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Napster Licenses "Acoustic Fingerprinting"
n8willis writes: "Well, it was probably only a matter of time, but Reuters reports that Napster has licensed an "acoustic fingerprinting" technology from someone called Relatable to insert into its filtering system. Boy, I just can't wait for the opportunity to pay Napster a monthly fee to share my music with other people. And have them censor me for my trouble, too."
The clue phone is ringing... I think it's for you.
"Boy, I just can't wait for the opportunity to pay Napster a monthly fee to share my music with other people. And have them censor me for my trouble, too."
If you don't like the way the service will be, don't pay for it and don't use it! Yes, it is a shame that Napster will go bye-bye (at least in the way we have all grown to know and love it) but let's face it, what we did, and what it does is THEFT on a grand scale. And all you fools who keep bitching about Napster going away and selling out and how the RIAA/MPAA screws the world etc... if you don't like it, don't buy CD's or videos! DUH! The reason they can and will do what they do is because YOU give your money to them and give them their control and power.
Let's say you buy a book, a paperback. Now, the publisher won't give a shit if you loan that book to a friend to read. Or even if that friend gives it to another friend and he/she reads it. That's fine. Or even libraries (for now). But if you take that book, and print several thousand copies and go trading it with other readers for thousands of other books over and over and over... HELL yes they'd get pissed!
Yes, the MPAA is corrupt. Yes, they ass rape artists waaaaay more than Napster ever did. But come on, stop with the poor me pity blues crap. Sure many people bought CD's after hearing the tracks downloaded from Napster, but that doesn't matter! There were PLENTY more people who downloaded entire bloody CD's and never paid a cent.
The system is the way it is, and it will remain so. Why? Because sheep keep buying music and CD's no matter what. Because the music industry keeps coming up with canned crap music and telling people it's what they want, and morons keep buying it (I mean come on... you can NOT tell me New Kids On The Block and N Sync got famous on raw talent and determination). Because anyone with talent can never get ahead in the industry without the help of the industry, and with BILLIONS upon billions of dollars to back it and more than half the politicos around the world on their bankroll, it will NEVER change.
Why don't you swim back to Mexico where your kind belong.
It's the IP cartels who have elevated copyright infringement to the status of plunder on the high seas--it just isn't the same thing no matter how badly they want it to be.
IP 'cartels?' IP has no specific representative, let alone a cartel. "No matter how much you jump up and down and call people names, it still isn't" a cartel.
Even without Fair Use it isn't stealing.
And what difference might Fair Use make? Fiar Use can't justify worldwide, millions-of-incidents "stealing" or "infringement" or whatever you want to call it. "No matter how much you jump up and down and call people names, it still isn't" Fair Use.
Ah, the rapturous sound of the Slashdot troll...
Paging Mr. Kettle! Sir Pot hast called ye black! "No matter how much you jump up and down and call people names, it still isn't" any more a troll than you, and likely far less.
Go back to Cuba yuo ButtPope! --Jeff
That's why U.S. copyrights are not a recognition of property rights (as the Supreme Court and the House of Representatives have noted). When you break copyright law, the offense is not theft, but infringement. And technically, the reason that infringement is wrong is not that the copyright holder loses (potential) revenue (the Congress could vote to repeal copyright law tomorrow, if they wished). It's that by undermining the incentive to create more works for the public's use, you are indirectly causing fewer works to become available to your fellow citizens.
Is it stealing if I would not have bought it if I couldn't get it without paying for it?
Well, yes. For one thing, you can't know with 100% certaincy that you wouldn't have eventually changed your mind and bought it. And for another, by stealing it, you're eroding the legitimate owner's ability to sell it since others who find out you're stealing it will wonder why they can't too.
To put it another way, the right moral question to ask is "what would happen if everybody did this"? If everybody stole IP instead of rightfully paying for it, there wouldn't be any businesses producing IP anymore. This is a good moral question that makes clear the reasoning behind lots of laws, not just IP issues. The people who don't see the value of this question are very short-sighted.
I just LOVE Vladinator's site! Especially the "fash" section, where I learned to cut the bottom off of an old shirt to use as a hair enhancement! Oh, and the "dance party" photos!
Of course, don't forget to read Vladinator's emails! Here you will discover how truly difficult it is to decide what to do on the weekends... have a pizza party? A fash party? Go to the mall with all of your friends? Have a sleepover and call boys on the phone?
In short, if you haven't checked out Vladinator's site, you don't know what you're missing!
The processed MP3 could sound like white noise to the fingerprinting software, and be rejected by the filter as an MP3 of some retarded techno band.
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Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
Yeah, it's getting so stealing other people's copyrighted material is hardly worth it anymore. Why, just the other day, I almost had to *buy* a CD, like back in the dark ages.
Oh wait, I forget. The record companies have it coming because they charge too much and put out crap and rip off the artists and drag their feet in new technology and pay off politicians for favorable legislation. I also forgot that all Slashdotters only use Napster in a way consistant with fair use to get digital copies of music they already own. Silly me.
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Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
How hard will it be for an indie or a producer of free digital music to include their works in the database- and more importantly, is there going to be support for an opt _in_ list on things like Napster: like "This fingerprint HAS permission to be involved in noncommercial copying, to any extent"? I'm wondering if the whole technology will be hijacked so you in practice cannot both have your fingerprints on file, and cooperate with services like Napster. Your submitting prints of your stuff will automatically cause them to be thrown off all forms of fair-use file sharing, but you don't get paid anything out of the taxes collected and given to the RIAA. Sort of worst of both worlds.
Then don't use Napster, silly!
.mp3's were successful is that encoders, data, and players, regardless of their legality, became easy to find and use. That made it a de-facto standard.
The entire reason that
No content service gets more users by censoring them, or restricting their rights; it's quite the opposite, really. They get more users *either* by dumping lots of money into advertising, and squashing their competitors, and keeping their service closed, (see AOL, Microsoft, MSN, and now Napster...) *or* by letting their service, integrity and reputation do their advertising for them. (a great example of this is google)
...and given a choice between the two kinds of companies, I'd always pick the latter. Unfortunately, people who don't know enough to ignore the advertising or find the alternatives will back the former, and more's the pity.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Sell his music on the internet and he can be eDitty - hey, that's got a ring to it.
PATENT TIME!!!
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
What's wrong with being able to share something for which I have paid???
That is an overly simplistic argument. If you didn't get the rights to share the hard work someone else made, then you are likely in the wrong.
It isn't about "sharing" I think it's about a bunch of people benefiting from other's work without proper compensation. It seems that it is the people that haven't tried to live life on both sides of the supply and demand equation that can't understand. If you wrote a program to make money would you appreciate people copying it, enjoying your work without compensating you?
Oh, I get it. Y'all recording companies came up with some "agreement" that we have to live by when we buy your stuff for no reason other than to make y'allselves billionaires.
Um, no. The idea of copyright existed long before anyone could record and reproduce an audio waveform. The industries may have tried to pervert it but it is still there and in general we've always had certain rights and they've always had certain rights, the only thing that changed was technology to allow people much more easily swap tunes that they had no right to swap. If you swap legit CDs that is your right, but swapping MP3s is not.
Anybody who's been using Freeamp for the last several betas probably knows about Relatable...their former idea was to check out your MP3 collection and suggest similar music from it. Whether you like that idea or not (I don't), or this new licensing, it's still a pretty cool technology.
\bmg.
LOL,funny as hell! Wish I had mod points...
You know, mikey, you conveniently ignored the fact that relatable is developing completely GPL'ed music player. But then, since you seem interested in only the bad aspects of companies, I shouldn't be surprised.
Odds are you didn't even visit the company's website, so I can't expect that you intentionally omitted this slashdot-friendly action on behalf of the company.
Only on slashdot can a posting be rated "Score -1, Insightful".
Actually, I sing ditties, not diddies...
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Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
In the future, digital music will be encoded with a volume cap, so you cannot share it with your neighbors or the car next to you at a traffic light.
Some tracks will only play on compliant headphones.
You heard it here first.
100,000 lemmings can't all be wrong.
no offense but how did that comment possibly merit "interesting?"
32 bits equals roughly 4 billion. each bit past that doubles the quantity. so, a limit of 128 bits is not even feasibly reachable in many millenia to come.
get with it already... they're going after not a single person for downloading anything that they own. They're only going after people who makes stuff available to others which they have no right to distribute...
Small difference to you, big difference so far as the laws concerened. Download all you want, just don't allow any of your files to be uploaded... Of course that undermines napster completely, but that's where the problem lies in the eyes of the law.
It makes me feel old to think that I've been doing the whole MP3 thing for several years now, back before the Linux kernel had hit 2.0 and the NASDAQ was healthy when it was below 2000. The rather recent popularity of MP3 trading, facilitated by faster internet connections and programs like Napster, is just amusing to me because I remember getting shit off newsgroups or maybe a handful of IRC chanels that even had a conception that you could compress music to a transferable size. Did anyone here use Oth.net? Ahhh, anonymous FTPs for file trading. WarFTP and Serv-U never had it so good. Anyways the point of this rambling is to remember that Napster only facilitated MP3 trading's popularity, they didn't really come up with anything profound. Until the RIAA makes it so you can only listen to music through a microtranceiver in your molars people are going to copy and compress music and look for music they don't have on CDs.
Stop whining about the RIAA anyways, they will never "get it" because they are business men. See they work with late nineteenth century industrial ideas in their heads because thats what they learned in business school and it is how mass manufacturing works. The RIAA will vehemently claim they are losing money due to MP3 trading because they have a monopoly on music distribution, therefore if you're listening to music they didn't sell you they have lost money (technically). It's a nice scheme they have worked out. You sign your work over to them and they are contracted to you to provide such and such services for you. That is why people want fucking record contracts. How come you can't just go solo? THE ENTIRE BROADCASTING INDUSTRY IS BUILT AROUND THE WAY THE RIAA DOES BUSINESS. The FCC makes it difficult for someone to get any FM bandwidth in a given area, you need serious funds to get into the business. This is where ABC, NBC, and CBS come into the picture. They make cash off the advertising their little darlings run inbetween the hit songs all the kids tune in to hear. Ever wonder why there aren't more free form radio stations? They have to play what advertisers will pay to have their commercials run with. It's the same reasons radio stations can offer you a thousand dollars for listening at a certain time. Advertising is sold at a prime rate and a thousand dollars is a small portion of that.
Napster bowing down to the RIAA isn't so much bowing down as it is to losing the ability to fight. They can only afford legal services for so long before they are run into the ground. The RIAA lawsuit knows this and thats why they went to court with such blatantly retarded premises. Their goal was to take Napster down before its shell had hardened. I doubt they expected them to put up so much of a fight. It doesn't really matter to them though. A sullied reputation doesn't amount to much when you own 90% of all recorded music. Acoustic fingerprints of songs will probably start to keep alot of people from trading more popular stuff. Thats life, tough. Find a different way to trade your copyright infringed material. Yeah it is less than legal. Putting music up for trade seriously skirts the bounds of the home recording act as you're giving it away for no monetary compensation. Napster is getting into trouble because they have made money facilitating the trade of material with questionable legality. Do I care if Napster doesn't let me trade a fingerprinted song? Not really. I'll go back to getting songs by old fashioned methods. Or I'll go down to a library and rip their public access CD collection. I don't give a fuck about anything except having alot of music that I like readily available to me.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
What you have to realize is that the RIAA is a bunch of old, fat, rich bastards who want every dime they can squeeze from you and don't give a damn about fair use rights.
When you purchase a CD, I think you still own the CD. The media. You don't own the music on there, but you own the disc itself. You have a LICENSE to listen to the music on your CD, but not to let anyone else listen to it. You can't play it in public or anything, in other words.
Under fair use, you are allowed to rip that CD for your own personal use. However you are not allowed to transfer that rip or those rights to anyone else. Furthermore, you aren't allowed to download someone else's rip because you don't have their license to use the music, you only have your own. It sounds stupid, and indeed it is, but that's the way it is.
Why not just rot13 the song, and rot13 it back at the receiver's end? Or, better still, build a rot13 filter, to slide in between the music file and the mp3 player? The rot13'd file should have a wildly different "fingerprint" than the original.
By doing things this way the song stays in "encrypted" form on the HD, and the "encryption" would be covered by the DMCA as well, so that the RIAA making a stink about it would be a defacto admission that they have reverse-engineered the "encryption" scheme, making them liable to be sued? Think of it as akin to the pig latinization of the file names.
Of course, that didn't last long, either. Guess nobody had the finances to be able to sue the RIAA. *sigh*
Lemon curry?
Better yet, just encrypt the MP3 file, as well as the name, and append the password onto the end of the filename (so files might look like, "aB33o98#xx2b55.password").
Then, all you need is some descrambling plugin that automatically converts those encrypted files into standard filenames (and will, _CLIENTSIDE_, descramble those files).
Better yet, include some small portion of your OWN copyrighted material in each encrypted file (throw in half a dozen haikus). If the RIAA decrypts the file, they're circumventing encryption designed to protect copyrighted works (namely, yours).
Yeah, I know, it probably wouldn't stand up to legal scrutiny, but it sounds nice for about 45 to 60 seconds of random thinking.
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No, it would just slow it way down, because you'd need to decrypt every filename.
However, given that the DMCA requires no particular strength for encryption, you could conceivably use some pathetically weak (and, most likely, fairly fast to decrypt) algorithm.
Perhaps this would be better suited for something like Gnutella or Freenet, which don't have any centralized search listings.
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Irrelevant. The DMCA protections only apply for the copyright holder's protection schemes, not to random joes.
Hence, putting in some small amount of original, copyrighted material of yours. The DMCA doesn't cover partial content copyrights - it's an all-or-nothing proposition.
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You realize, of course, that the RIAA is not interested in keeping Napster legal. They are interested in Driving Napster out of existance so that *they* have absolute control.
MusicNet , a joint venture of RealNetworks, AOL Time Warner Inc., Bertelsmann AG, and EMI Group plc, will offer high quality music content to music lovers via downloads and streams.
cpeterso
What is this "Naptser" thing you talk about?
God, slashdot editors. I swear.
BilldaCat
you do NOT TALK about FIGHT CLUB...
Karnal
yes, but this isn't Napster, it's Naptser (see title). Looks like Michael's been morphing song names a bit too long.
Never meant half of the things I said to you. So you know, there's a half that might be true - G. Phillips
In My Ear
Never meant half of the things I said to you. So you know, there's a half that might be true - G. Phillips
Could you work around this by inserting low-level noise at the beginning or end of a song at the time of ripping? Unless the accoustic fingerprinting filters with a margin of error, you'd be able to alter the fingerprint (essentially its a checksum, right?) Well?
-C
"This above all, to thine own self be true"
Okay folks, lets think about this... why is napster dead? There are more than a hundred million people on the Internet, and how many of them do you suppose are so tech savvy that they will be capable of or willing to seek out an alternative to Napster? I think the vast majority of people out there (think of your neighbor in the dorms, or your Mom's friend, or whomever is the most technically inept person you know who manages to use Napster) would be willing to pay a small innocent fee on a per-song basis. Just because we /.'ers wouldn't (based -- in large part -- solely on philosophical objectsion) doesn't mean that Napster won't survive as a business entity.
-C
"This above all, to thine own self be true"
Does anyone remember when Napster used gracenote, or CDDB to get their list of songs to block? One look at the program tells me that Relateable is going to take the fingerprints of songs that it creates, and turn them around and sell that database! By creating signatures with that program, you are adding to the machine keeping you from your music. This is probably a pretty radical post, but just remember that you will be helping the RIAA's cause by using the player found on that page. They just got all the media coverage they needed today, everyone is viewing their page because everyone can't stop talking about the new beef with Napster. I really can see this one coming. Don't let them take over.
1. Napster will have to invalidate old versions of the software, forcing everyone to DL a new (and probably quite larger) version with the fingerprinting tech.
2. The tech will not live up to expectations, but it will then be set to be hyper-sensitive, pleasing the record industry but making false positives and thereby shutting out content that it shouldn't.
3. Just like people garbled and ciphered artist names to get around the filename block, people will encode and garble the audio data to get around fingerprinting. Possible ways around fingerprinting:
- Invert every byte of the audio data
- Add a repeated sequence of values to the audio byte data (like a One Time Pad, perhaps)
- Split song files into smaller chunks to send over Napster which can then be lumped together into one complete file -- a lot like the way files are and have been transmitted over Usenet already for years.
- Combinations of the above, etc.
But have little fear, since this announcement is almost assuredly just a stall tactic. Given Patel's blurry and skin-deep perception of technology, Napster's lawyers figure they can convince her that the tech will take some time to be ready for prime time, and then be implemented into Napster client software and rolled out. They say it will take some months to make that happen. However, they are also looking forward to a rehearing much sooner than that, which will at any rate very likely involve putting a stay on Patel's court orders until they decide whether to even have the rehearing or not.
FWIW, I followed the Microsoft antitrust case, and I can't say I was that impressed with David Boies. He got lucky. From what I could tell, he basically flubbed everything, not bothering to drive home the points that would have made the case more clear cut, for fear that he would lose the judge in even an ounce of technical explanation. He's too much of a gambler to win a more hairy case like this one. This banking-on-a-rehearing that they are doing seems very risky to me.
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Terrorists can attack freedom, but only Congress can destroy it.
Really, you didn't think the entire music industy was going to let you steal from then forever did you? In the wise words of Marshal Mathers III, "Napster is bullshit."
Fawking Trolls!
"Going to war without France is like going deer hunting without your accordion." - Jed Babbin
That was the old hosting service. We're on a new one now. ;-)
Fawking Trolls!
"Going to war without France is like going deer hunting without your accordion." - Jed Babbin
How about making the client software generate the fingerprints as it generates the file library? Then, when a transfer is requested, the client software is required to send the fingerprint of the requested song to the server, which checks it against a database.
Of course, client side could mean easily fucked with, but is that such a bad thing?
"That's Tron. He fights for the Users."
Probably will be seen as a small price to pay to get the labels off their backs.
"That's Tron. He fights for the Users."
Would it make _sense_ for them to let people download songs for free to sample them? Sure.
Does that mean you have the right to do it if they decide they don't want you to?
Rights are decided socially. The technical implications of the internet have not been integrated into copyright law. While you ponder a response, check out some music. Consume it, if you can. Don't think for a second that I don't feel creators should be compensated for their works, but I can't pay my rent with Napster (without breaking good laws).
Here's some light reading (in the meantime) of some laws that might hold an equitable solution.
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+&x
Record companies do work for their share of the profit too. If someone wants to sell something, they should be able to. If I want to sell my buggers, I can, and if you don't want to buy them, hey, that's okay too. Just don't come stealing my buggers, their mine!
My point is that we should be able to ask for something back for what we do, if we want to. It's the customers choice to use the product or not. If they want to use it, they should fill our requests of what we want back for it. That's what the record companies are doing. They are selling a product, like bananas or shirts or motherboards. It is no different from 'physical products' even though many people like to think so.
Wrong analogy. Say I invent a mind control device...
This is the right analogy?
How the hell will they fingerprint everything from all their users? I don't think they have enough bandwidth...
jc
"Some men see things as they are and ask why. Others dream things that never were and ask why not." --George Bernard
Only if it's a 128-bit int
Umm... what song is that quote in your sig from? I'm a huge Toad fan, but just can't seem to place it and it's bugging me badly...
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"You know your god is man-made when he hates all the same people you do."
Oh, believe me, I love to do that also. But I don't get to do that nearly as much as I want. I try to keep track of the artists I like, to make sure I get the chance to see them live when I can.
But when I like an artist that plays her shows in a few cities in Canada, and maybe one or two cities in the US that aren't close to me, like Kinnie Starr, then I don't get that chance. I just keep checking the web site occasionally to find out where and when she's playing, in hopes it's somewhere I can make it to...
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"You know your god is man-made when he hates all the same people you do."
Wow, I didn't realize people were still using the official Napster service. I thought they had all long gone to OpenNap, like I have, to get around all that annoying filtering stuff. (Actually, like I was doing before Northpoint when belly-up and I found myself without net access at home)
The official Napster service itself is becoming more and more irrelevant, little more than a symbol of where people are taking the music industry as it tries to fight back unsuccessfully.
I had to go to opennap to find the songs I wanted to DL so I could decide I liked them enough to buy the CD's... next thing you know they're going to have guards at music stores and require you to give proof you didn't download any mp3's off an album before they let you buy it. After all, they do seem to be doing everything they can to discourage people to enjoy music more.
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"You know your god is man-made when he hates all the same people you do."
Napster's popularity is what it makes it worthwhile in the first place. Remember, the usefulness of a network is the number of its users square, and Napster is not an exception to this. These AOL users are the ones who share all their songs, who leave Napster running in the background on Windows, etc. More savvy users disallow uploads and stop Napster as soon as they are done with it. A network comprised solely of people like this wouldn't be as useful.
How things have changed in the past year. Do a quick seach on /. for Napster and you can see how the attitudes about napster have changed as it becomes less the pioneer (for the mainstream) and more just another way for someone to make $$ off of what people are doing anyway.
Remember it, write it down, take a picture, I dont give a fsck!
Irrelevant. The DMCA protections only apply for the copyright holder's protection schemes, not to random joes.
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
...which means that they need to force even current users to upgrade.
.MP3 files themselves.
.MP3 files themselves, and calculate fingerprints while doing so... but that model doesn't exactly scale as well.
And even when they do, I wouldn't be surprised to learn that somebody deduces the protocol, and either re-implements it or figures out how to interpose a proxy to send back randomly-generated fake fingerprints. No need to modify the
Unless, of course, Napster figures it's got the bandwidth to be man-in-the-middle and temporarily store the
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
a) And you don't think that they'd notice a lot of .zip.'s showing up in filenames, and handle that?
b) Fingerprinting doesn't need to be done crypto-style ala MD5, where a single bit change can change the whole print. Simply running the relevant parts through a DFT or DWT might yield interesting results for a similarity search.
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
TheShadow presents a simple statement, but the staement is so true.
I remember finding people to trade MP3s with on IRC way before the Napster craze started. I would rip an entire album they would want, and the person I was trading with would do the same for me. We would do this at night so we could leave our computers on all night downloading with our measily modems. Presto! By morning, you would have a fresh directory of 9-13 tunes, and the RIAA was none the wiser!
that Napster sucks? I remember when pirating copyrighted material was done in secrecy... I can't believe everyone expects to be able to do it in the open. Dumbasses.
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"What do you want me to do? Whack a guy? Off a guy? Whack off a guy? Cause I'm married."
This whole acoustic fingerprinting is amazing from the technological side... but looking at how it could be used, frightens me to no end.
Imagine a computer (Big Brother) hooked up to a major television head-end (let's use DirecTV for an example). 24 hours a day, this computer listens to the audio and SAP from every television show passing through the head-end. It logs exactly what music it heard at what time, samples some audio, and takes video stills of questionable events. Then, later that day, an ASCAP henchman looks through the Big Brother logfiles, and finds a list of offenses a mile long. ASCAP then immediately files lawsuits with the long list of offending companies, some of which include Jim Bob's Deli for the use of Simply The Best in a localized ad without an appropriate licensing agreement, Channel 7 News in Detroit for broadcasting a segment where through the background noise of a rave party "That Zipper Track" by DJ Dan was audible, and the Detroit Red Wings who, during their last playoff game, played a techno song to rile the crowd in the arena which made it onto Fox's effect microphones that violated the terms of DRW's exclusive playlist agreement.
Sure, I made these scenarios up. But how long until we're seeing this story on the news? This technology can already do a tremendously good job of identifying songs through all sorts of audio compression and noise... I'd imagine we could see a machine capable of doing this in under 2 years.
actually, several million people have talked about that.
/., for keeping the flame burning just one more day.
just like the several million people who thought it would boost live performance attendance.
or the several million people who only download mp3s at the office of cds they have at home
or the several million people who said it brings more exposure
or the millions and millions of people who, despite knowing the horse is dead, continue to flog it beyond recognition.
if i ever get 3 wishes, one of them will be the ability to get into all of the news editors' brains around the globe and erase the part that says NAPSTER = NEWS. thank you,
It's called freenet and you would be very welcome in becoming a node on the Freenet.
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My mom's going to kick you in the face!
freetantrum.org
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My mom's going to kick you in the face!
Next...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
What about scrambling your mp3's with something simple and then the DCMA would protect you against
reverse engineering?
"as plurdled gabbleblotchits on a lurgid bee" - Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz. (One man's humorous is another mans flamebait)
It's wrong to get something for free if you could have payed for it?
Are you one of these people who think that people exist in order to buy stuff and make corporations profitable?
Believe it or not, there are more important things in life than being a good little consumer and doing as you're told.
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
Don't get me wrong, Napster's great, and the idea is great, but people need to start understanding that what they are doing is STEALING. Until you are willing to admit to it, then don't complain about the measures that RIAA are taking. I use Napster for one reason, to get songs from places that the RIAA has no rights to the music. The music I get is impossible to get due to it's location in the world. I would buy the damn cd's if I could buy them.
We in the open source community would cry foul if someone took open source code and did the EXACT same thing. So don't be a hypocryte
I'm gonna copyright the sound of a computer booting up, then license it to everyone. bwahahaha I'm gonna be rich!
Who's going to decrypt the filename? Napster would have to do it since their servers are the ones that perform the searches.
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Do you even know anything about perl? -- AC Replying to Tom Christiansen post.
So people can encrypt the MP3s with a decryption key of, say, their usernames. I doubt that encrypted binaries would be blocked by the filters. Could they really fingerprint *every* possible encryption of an MP3? I doubt it.
Yup... napster is on deaths door now. Its Alienating its userbase.
:)
Now people will switch to the next big thing. Life will march. We will start to have to see stories about the RIAA fighting Flapster, the new music sharing service that claims to not be making the mistakes napeter made...and the whole damned comedy will begin all over again.
What fun, what joy. Whatever.
Hows about people just start setting up freenet nodes and be done with it. At least freenet has a real purpose - making censorship of any type, for any reason, impossible. Whats even better, its decentralised and it will lead to lower network loads between networks as the number of distributed servers grows.
Win situation for everyone. Well... ok not everyone, but everyone who wants such a system to exist
-Steve
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
If their fingerprinting is at all sophisticated, it has got to be awfully easy to distinguish a real recording from just random gibberish (what a compressed or encrypted file would turn out to be), which it could then just reject as not being legitimate recorded sound. Detecting backwards would be more difficult (especially since some legitimate recordings contain sections which are backwards).
Another option is to keep it 'opt-in' so it would reject anything except what it recognizes.
[I hate DJ's] IIRC, you have no legal right to make a derivative work from works [you don't own/that aren't licesnced to you ]. Thus your "work" would be infringing ...
Free Techno/Jazz/DNB/MI Music by guys obsessed with monkeys!
I think thought, that when Dr Dre samples a song, he has to pay royalties on it ... so its "legal". (not that its an excuse for being so musically bankrupt:)
Free Techno/Jazz/DNB/MI Music by guys obsessed with monkeys!
Although it seems like you would have to run millions of songs through the fingerprinting software before you could block them its really much more simple than that:
Analyze one Blink 182 song and you have them all + a bunch of crappy wanna-be bands..
Analyze one Metallica song and you pretty much have them all too..
Analyze one mp3 of Lars talking about anything and you might just save the world...
Click here to read too much about my personal life
This article and specifically this comment was referenced in an e-zine article located here
Black holes are where god divided by zero
You wrote the music you are sharing?
Does it recognize mp3's that are backwards? How about zipped? There are dozens of ways around this. Ok so now people won't have to scramble file names, they'll scramble the file itself. Better yet let's encrypt a whole file sharing site. Maybe we can rope the RIAA into violating the DMCA either by breaking our encryption, or violating our terms of use:
TOS: Article 5: You may not use this service in anyway if you are a member, or in the employ of the RIAA. You may not speak of the specifics of this site in any manner outside this site...
Well you get the point.
I'm the big fish in the big pond bitch.
There's someone that already does this. emusic, mp3.com, etc
and i don't think that's likely, since it's already started to be a problem with gnutella and the mpaa...
When you use the terms "pirated" or "piracy" or any variation thereof, you are perpetuating a false image created by the record companies. They want music sharing to be given a negative connotation, and they do this by evoking images of evil computer users with forked beards, eye patches, peg legs, and the occasional parrot. I personally have no peg leg, keep my beard short, and only wear an eye patch on special occasions. (I have not yet saved up enough for the parrot.) As you can see, this use of the term "pirated" is really inappropriate. Please resist the temptation to let the music industry control your thoughts. Thank you.
Sincerely,
Redbeard
Maybe not in the US, but it is in for example Sweden. There was a discussion on a radio program with a member of the department of justice about copyright, and she explicitly stated that no, copying a tape and giving it to a friend is not illegal.
Wow, I didn't realize people were still using the official Napster service. I thought they had all long gone to OpenNap, like I have, to get around all that annoying filtering stuff.
Not if the most popular OpenNap network gives busy signals ("The server is full!") constantly.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Of course, client side could mean easily fucked with
OpenNap has a list of clients. I see eleven unofficial nap clients for Win32, not counting the numerous clients for Perl, Tcl/Tk, and Java platforms. If Napster Inc. breaks these clients, older versions of official Napster MusicShare for Win32 will also likely break.
Will I retire or break 10K?
A tool that adds 0.5 seconds of silence will totally screw Relatable's algorithm
Such an algorithm is easy to modify or replace if the beta testers can get around it so easily (Hack SDMI anyone?). The most advanced algorithms attempt to discover the actual notes, which allows for enforcement not only of phonorecord rights in sound recordings but also of derivative work and performance rights in the underlying musical composition. BMI and ASSCRAP will like this aspect, as it lets them track unauthorized covers.
Will I retire or break 10K?
finger printing might make it more difficult for some folks but those who want to persist will create a few tools then others will pick them up and off they go again...
this is just a way for the lawyers to make more money when everyone has to come back because...gee...its not working like we thought it would.
Wait, didn't Puff Daddy change his name to 'Diddy P?'
Napster's dead. If you pay their 'subscription fee' you're essentially paying 'protection money.'
You're paying Napster so that that wacko-fucked british IFPI -- or whatever it's called the phonographic protection corporation or whatever -- won't come calling on your ISP and come spamming your mailbox with letters threatening you breaking global laws.
And the protection money you're paying probably won't protect you. Napster will still cancel your account, you'll still get your internet access yanked, and the IFPI will have their way and besmirch your livelihood with accusations, allegations, and criminal charges.
Then it'll be hell to *cancel* your account with Napster. They'll probably include some fucked-up clause that states if you have copyrighted material, traffic in said material, and get caught -- you'll be fined $10,000 -- and -- guess what? -- we've got your credit card!
Hell, IFPI will start demanding credit card numbers from Napster so that they -- the fucking IFPI or whatever it's called -- can save you time and effort by circumventing the legal process (a process which, the IFPI will remind you, doesn't span global borders) and simply charging you whatever they think your infringements are worth.
They'll still cancel your internet account and, if they're having a particularly bad day, might just send federal agents to your door so that when you get out of the shower a couple of junior g-men will be standing there with all of your CDs, your computer equipment, and your pet cat -- all of which, they'll remind you, is proof that not only have you broken the law but you've broken it so horribly that the scope of your crime perhaps surpasses that of the rapists and murderers currently incarcerated across the world.
If you have any balls, you'll tell them to fuck the fuck off and drop your cat -- or else.
They agree. Sure, they say and drop the cat -- but not your computer equipment. All you need to do, fuckface, is sign this form.
And they'll give you a form to sign authorizing them -- Jeff the junior g-man and his frat-boy buddy, Tyler -- to charge your credit card 10,000 dollars.
Then you'll be left with a bunch of yanked power cords, a broken down swivel chair that you've used to compute on for six years, and a frazzled pet cat.
Seriously: is Puff Daddy aware of how fucking stupid a name like 'Puff Diddy' is?
I mean, really.
Am i missing something here? Is there anything *not* stupid about the word -- or, worse yet, the *name* -- "Diddy?"
Sure, we've all sung diddies, but I defy anyone to deny that they've not cringed whenever they've actually admitted that they've sung a "diddy". It's something you admitted to your grandmother when you were in the third grade and asked you what you did in school for music. "Do you sing diddies?" your grandma asks. "Yes," you say. "We sing diddies." But you're in the third grade, for chrissake! And you're talking to an old person who doesn't see anything wrong with the word.
(She's the same person that asks you, one night at the dinner table, if you're a gay and happy boy, and you admit -- to her only -- that, yeah, you're gay. But it's "gay" in the happy way -- "I'm so happy! I'm so gay!" -- not gay in the way that gets you beat up on the playground. But this is all for the benefit of your grandmother -- slow-moving, slightly crocked, but lovable -- and has nothing to do with the hard, cruel, real world outside of the domain of your grandma.)
Yes. I know. This is off-topic. See my post about the cat and g-men above. That's on topic. Napster. Acoustic fingerprinting. Napster is fucked. Is this a surprise?
First, relatable does not embed watermarks or signatures. They analyze the first 30 seconds of the wave form (yes, they will trim silence if they haven't started to already). This creates a unique id that is stored externally on a server somewhere.
Second, it's really accurate. A cover band will have a different signature than the original. Even a remix will have a different signature than the original. Two different versions of Beethoven's 9th will have different signatures.
Third, it's reliable. A vorbis encoding will have the same signature of an mp3 encoding. A VBR encoding will have the same signature of a CBR encoding. Low bitrate 24kpbs mp3s might have different signatures than 128kpbs mp3s but only because of the substantially degraded sound quality.
Finally, it's really a great idea. Artists can now opt in. Users can subscribe to certain artists. And if you have an mp3 out there that doesn't have metadata, you can use the Relatable TRM to connect to a metadata server like MusicBrainz, an open-source effort which stores the relatable ids and stores the metadata. Relatable is actually quite active and supportive of the open-source world. They are not even close to the bad guys here.
This is a great step for independent musicians. Using relatable (or other fingerprint technology, which is DIFFERENT than watermarking), artists can feel more secure about the authorship information remaining with their mp3s. Metadata servers can also store information about financial transactions. Mix in recommendation engines, and independent musicians have a great new option to compete with RIAA - internet-based, FREE, marketing and distribution.
I don't know if Napster is going to take advantage of all that stuff, but they might. Overall though, it's short-sighted to think of this as another "turn for the worst".
tune
skkkoooonnnggggkkk ptui
As I understand it, swapping music non-commerically between friends is legally okay, right?
So how about this for a music-sharing system? There's a little client that lets you enter up to 16 friends with whom you are willing to share music. These should be real-world people that you know, like, and trust.
Now, when you request a song, the request goes to the 16 people you know. If they don't have it, they forward the request to THEIR friends, without revealing your identity. Eventually the song is found and passed back friend-to-friend to the requester. Everything is kept all crypty. There are potocol issues, but yada-yada...
The "friends list" has a few advantages:
Or does Freenet already do all this? :-)
Almost every post in this forum ought to be moderated -1, Offtopic. Except for a couple anon posts stuck at 0 and 1, there's almost nothing actually discussing the topic of the article. I've seen all the "Napster Bad/Good" bullshit before. If I wanted someone's decree about what I should use my computer for, I'd ask Microsoft.
/.'s immense readership, someone would. Apparently not-- apparently there are simply a few hundred thousand people who want to discuss the morality and legality of Napster for the millionth fucking time.
What I was HOPING to find here was something about the reliability of this fingerprinting technology, possible ways to foil it, Napster's future plans for the service, etc.. I don't have those details. But I was hoping that with
"What's the song that goes mmm-mmm-m-mmm?".
;)
That's the Cambell Soup commercial you dummy!
With all the thousands of files, and gigs of information, how are they going to run even a very small portion of the files through a filter? Wouldnt they have to drop peer to peer to do this effectivly? Or when you log on, they download every file and filter it? How are they going to be able to pull this off?
Yeah its a dirty job but some @hole has to do it.
It's a new kind of Hytsteria
Try WinMX. It will run through all the musiccity servers
in succession and repeat until it logs into one.
It also has all the features Napster should have but doesn't,
like resume and filter search by bitrate.
URL: http://www.winmx.com/
I'll probably get flamed by some of you dolts out there, but this actually makes more sense than filtering by title. The problem with filtering by titles is that things which should allowed may not be. For instance, I was one of the people potentially being sued by Metallica, because I had songs that I was sharing with titles that sounded like the songs would have violated copyright protection. But how did they know that I didn't have mp3s of flatulating dogs or something (which could be considered a parody)?
They didn't, because no one ever tried downloading any of those songs from me. Had someone actually downloaded from me, they would have noticed, but no one ever did.
But above and beyond that, it sounds like Napster would have been just as well off if it had allowed users to actually upload songs to their servers. From their penalties, etc., it seems to have made no difference.
"Boy, I just can't wait for the opportunity to pay Napster a monthly fee to share my music with other people. And have them censor me for my trouble, too."
Let's break this statement down into varying levels of stupidity.
Level One: "censor me for my trouble"
Your trouble - meaning have to pay for a copyrighted product. The censoring? I'm not sure what you mean by *censorship*, necessarily.
Level Two: "[I HAVE TO] pay Napster a monthly fee to share my music"
I see. So, you should be able to go to the store, take a Sony digital camera, and then loan it to me. Neither of us are liable for the fact that Sony spends tons of money producing that product, it's copywrited, and they expect to be paid for it.
You know, guess what? It's not just YOUR music. It's BMG's, or RCA, or BamaRags or WHATEVER also. Bands put SO much energy into creating the CDs you buy, and the producer companies put SO much money into releasing them. They have every right to make a profit, and be protected.
The two points made by Napster-supporters?
1) CDs are expensive.
I agree. Titanium PowerBooks are also expensive. I want one. They should be free and shared.
2) Music should be shared.
I agree. If you like music, share it! Go tell someone, "Hey this CD is awesome, go buy it."
The points made by Napster users don't override copyright laws. I bet 90% of Napster users KNOW It's illegal but still use it. Fine.
Why not use something while it's around?
As for the 10% who actually BELIEVE Napster is right.. You're either lost in the commotion, or simply ignorant to the law and immature.
I sound like an old angry adult, don't I?
I'm 16. I love music.
I also am aware of the law, which in this case is 1) right, 2) just, and 3) applicable.
The next comment I write will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
Doesn't this imply that the Napster client on the local machine is going to have to process your MP3s before listing them? Otherwise, the MP3s would have to be uploaded to the Napster server to get blessed, which would be quite a departure from the present model and require beaucoup additional bandwidth and processing power at the server. So, if it's client-based, it seems likely that somebody will just hack a Napster client to always tell the server, "yeah, this file's ok". Since the server's never going to see the file for itself, it'll never know whether it's being told the truth or not.
When did this happen?
Napster free for 6 months. Hooked on gnutella now.
I have a shotgun, a shovel and 30 acres behind the barn.
1q2w3e4r5t6y7u8i9o0pqawsedrftgthyjukilo;p'azsxdcf
Random Comment: I'm not a big fan of Alanis Morisette but she had a telling comment. She said that folks talk to Napster, and the RIAA, adn both sides say they're for 'the artists' but the artists themselves are a third, separate group, and sometimes but not always have their interests aligned with a particular side.
Remember all the talk of audio watermarking and the other (debatably) "unaudable" copy-identification techniques? Well, it's time to use those on your own music to screw this thing up. In its pure form, audio ID'ing is cool. It's like CDDB for mp3s. Download something, and you can be sure it's not some wanker who named all his stuff "Orbital - Peel Sessions", or whatever you're looking for.
But if you need to get around this? Bam. A tool that adds 0.5 seconds of silence will totally screw Relatable's algorithm, last I checked. Past that, it's the same old story -- a war between the modifiers and the filterers. Napster's gone from being somewhat useful to totally useless. Long live Gnutella and Freenet.
Well it this case, this is probably more problematic in terms of classical music, where you can argue how well the performance is. But you could also see this with a cover band, where they play the tune well enough, but just a little off speed.
and heck, if you take a piece and more it just one or two percent faster, so that the feel is a little bit punchier, and obviously doesn't match the original version. the signature might not pick up on this
In the classical example, you would literally have a performance that never took place. It is more acceptable in classical because there are discussions about what are the correct performance values. And they would have to track down the original recording, which doesn't exist in the form they are expecting.
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
That said, I wonder how much of a audio signature is retained when you play with or edit the file.
For example, in classical music you sometimes have performances that are excellent, but which are basically at the wrong tempo as far as you are concerned. One instance of this is the first section of the Eroica Symphony (by Beethoven) which is marked to be at a speed that is stunningly fast. You can tweak the speed easily enough in a midi file, and find something close enough that it sounds convincing. But live performances are not usually done at that speed, they are usually somewhat slower. With appropriate audio software, you can take a very high fidelity copy wav file of the music, and change the speed of the music without screwing up the pitch.
[just for the info, the average speed of perfomance is this exact piece is usually 100 to 130 beats per minute, when the spec is 180. 170 or so sounds best to me.]
You now have a performance by an orchestra that never actually took place. Would the audio signature be different? Would it even be a different copyright, especially if you invested alot of work fine tuning the tempi of the individual sections?
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
...while waiting in line at a Henry Rollins show in LA last week, a guy talking to some friends, who were also in line behind me. He told them that they got a new account, and it was a big secret in the office, and that he found out that the company was Napster.
I didn't get the name of the company, but overheard that they were going to be the POS when Napster goes to a pay service.
Oh well... It was fun while it lasted.
"Acoustic Fingerprinting" sounds like it'll be a 90% shot; there's a chance it'll stop the transfer of a file, but it won't catch all fo them, and it'll accidentally block others. (Some of them might be perfectly legal to exchange freely.) Also, the quality of the recording will have a significant effect on fingerprinting.
I wonder if this "fingerprinting" thing will read OGG files?
I think it's kind of sad; ICQ and other instant messengers have had peer-to-peer file sharing from the beginning.
---
Chief Technician, Helpdesk at the End of the World
"I am an Adept of Tantric VAX."
err ... then don't use napster ;p
- If I close my mind in fear, please pry it open.
no one talked about all the people who trade or download the stuff they already OWN...
I used to go on there and download stuff because I was to lazy to rip the mp3's myself...
if someone comes after me for downloading an mp3 that I already own the cd to im gonna be very unhappy
moo.
> between friends is legally okay, right?
I am pretty sure this statement is true in some if not most western countries, evidenced by the royalties paid on blank media. Now the main question is what constitutes a "friend" or "acquaintance" or however it might be worded in the law?
I suggest writing a napster-like service that requires you to chat to whomever you want to download a song from for at least say 30 seconds(?). Surely that is enough to constitue a friendship for geeks :)
We'll see lots of fun things happening here until the law catches up with technology (by which time there will be new thech !!!)
If this means Napster can offer a subscription service, and compensate artists based on what's shared, and thereby continue to exist and offer MP3s and not some Windows Media shite, I would be thrilled. Where do I sign up?
sulli
RTFJ.
Or then again, maybe it's time to stop using napster now. It was fun while it lasted. Except for all those ppl sucking up @ Home's bandwidth in my neighborhood.
. . .
. . .
. . .
. . .
It's actually P.Diddy. Come on now. How could you miss the simple elegance of it all. Of course Puff Diddy sounds bad. But P. Diddy? Pure genius.
Joe Blow writes in with this article from The Podunk Reporter. Apparantly Target Corporation has decided to implement two new pieces of technology - the "lock" and the "cashier" - at all Target, Dayton's, Hudson's, Marshal Field's and Mervyn's stores nationwide. What's next? Government appointed people driving around with guns and restraint devices stopping people for breaking the "locks" and walking past the "cashiers"? What about my 7.5th amendment rights to all the damned free stuff I can load up on????
Ok, I have to apologize. I was thinking the author was just another kid pissed off at not being able to get all the free music he wants. Just didn't read close enough -
Boy, I just can't wait for the opportunity to pay Napster a monthly fee to share my music with other people. And have them censor me for my trouble, too.
This guy's sharing his own music on Napster, which is frankly a very cool thing and a shrewed business move for someone who's probably not very well known as a musician yet. Maybe he could share the name of his band and some of his songs so we can look up his music while we still can. Oh, and I bet if he asked Napster would probably wave the subscription price, since he's contributing stuff he owns for the betterment of the service.
This isn't so spectacular.
All anyone has to do is compress the file, say, "David Mead - Robert Bradley's Postcard.mp3" with something like PKZip and rename it to "David Mead - Robert Bradley's Postcard.zip.mp3." This will confuse the "fingerprinting" system, and similar versions of a song will have very different fingerprints because of the compression, so they would have to implement a system to unzip or untarball or unbz2 etc. to read them all. It wouldn't be difficult at all to code a mp3 player that would be able to decompress automatically. Think, downloads would be quicker, too!
Of course, there still is the name blocking issue.
MP3's aren't compressed the same way .zips are compressed; that's why you can play a partially downloaded MP3 but can't open a partially downloaded .zip. There should still be some size benefits.
Like I said, name-blocking is still an issue.
.zip style of compression, minor bit changes across the entire song will result in a very similar "family" of MP3s but radically different .zips, since .zips don't recognize things like least important bits and aren't lossy like MP3s.
Remember, because of the
I would *love* if they did this!
Imagine, me downloading Delerium's Silence, and then asking the server for other songs with similar fingerprints?
Now I can search across the spectrum!
Or I can encode my own songs for Napster, say my fav CDs, and then get other hits for similar music!
I'd love to find music that sounds like Chrono Cross "Time of the Dreamwatch". Yet I don't know how. Or songs that sound like Ah! My Goddess, melancholy and sentimental.
I dunno, if they use it to actually characterize songs, for filtering purposes, they can also use it for searching and indexing purposes too!
Geek dating!
GPL Deconstructed
So long as I don't *sell* copies of music that I've bought and paid for, I can do whatever the fuck I want to with that music - *give* copies to friends, invite them over to listen to the music on my A/V system, write bad reviews of the music, modify the music so it sounds funky, whatever.
Because of this, the practical reality is that once it is in my hands, it is *my* music, selling copies excepted.
Why do you think the NFL makes those statements at the end of a game - what they essentially state is that you can do whatever you want with their broadcast as long as it isn't commercial. What is different between that and mp3's? Nothing other than content.
In general, modern problems have medieval solutions...
Audio fingerprinting may be an interesting technology and may even be useful (to some extent) for IDing recorded music that hasn't been mucked with, but... What about trying to identify bootlegs and such? How accurate can an algorithm like this possibly be?
--- http://www.loudwerkz.com "Music That Rocks Your Lame Ass"
Here's the basic solution. Put the music through a narrow bandpass filter. That is, remove all frequencies except those in a narrow band, say 800Hz to 1000Hz. It probably makes more sense to locate this band in the lower octaves. Then, go through the song looking for the presence or absence of a signal. Turn this into a string of 1's and 0's where a 1 means that there's some noise with a frequency in the range and 0 if there's only a neglible amount. Then do string matching. You might need to slide this back and forth a bit to find the best match, but that's not too complicated.
Just wondering, do the suggestions that this fingerprinting thing make have any value? ie Does it work?
10+ gigs on AG and running...
It's better than Napster is, was, or ever could be.
--------
For the technologically savvy, $17 is chump change. I sometimes spend more than that going to dinner. Pirates are, in general, not freedom-leaving heroes against repressive corporations, but a bunch of cheap wanna-bes.
It really kind of sucks. Music trading used to be a pretty cool thing (and still is outside the mainstream, although the name itself has gotten tainted). Tapers would bring taped concerts from the Dead or Phish or whatever into circulation within a certain community --- the Internet revolutionized that. But now it has to go underground again.
Too bad really; even though it was sometimes illegal to tape bands, it was a legality few people in music really cared about, since most tapers bought the band's regular albums anyway, as well as paying to go to their concerts.
I just figured out what that stands for: "fucking pathetic"!
IRC is probably in the same boat, it is largely the domain of Unix users. If AOL doesn't offer it you can bet the masses stay away.
When you walk into a book store and pick up a book that looks interesting and browse a few pages, is _that_ "stealing"? It is possible to honestly read a book without having paid for it (preview browsing, borrow from a friend), and this analogy can carefully carry over to the music world.
If you camped out in the bookstore and read the entire book, that would be pretty tacky, but I'm not positive even that would be stealing the book. The store owner might ask you to pay up after a little while. Stealing the book would mean tucking it under your trenchcoat and running for the door. The main difference is when you steal a book, it is gone off the shelf and no one else can buy it. Book store customers have _some_ reasonable right to browse books before they decide to buy or not, and you are in fact allowed to "share" your books with friends. Music users have some reasonable rights when it comes to Fair Use of music browsing and sharing as well. I think the RIAA and its companies are in danger of crossing the line from defending their work to cracking down on musical competition and locking it out with with constrictive permissions technology, designed to totally dominate the music world, in the name of self defense.
getting something for free when you're supposed to be paying is stealing.
The main problem here is who decides what's "supposed" to be paid for. A minority of corporate lawyers, government politicians, and law enforcement people with weapons or the tens of millions of people in the public masses? They're gonna give you a case of the "Sposed-tas" that closely fits their own needs to the exclusion of others. Hopefully the US Courts will find a Solomon-like compromise that balances these freedoms of companies with freedoms of the public.
I've made music and put it on Napster. I want it there for free. Maybe you'll tell me I'm "supposed" to charge for it. Maybe I'm crazy or something, but I happen to be willing to let it be out there for FREE. I don't want some big RIAA telling me I can't put it there without their permission, or force Napster to control me with some audio signature for my songs that will give them permission. They can protect their own stuff, but they don't have the right to conquer, assimilate, shut down, lock out with fingerprints, or destroy everything else while they're at it.
I wonder how accurate it is. The product is called relatable in that it was designed to recommend music similar to songs that you listen to. So it seems that they could mistake one song for another quite easily. Also, what about the processing overhead for doing this to every file that a user wants to share? And finally... what if the user has a legit "free" song that parodies another? The filter would probably not allow that song through if it sounds too similar (think weird al... if he allow his music to be freely distributable).
You crazy man? You piss off supahfly!
Lets say i get bored one day and mix together a wide variety of different songs into a rediculously long track that happens to have a few bars in it that match one of these banned sections? How is this fair to aspiring producers, DJs, and the bored people of society? If this is the case, it seems it is virging on infringing on my rights.
.
Relatable's technology identifies music based on the recordings themselves and analyzes the acoustical properties of a recording's waveform to identify it precisely, regardless of its audio format, bit rate or minor signal distortion, the companies said.
So, in theory, couldn't you just reverse the wav so the file is actually backwards? There's a ton of audio programs out there that can reverse the wav on a whim. From the description of the new filters it sounds like they wouldn't recognize it anymore......well, save for Paul is dead and Judas Priest telling me to off my parents.
From this point forward Napster will be little more than an R&D lab for the recording industry, which now seems to have legal license to force Napster to install whatever copy protection widgets they want to field test. The RIAA couldn't ask for a better development platform to further their own schemes. Sean, I admire you immensely and I hate to say this, but Napster is completely in the hands of the Dark Side now. It's time to push that big red button and get the hell out.
It's a step forward for the copyright ownership industry, not for the artists.
Two questions- What is the problem with Gnutella (someone told me it couldn't scale to replace Napster), and before they thought of the subscriptions, what the hell was their business model? How did they get their money?
I spent a year in Iraq looking for WMD and all I found was this lousy sig.
Tell me, what will this fingerprinting do, besides make me use freenet more and WinMX. Face it, you're screwed RIAA. Fanning made file-sharing user-friendly before you did and you failed to stop it! If only Napster wasn't open source, eh?
Slashdot Hypocrisy at work?
Now before anyone jumps on my case about Napster being the first to do p2p or at least being its "killer app", remember that I loved it too, pre-RIAA.
Now I believe is the time to add Napster to the "Remember when..." quote series. Other favorities in this series are the "Remember when your Commodore 64 was the fastest machine out there." or "Remember when you first learned THE CODE for Contra on the 8-bit NES." My personal favorite is still the "Remember when you first beat Zelda."
Napster is a great program. It opened the worlds eyes to P2P and helped alot of smaller artists(read not RIAA affiliated) spread their music. It is sad to see that it has come to the courts and lawyers saying what the system can and can not do. Each new step is further and further away from the idea that drove Napster to its own succes and thus demise. It will always be with us, sadly our children will only know it from our fond memories. "I remember when Napster still had all the music you could want. Including Metalica!"
-Life is a Journey, --Not a Guided Tour! ---Trust me, I've already looked for the guide book.
I can never get into musiccity's servers using Napigator... anyone know any workarounds?
The hooligans are loose! The hooligans are loose! What if they become ruffians? -- Bill Hicks
Current napster filtering relies on filenames...this works, because napster's servers receive the search query...This audio fingerprinting, however, appears to require the binary song, which dosn't actually go through Napster's servers (b/c of the peer-to-peer architecture). So how will this work? Unless this software is integrated into current clients, where will this "fingerprinting" take place?
And now for something completely different...a man with three buttocks.
All my rights are belong to Napster?
Wow...so I guess Slashdot decided to give all the editors the axe on this 4/20...somebody must have set up us the bomb...
Relatable is flawed. It doesn't scale, meaning you start getting duplicate identifiers for totally different musical tracks as you have more and more tracks in your database. If you have enough tracks, identification of the music becomes very ambiguous. I wonder how Napster plans to deal with this.
This probably bodes well for Napster users, as it may throw a monkey wrench in their ability to block stuff.
How doable is this really? What if I'm a member of a metallica cover band who strives to sound like the real thing? Can this fingerprinting software tell the difference? I doubt it. This filter should be no more effective than speech recognition software. And to be legally safe, they'll have to block the greatest common denominator. Better to unintentionally block some legal-to-trade stuff than to unintentionally not block copyrighted stuff, right?
And here's an idea... what if someone writes software to encrypt an mp3? with a winamp plugin or hacked napster client of some kind to decrypt? Will they block files they can't get a signature on? How can they tell the difference between a song with a "wrong" looking signature and, say, an mp3 with sound effects?
While I agree that music piracy is wrong, there's a lot of grey. I use napster to replace 80s music I listened to in high school. Those tapes I had are long gone. But I did once pay for that music. So is it illegal? The recording industry would probably argue that it is. But I'm not so sure that's The Right Thing, even if it is illegal.
I think the recording industry is fighting a losing battle. The legal game playing can only go on for so long. And sooner or later, they'll kill napster outright. But that's wont be the end of the war. Right or wrong, the recording industry will lose this war. Maybe they should embrace the new technology so that they can steer it in a direction that's more compatible with their business models.
Disconnect your television. Do your own research. Draw your own conclusions. They're probably lying. Don't be a sheep.
Anonymous Thief writes: "Well, it was probably only a matter of time, but Reuters reports that some home builders have licensed a "key lock" technology from someone called Master to insert into their home security systems. Boy, I just can't wait until we won't be able to go around randomly stealing from each other any more, this really sucks."
-Keslin, the naked nerd girl
-Keslin, the naked nerd girl
How are they going to tell the difference between Michael Jackson's Beat It, and Wierd Al's Eat It?
So now all spoof songs will be filtered out?
This sounds like a bad idea to me.
This is one of those posts where I regret not being able to see the names of the moderators, because at least 4 people are on crack here (Poster, +3 up-mods at the time I saw the post).
A) There is nothing being stolen. Copies are a commodity, and with the advent of computer networks and digital formats, the value of a copy is infintesimal, as the supply of copies can exactly meet the demand. The market exists; the value of copies are measured in storage space and bandwidth, and as such, there is little, if any, money to be made from the posession of a copy in digital format.
B) The "Association" is proceeding to eliminate the use of "unliscensed" digital formats, through legal action and threats of such action, against users of these technologies. They have also manufactured legislation for that purpose, and conduct public 'education' campaigns to cast the market in a criminal light. The purpose of these actions is to artificially raise the value of a copy to a level such that they can make a profit.
The best description I've found for the actions summarized in (B), is in U.S.C. Title 18, Chap. 95, Sec. 1951 (emphasis added):
It can be argued, that since IP law permits the "Association" to conduct such actions, they are exempt from prosecution under the above section. Regardless, such actions are now central to the "Association's" business model, and are the source of their illegitimacy as a business.
In case you missed it, the point is that the "Association" has bought legislation to force the consumer/producers of copies to pay the "Association"-set price, via the threat or reality of legal action, currently conducts such legal action, and has effectively convinced the ignorant to view those consumer/producers that do not pay the "Association's" price as "criminals". This approach is best defined as racketeering, and signifies the "Association's" obsoleteness.
[/rant]
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The American Dream went to hell in a handbasket when someone decided that "The Customer" was King, and the customer beli
Every time an article about Napster or file-sharing appears, you can read the same topics. One very popular is the "you are all despicable pirates" theme, followed by many "but it's mainly fair-use" choir. I beg to differ.
I for one haven't bought a CD for three years now, if you don't take into account gifts. And I take home every two months or so a 50-blank-CDs pack, and burn it with everything. I just love music. And I don't consider myself amoral. (knowingly half-smile) Does anybody, ever?
If asked why I do that, the only thing I can think of is "because I can". I can, the technology lets me do it, and I'm hurting nobody. I'm only not-benefiting some people. And that's not the same thing, not for me, at least. Let's make a parallelism.
Suppose some smart guy invented a car-duplicator. This car-duplicator can, as its name implies, duplicate a car, any car, for about $200, and in your own backyard.The duplicate is perfect. Would you duplicate your neighbour's BMW, and then let that moron of your brother-in-law duplicate your new copy? Or would you forge ahead, and pay $20,000 for a new half-as-good one? Would you take into account the interest of the BMW engineers, their many patents, the investigation, the almost sure ruin of the company? Would you think that no new, better cars wouldl ever be produced? Or would you first think of the improved security and comfort for you and your family? I am not sure, but I think that after the invention of the car-duplicator, you would be hard pressed to sight a cheap Toyota.
And, oh!, perhaps rather obviously, the car makers would not dissapear, not entirely. They would reduce their size, start using the damm duplicator, and sell the cars for $300 , with a free toaster in the pack.
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Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
This just sets the stage for another step in the arms race, where people screw with the files to make them yield different fingerprints or with the fingerprinting code to produce "non-infringing" fingerprints from files which aren't supposed to be shared. The only solution is to have an OS where the owner of the machine has no control over the code it is running (see Microsoft).
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spam spam spam spam spam spam
No one expects the Spammish Repetition!
Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
So what other kind of MP3 traiding softwares/sites are out there?
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Does anyone remember
"NOOOO!" Screamed the ignorant masses of Napster users who are, aside from using Napster and burning CDs on their parents' computer are completely computer illiterate. Why hasn't anyone started using encryption? Personally I think it's because if you can make a decryption key available to thousands of napster users, it's also available to a couple anti-freedom agents of our very own "land of the free." The trick here is to exclude some large group somehow....but with thousands of dumbasses who would give up that info to anyone that asks, there is likely no way to accomplish this. Personally I am happy! The only way we can keep "illegal" trading away from prosecution is to keep it a secret...when thousands of people know about it, it's no longer a secret! Smaller music fan communities should spring up out of the rubble of Napster and replace it. Use of encryption and other computer literate concepts can keep them safe, and since none contain thousands of users (accept for the few that fall into the hands of the ignorant masses) no one will find any particular group as a threat.
This is a classic example of people's reaction to a product with less intrinsic value than its purchase price. Instead of the Industry spending all its money on making sure Napster doesn't trade any of its works, why doesn't it add value to those works above and beyond the music data, in order to bring consumers back to paying for them? I still buy vinyl, even though I've got about every song I could ever want on mp3. Why? Because there's no comparison between the feeling of holding a shiny black (or red or clear) LP, with all of the elaborate liner notes, distro catalogs, etc. that you get when you buy a real record. Plus, I can get a 7" (aka 45) for two bucks from Insound, with free shipping a lot of the time. Maybe the Industry needs to lower the price of CDs until they make sense to buy because it's easier than stealing them, instead of making them harder to steal, so that the consumer grudgingly buys them. A consumer that buys your product and doesn't like it will eventually figure out a way to get it without paying. The RIAA's problem isn't Napster, it's that they've finally gotten busted for selling a product for about double what it's worth, and offering no more value than stealing it.
Maybe they could allow you to register the CD on the artist or label's site, and get access to better concert seats, discounted merch, "club-only" early ticket sales, etc.
Attention: RIAA- Put the value back in your products, or we'll keep stealing them!
If you fall off a building, go real limp, because maybe you'll look like a dummy and people will be like hey, free dummy
Graham's Number, a number so huge it needs its own notation, a number that dwarfs Littlewood's Number (10 ^ 10 ^ 34), is the upper bound for a problem to which most people think the answer is 6.
How many different songs are there? I don't know. But apparently there are less than 2^128.
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Yes, the nick is flamebait
Hey, this could help with the problem "What's the song that goes mmm-mmm-m-mmm?". Simply hum a few bars, take the acoustic fingerprint and query Napster's db for the artist, songwriter and song title.
It should also put an upper limit on creativity. If there are only 128 bits in the fingerprint then there are only 2^128 possible songs.
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Yes, the nick is flamebait
The RIAA isn't out to stop you or me from swapping songs. _Some_ trading doesn't dent their sales. Napster was around for quite a while before the lawsuit. The RIAA took notice when Napster became *the* way to get music. Other services haven't acquired the popularity and simpliciy to be worth sueing (yet).
The bottom line: The technologically savvy will always be able to get the music (or whatever) we want. I'll leave it to AOL users to buy the CD's. Besides, I'd rather listen to myself pee in a bucket (pitter patter pitter patter) before I pay 17 bucks for the 2 songs I like off a album. I better start drinking more beer just in case...
RC
The good news:
People posting bruce springsteen songs labelled as metallica will get filtered out.
The better news:
People coughing into the microphone as a prelude to pirated music will get filtered in.
You gotta love it. Let me digitally fingerprint your analog data.
Now, if they're doing true, really good pattern/voice recognition, then they may actually cause the Napster crowd some problems.
I wonder if they'll filter out Puff Daddy songs because they contain samples from Sting?
(REJECTED: Song Recognized: The Police, "Every Breath You Take")
heh.
OK... lets get it right. RIAA thinks it can stop mp3 trading? NO WAY. It is just like any other case where technology has gotten in the way of these peoples mass income and they want to fight technology. As some have said, Napster is not the only option (IRC, the web, OpenNap, etc). This goes beyond just mp3s but it is a current example. The legal system CAN NOT keep up with the advance and change in technology. Hell, I can download 5 gigs of mp3s in the time it takes the courts to finish a case. Then people resist so it takes another "X" amount of time for anything to be done. Then some "filter" or change is made so we can't do the illegal acts we are all used to. Then someone comes out with a new idea(CatNap scrambler for Napster comes to mind) and gets around the Accoustic filter. Let us not forget RIAA is making money hand over fist since Napster came to be. Record sales in CDs... oh, but cassettes, vinyl and 8-track sales are down??
I don't think the legal system, RIAA, MPAA, Bill Gates, etc can stop us from fighting for our rights. Groups like the EFF, 2600, open source community, etc. need to survive. Down with the white rich control freaks.
Argh I am all worked up now!
ZERO ZERO ONE ZERO ONE ZERO ONE ONE! Just brushing up for my next big invention: Ethernet over Voice (EoV)
Everyone was aware that cds weren't supposed to be copied.... We all new that some artists probably lost a tiny amount of money (most was lost to layers of distributors) due to the popularity of Napster...And, most of us didn't care. Napster gave us free music. Napster took away profit from the labels (and scared them to death.) More importantly Napster showed what a delicate line we walk between protecting the creativeness, the intellectual property, of individuals, and the fairness of prices charged/accepted by the public for these products. Napster wasn't just free music, and lost profits. And, it is nothing more then what has always been in America: Capitalism. It wasn't the first time the envelop was pushed. And, it will not be the last.
He was making a joke you silly willy. And I think that 2^128 still fits in an int, so that is not that big an number. And after two 40 onces of Old E. I think that that comes out to 16386, if wy while loop worked right. That is not that many songs. later
I hate to break it to you, but its not your music.
It belongs to the artist who wrote, copyrighted, performed, recorded and then sold you a licence to listen to it in the privacy of your own home. (For the sake of bevity I neglected the myriad of other individuals involved in the process who may also have some ownership)
Point being, its not yours to give away. Doing so hurts the people who busted their butts to bring you the entertainment. It is also theft, plain and simple.
Napster's service has but one purpose: the illegal distribution of copyrighted materials. Let the one of you who hasn't downloaded a copyrighted work from Napster cast the first stone....
This is the future of gnutella.. and I am suprised that a search on slashdot didn't find anything on this..
http://www.projectelf.com/
I assume there are ways to detect if a file contains an mp3 stream or if it is just zip'ed or if its encrypted. Therefore, Napster will just bar anything that isn't mp3 data, if people try any of these tricks. (only of course if all this is done server side). If the whole system is done on the client software, it will be hacked in minutes. This is gonna turn out to be a constant battle which is probably what the RIAA wants.
As to the record companies - why can't they just accept the fact that they cannot win. There are more ways of making money off music other than selling cd's. They sell all sorts of merchandise and get paid millions from tv/radio/film for royalties. They could offer their songs for download on their own (very fast) servers for free and put advertising into the files. (someone will hack that too but...). Its the same with all intellectual property. Software, movies, music its all the same. The big corps. know they have a good thing going - they can come up with something dirt cheap. Master it to cd and print as many copies as they want for nothing and sell them for a massive profit.
Some of the artists out there do what they do because they enjoy it, some want fame, and others fortune. But lots of people want both, and don't want to put the effort in to get it.
The open-source revolution has proved that some of us are willing to do something they love for little or no money, and share it with everyone. I say, good for them.
-tfga
Here's a thought... what if you just reversed the song? It would fool the audio finger printing for a while, at least.