type service of their own) when IMHO they should have already had such a list in a CDDB like service for at least a couple of years - in fact, I'd be willing to bet that the RIAA, even as they devote time and energy to compiling their lists are failing to take advantage of their own efforts by compiling these lists into a CDDB type app.
In fairness, I suppose, if the RIAA had such a service and CD Rippers used it to populate ID3 tags and name MP3 files, it'd probably be an even bigger irony, but still...
I also have to ask - aren't many if not all song/album titles (and not just the songs themselves) copyrighted? Could Gracenote / CDDB be the next target for the RIAA scheist...er, lawyers that is? After all, if they sue CDDB out of existence, they set a precedent that they are the only ones who can build such an application as the copyright holders of the song titles- next thing they'll be charging companies / software authors that write CD playing software for computers for the right to use their database. Heck, its not at all inconceivable that such a service could be integrated into normal CD playing stereo components (and stereo component manufacturers charged accordingly) - how hard is it to put a two port ethernet hub into a CD player that would allow even the average Joe to connect their CD player and computer to their cable modem / DSL service for the purpose of retrieving song titles (and, heaven forbid, allowing the RIAA to spy on your listening habits)?
Understanding is a three edged sword. - Ambassador Kosh Naranek, Babylon 5
Know what else? Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is in the public domain, yet publishers have the gall to sell for profit copies of the book! How dare they! It's available for free, so they're evil to sell it!!
This doesn't follow. Alice in Wonderland is still in the public domain. Publishers sell it, that's fine. Commercial distros sell Linux too, and that's also fine.
But CDDB isn't in the public domain anymore. For your Alice in Wonderland comparison to work, publishers would have had to remove Alice in Wonderland from the public domain, and make it illegal to acquire a copy of it without paying a publisher for it.
Drakantus is right - the other ones we try to keep an eye out for. If there's not something in the mainstream media, then write a review! Compare and contrast! Write a user guide!
You say this now but Slashdot has never acted like it's interested in lengthy user submissions. I've stopped bothering when my last attempt at an editorial sat in the submission queue for about week and I had to mail you guys about it only to be told someone would get around to reading it "soon". That's why my stories go on kuro5hin because I know they'll get read and I'll get feedback.
As for short submissions, I've basically stopped those as well after this story where you editted all the coherence out of my submission and made me sound like a raving zealot instead of maintaining the original theme of the submission.
Quite frankly I don't understand why with the authors slashdot has no one writes anything longer than a paragraph about a submission. Is reading submissions that much work that we can't get the kind of review, comparison, or user guide that you've just suggested?
Napster is a database. It is also a communications protocol. It is a search engine and a GUI. It is all of those things and more.
For one, this will only help stop mass producer's of MP3's who can't figure out how to do stuff properly (like renaming).
What I would propose to beat the RIAA is to develop a plug-in for Napster that allows the client to search and share for scrambled names. The key would change every day, and be hosted on several servers outside the RIAA's extent of power.
Every time the system connected to Napster, it would connect to the servers, which would also update the list of mirrors.
I know this is a bit vague, but I hope somebody will figure out what I mean.
The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it. - G.B. Shaw
But napster is not king. Opennap for example gives you 100% of the functionality of Napster without having to deal with the RIAA.. yet. There will always be up-and-down servers, etc.. but thats alright. The list of servers right now is centralized with Napigator, but how hard would it be to reverse engineer the napigator ? Damn easy..
I put up a opennap server on my cable modem one night.. within 2 days I had over 300 users using the server and 250GB of songs indexed on my system.
RIAA is nothing more than a speed-bump... honestly I think it's the best thing to happen to push people out of using a centralized and corparation controlled service.
RIAA may of made their worst mistake by not settling something a bit more reasonable with Napster.. it's going to push people to other avenues. (No, I am NOT talking about Gnutella... ) I can see the RIAA board all start laughing when they talk about gnutella as a threat.
anyway...
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Would you like a Python based alternative to PHP/ASP/JSP?
It might take a while.
Don't you all remember the pre-napster days? searching for ftp sites, etc. It was a pain in the ass. Then napster came along and made it easy.
Now it's a pain in the ass again.
Something else will come along. It's too big now. The only difference is now it will be done right (no corps involved and there must be no one to sue). Gnutella looks like a good replacement. If we could only get it working right.
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CatNap filename encryption proxy
Daily news on P2P / file sharing
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RIAA: Here is a list of 150,000 songs that we want you to block. You have 3 days.
*THUD*
Napster Admin: OK.
*2 days later, Napster Admin wakes up from a hangover*
Napster Admin: That was some party, hey? Oh shit. The RIAA thing. Holy Mother of Perl! I don't want to mess with typing or OCRing all that in!
*an idea forms...*
It's denying the rights of the artist.
It's theft. Pure and simple.
But you "I want it all for free" thieving scum don't understand that.
Or do you actually want an end to reward & creativity?
Hacker: A criminal who breaks into computer systems
"Information wants to be paid"
Or does this seem strange...
Napster - A database of Song Names - ordered by the courts to remove the song names
GraceNote - A database of Song Names - helping Napster to remove the Song Names.
Pinky: "What are we going to do tomorrow night Brain?"
Brain: "I would tell you Pinky but this 120 char limi
Simple. First, nobody doubts that the RIAA companies, singly or in concert, can hire people who can devise a very good technology to digitally distribute their "property" in a way that will satisfy their requirements.
They may even be bright enough to do some market research and find a mechanism that doesn't aggravate their target audience too much -- I wouldn't bet on that, but it's possible.
The question is, do they want to? And I think the answer is, no, not very much.
You've got two world-views within the recording industry:
- One world-view hopes that digital
distribution will simply go away if they stick
their fingers in all the holes in the dike.
-
Another world-view recognizes that the holes
in the dike
aren't enumerable, and that digital distribution
is coming whether they want it or not.
In neither case is Napster part of their plans. In the first world-view, they're the enemy and must be destroyed. In the second, they're a competitor and must be destroyed.There never was any hope that Napster would be spared.
If I monkey with /etc/hosts (or whatever the Winduhs equivalent is), can I silently redirect *.cddb.org to my choice of freedb mirrors without causing undue pain and hardship on myself?
- Pithy comment goes here.
Let the RIAA make it as hard as they like for people to share music from their artists. Give them enough rope to hang themselves. If the only tunes on Napster are free tunes, then free tunes will get traded and free tunes will get heard.
The more draconian the RIAA gets, the more people will want and seek out alternatives. This could be the start of something wonderful.
I can guarantee that the entire set of CDDB files, while they might all be copyrighted due to inherent copyrights by artists and their creations, the set of music which is copyrighted is NOT the same as the set of music the RIAA has a right to control.
I know many local bands here in Austin who WANT their music on Napster. In fact, I've been explicitly asked to share it. I also inserted their files into CDDB (this was before they went all evil on us, mind you, which reminds me, I need to resubmit to the friendlier, open versions).
I feel doubly betrayed.
Returned Peace Corps IT Volunteer
For those unsure of how they propose to implement this:
There is a copyright field in the newer ID3v2 tad info.
Since the CDDB was a community based system, it would thus rely on the people ripping it to enter the correct information. There is also a field which specifies: "Encoded by".
These fields are all good and well, but it will take a lot of time and effort for them to verify these.
:)
Sometimes those who say "I don't like to use or contribute to that piece of software, because although it's free beer, I don't like the license" get accused of whining: "hey, it's free, if you don't like it don't use it but don't whine about it". The real lesson to draw from this is that licenses *do* matter and it's worthwhile discussing what we want out of them.
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Xenu loves you!
At the height of Slashdot's reporting on Napster (twice or thrice a week) I couldn't understand what relevance it had with regards to being "News for Nersa" or "Stuff that Matters", some service that is primarily used to pirate songs was getting sued, big deal.
Now that Napster has been rendered useless as a file sharing service by the RIAA and a court of law, why is Napster still news? Everyone I know has moved on from Napster and now uses a service that surpasses Napster's poorly designed service in one way or the other. For simply sharing and obtaining music there are iMesh, Audiogalaxy, Music City, Ohaha, Gnutella and a host of others. For uses of P2P beyond simply grabbing MP3s we have Mojo Nation, Freenet and Publius.
Why doesn't slashdot start reporting on these systems instead of beating the dead Napster horse?
Sorry if this has been asked before, but I don't see it in the FreeDB FAQ....
+5:offtopic,but anti-American
I think that the RIAA would just assume have Napster completely shut down. Napster is lucky that there is such an easily accessable database of music titles to use as a filter.
OK, assume for a moment here that they have some way to separate RIAA music from independent music. In that case, why does anyone object to this? It will only help them block the illegal stuff. Are you upset that your contributions to the CDDB are helping to prevent you from illegally downloading copyrighted music? If so, are you also upset that the money you pay in taxes helps prevent you from stealing your neighbor's car?
On the other hand, if they don't have any way to separate RIAA music from independents, then this is bad. Some of the musicians with matierial listed on CDDB might want their music to be shared on Napster, in which case it isn't illegal. I would expect that Napster and Gracenote have figured out some way to separate RIAA music from independent music, though. One easy way they could do it is to get a list of artist names from the RIAA and filter the CDDB stuff based on that (would be *much* easier then getting the whole list of songs from the RIAA).
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One day I'm "sharing" tracks with "friends" I've never met. The next day, I'm "stealing." What the hell happened to you, Napster?
This reminds me of that guy we all knew in high school who used to let us borrow his car all the time. Sure he was friendly when we were hanging around and borrowing his car. But once we crashed it into a tree, he wasn't very friendly anymore.
Everything was cool when you were cool, Napster. Remember? We were all having fun until the cops came a'knocking. Hell, half the stuff I stole I didn't even like.
Well, I've gotta go shave my donkey ears.
Do all the angles of copyright law still apply if I *don't* have that little line of text saying "copyright 2001 by moi"?
Yes.
Of course, if you don't put the copyright notice, you're basically saying "I don't mind if you copy this, even though I have a copyright." You, as the owner of the copyright, can decide who has permission to copy your works, and who doesn't. Just be aware that, if you don't defend your copyright and enough people copy your work, you can loose your copyright. Also, IANAL, so take this post with a grain of salt.
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Home is where you hang your @.
I hope this isn't blanket blocking.
I have material to which I own the copyright which is entered into the CDDB.
So now I'm blocked from distributing my own music over napster because someone who bought a CD typed the information into Napster?
Hopefully the record industries will have to supply a full CD signature to CDDB and then they block all tracknames with a matching signature.
Now is the time for independent producer to make albums with identical CDDB signatures to RIAA music.
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former. (Einstein)