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Napster Settles with Metallica/Dr. Dre
jeffy124 writes: "Metallica and Dr Dre have settled their lawsuits against Napster. Lars Ulrich says the terms of settlement allow Metallica to have final say over what songs of their's are permitted to be traded over the Napster service." It's pretty easy to settle when you're completely shut down anyway.
Do you understand what the implications to the computer industry would have been had Apple won it's lawsuit?
It had no merit and would have stagnated the industry.
It would have been like Ford suing Chevy in 1927 because they copied the look and feel of the Model T by making their car black with 4 wheels.
It amazes me how ignorant people are sometimes, they just wish to attack Microsoft without really understanding the alternative.
You must be young, or at least you don't remember the lawsuit filed by Bowie/Jagger against Vanilla Ice for sampling 'Under Pressure'.
Whoops. Yep, Queen/Bowie.
;(
Got that confused with 'Dancing in the Streets'.
go to http://www.joecartoon.com/buddies/index.html
and click on napster bad.
for a recorded interview with Lars on Napster and these events.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Because "sampled" music author gets paid royalties by the "sampler."
(Remember Vanilla Ice and Queen/Bowie over "Under Pressure" and "Ice Ice Baby." Ultimately Queen/Bowie got writing credits and therefore, royalties.)
Well, don't worry too much, They are sure to do it in a way that their analysts tell them will be profitable to *them*.
Napster worked using a very simple algorythm:
unless(music eq $free){
die("No way, Dude!");
}
No other formula has been shown to be effective. None are likely to work until another variable comes into play and I just don't see it...
Of course, after a while, Forbes Magazine will declare that P2P is dead as a business model and people will go back to trading on IRC and Gnutella.
Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo
MMDC Mobile Media
-- My Weblog.
The Iran hostages are in day 18,470 of their freedom and Princess Diana is still dead.
As is napster.
I mean, when was the last time anyone downloaded *anything* from Napster?
Sayonara, Napster, it was fun...Nothing to see here, move along...
MMDC Mobile Media
-- My Weblog.
Interestingly, someone here pointed out that searches for N'Synch and Ricky Martin yeilded results when artists like Tom Waits were blocked.
One has to wonder if the companies were keeping some searches unblocked, just to see how it affected their sales.
Personally, I don't think I'm alone in being some one who mainly used Napster for old, obscure songs that I doubted I'd be able to find at the local CD store. I can't help but wonder if that's the market that the RIAA really wanted to kill, while examining the viability of the peer-to-peer market for new releases.
I will miss Napster's feature of seeing what else a user has on their hard drive - If someone actually has Etta James' "Out of The Rain" or Gavin Bryars' "Jesus Blood Never Failed me Yet", I want to see what else they have. Probably stuff worth acquiring...
Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo
MMDC Mobile Media
-- My Weblog.
Gnutella doesn't scale well and is already starting to show signs of that...
My journal has hot
So if I write a book, can I then say that I do not want it available for free in public libriaries?
And you want to bypass the RIAA's preferred subscription services & support the artists directly (good music isn't free) and voluntarily, then you want a system where you can tip artists; either directly with our currency (blatant plug!) or others, or just something like Fairtunes.
The problem I see is that plenty of people (I'm not singling you out, this is a general rant) spend a lot of time *saying* that they don't want to steal from artists, but folks don't seem to go out of their way -- even a little-bit -- to try to pay for the music that they get now for free, since they "haven't had to before." This is unfortunate (and it's a lousy excuse, IMO) but now there's no 'tipping culture' in online music. Obviously, I think that needs to change (preferably with a wide variety of payment choices). Perhaps someone more-eloquent than I can cause the change, I don't know.
JMR
(speaking only for myself, as always)
Try e-gold - (contact me). I'm NOT e-
Actually not after a really big fight. Originally, Ice tried to claim that Ice Ice Baby was original simply because he doubled one note in the bass line. He's right, there is an extra "bum," but the argument was so utterly comical that he gave in.
The other posts I've seen answer the royalty question well. Sampled music is paid for. Many of rap music's background "melody" lines are done by people like George Clinton or whomever and they get royalties, or percentages.
Unless the sampled song is free of author rights, sampling is subject to severe rules. You can't freely sample something and use it in your own songs unless the result substantially differs from the original sample.
-- Pure FTP server - Upgrade your FTP server to something simple and secure.
{{.sig}}
Not sure if you're being sarcastic, but in the specific case of George Clinton, he doesn't make much in royalties because of mismanagement.
--
Hey, in my day we used mp3 search engines and FTP,like Oth.net
was that not Queen/Bowie ? ? I think Bowie/Jagger did "dancing on the ceiling".
Non-Deterministic Finite Automata
And just so you know, HBO doesn't just grab a DVD of the latest movies and broadcast them, the also pay the studios for the broadcast rights.
Metallica/Dre have agreed to allow some of their songs to be traded, and the ones that are allowed will be rotated from time to time. Which sounds like a decent compromise to me. But the RIAA (which claims to be representing said artists among others) is claiming that napster is still in violation of copyright laws by doing such a thing. I will say, I have new found respect for Metallica/Dre (even though i hate their music anyway), but this just confirms the RIAA is a bunch of money-grubbing execs who don't care whether or not they hold the copyright for the music they sue for the infringement of.
I am !amused.
Music sharing's going underground again.
I understand that there was and has been many people (myself included) who are well acquainted with FTP. The lack of Napster is not going to stop these bunch.
You mean, as Napster was intended for (or at least, what mp3.com was intended for and Napster kinda liked and borrowed), artists such as the fine gentlemen mentioned above are actually going to USE this new medium to promote songs, sort of a "special offer" deal, so long as it's not subject to abuse? How novel!
Seriously, this sounds like the best compromise to the situation. I feel kinda bad that it had to go as far as it did the way it did but, as we all know, part of this is anger caused by a lack of understanding, and part of this is because like it or not, copyright infringement (I won't say illegal) is a little on the "hinky" side.
"I'm not even supposed to BE here today!"
There is a way to plug 100% of the holes and still allow trading. Have an accepted songs list and only allow those songs on the list to be traded (sucks in that people with new legal songs would have to submit to napster to allow the song on the accepted list.)
"You can now flame me, I am full of love,"
Just closing the door, just closing the door. Closure is nice after such a long, screwed up, greed-filled, hypocritical, disgusting, embarrassing lawsuit. Now hopefully we'll never hear about Metallica again.
____
Skivvy Niner? Email me!
HEY! Look left just ONE MORE TIME!
Isn't this one of the signs of the Apocalypse? Just thought I'd ask...
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"The only difference between me and a madman is that I'm not mad." - Salvador Dali (1904-1989)
Personally, I agree with you. However, legally, I seems like it could theoretically help protect Napster. A ways back, Slashdot had a really nice, detailed legal article discussing contributory and vicarious liability (I believe those were the terms) and how they related to the P2P situation. I may be misremembering, but "showing harm" may have been on the laundry list of criteria necessary for the appropriate liability to be invoked. If that's the case, then it is something that could help Napster's legal standing. Of course there's still the issue of proving that it helps CD sales.
Even if there weren't half a million graphic interfaces to FTP (starting with the venerable favorites like "Fetch"), it is simply a sad comment on the state of computing that a program that is as hard to use as typing: /pub/metallica
ftp ftp.freemusic.com
cd
get Creeping_Death.mp3
is considered "obscure" and "hard to use". If you can't use FTP you don't deserve free music. Which is exactly your point, music goes back underground.
I do not have a signature
Yeah. if what you're doing is illegal (like sharing metallica songs), then you may find you need a username or password to get on a site, otherwise anonymous/a@b.com works as a user ID/password on most any legal FTP site. Although some of us are good netizens and we do enter our email for anonymous FTP.
That said, what makes FTP so hard to use that wasn't just as much work with Napster? What it did great was peer-to-peer indexing with search capabilities, not file sharing.
This same function is performed by Google for web sites (which could include links to files)-- except that no one wants to put up a web page of mp3s because they know it's illegal.
I do not have a signature
Last time I connected to Napster, I wanted to perform a search about David Lee Roth.
No result.
I then mis-typed his name "Dave Lee Roth" and, hey ! Almost all...
If this is only what these so called filters consist of, then I guess some r3b3lZ L4ngu4g3 might do the trick?
Of course, we will have to change the way we write names whenever a new "adapted" Napster version will occur, but... well, ain't this a typical example of Darwinian Evolution, where the predators are the Majors?
--
Trolling using another account since 2005.
Ok, time to burn some karma. I have plenty anyway. The huge dropoff Napster has seen since the last ruling and subsequent removal of most copyright material shows us one simple fact. Most of the people using it were idiotic theiving scum who have the morals and self-worth of a sewer rat. They were there simply to steal something they wanted and couldn't be bothered to pay for. They didn't care at all about the effect they had on the music industry, simply that they could steal with little chance of having to answer for their crime. At its peak the /. opinion was 'Hey, leave it alone RIAA and Metallica! Its us expressing our right to information! Information and MP3s WANT to be free!'. Now the courts have made a decision that Napster should stop what it was doing (facilitating copyright theft through gross negligance and failure to provide a safeguard to ip owners), and /. steps up with 'Who cares! Old news! Napster is dead!'.
Perhaps those who stated so loudly their opinions about Napster would like to actually have a little courage in future, and stand by what they said previously.
Don't be so damn fickle next time.
http://twitter.com/onion2k
Heh. Yeah. Well, I actually thought for once I might be trolled down.. just covering my ass.
http://twitter.com/onion2k
Dr. Dre is actually the head of a secret world government. That's why Metallica took so much heat over this- not because Lars is such a weenie, but because they just don't have any pull in Dre's administration.
That's why, bee-otch.
Bryguy:)
microsoftword.mp3 - it doesn't care that they're not words...
If it weren't for Napster, they might have to do some soul searching. Maybe people just aren't as interested in my music as they once were.
My guess is that the secret agreement is that the two artists drop their suits in exchange for a small sum of money and a promise to take the blame for their poor sales figures.
In recent news Napster had finalized their 100% filter!
From now on, any file that falls under the wildcard "*.mp3" will be blocked.
Napster was unavailable for comment.
What do you mean there are no holes ? There is at least one post here today already documenting how easy it is to circumvent Napster's lame filtering (the example given was searching for 'Dave Lee Roth' instead of 'David Lee Roth'). And though it may prove impossible to close every last hole, why should the artists and the recording industry care ? If they want some of the holes, they should want all of them closed.
And please, no more of the 'try-before-you buy' and 'people buy more CDs with Napster than without'. Even if true, this is a marketing decision that only the copyright holders should be entitled to make - NOT you or I. What if I decided that maybe people would use and contribute more Free Software if I began distributing binaries of modified pieces of Free Software without making the source available ? How would people here feel if there were networks (say, run by Microsoft), whose obvious main raison d'etre was to traffic GPL-violating binaries ?
So you can tell by this that Napster is not hurting their sales ? Did you also consider the fact that there are now more people of CD-buying age now than 2 years ago, that there are more people with CD-players now than 2 years ago and that CD players are now more prevalent (Discmans, cars, etc.) than 2 years ago ?
Did it occur to you that maybe those factors explain why CD sales may not have decreased in the face of rising Napster use ?
And besides, even if Napster did increase CD sales, what relevance does that have ? It's the copyright holders' right to enforce their copyright however they choose. If you are correct, then the artists and recording industry might be foolish to oppose Napster, but that is their choice. Maybe GPL'ed software would become more prominent if Microsoft starting selling MS-Emacs or MS-Linux without making source available. Should this fact by itself be enough to allow then to do so, if their violations of copyright ultimately helped the FSF's cause ?
Seriously now, there have been media changes in the past and there will be media changes in the future driven by technology. While I agree to an extent that it shouldn't all be 100% free, there must be an amicable solution to these problems or big business will yet again stifle technology and maintain control over what you listen to and how you listen to it. I do believe I should be allowed to rip every damn cd I own for my own personal use at least. So in the next trial we'll let you cast the first stone. Calling people "idiotic theiving scum who have the morals and self-worth of a sewer rat" dosent exactly solve any problems or even acomplish anything now does it?
Napster is only blocking copyrighted music so those seeking MP3s of N'Sync, Ricky Martin, Britney Spears, etc. will probably have no problem getting them through Napster.
I re-read what I wrote, and don't see how you are justified in your inference that I was expressing my opinion concerning the merits of Apple's case. Frankly, I'm not all that familiar with the case. I know only that it had to do with MS implementing reasonable facsimiles of Apple's design elements (Trash Can/Recycle Bin, etc..).
The gist of my analogy was that by the time the case had been settled, it's outcome was not terribly important. It's not an altogether good analogy. I wanted something with the Pony Express, but I'm not that clever.
Regardless, I was not attacking MS at all. Not in the least. Take a breath. Remember to exhale. ;)
- Dan I.
This is just like MS settling with Apple on it's win95 ripoff cases three years after MS gained %90 of the market. It's moot.
- Dan I.
Hi! This is the Sig, blatantly attached to the end of this comment.
Hi! This is the Sig, blatantly attached to the end of this comment.
Gnutella seems cool, but almost every time I try to download something I get put into a waiting queue, then ultimitly a 'could not download' sort of message pops up. What Gives?
--
Does anyone remember
Napster is DEAD and will be forever. People have moved on, using better war3z software now. So what was the result of napster shutdown? Evolution. More law-resistant file-sharing programs have been developed, people feel more secured and share more, storage space has increased, Internet connections are faster. Does Music industry understand that they actually subserved pirates, even right now they're picking rotten corpse of Napster with smiling face thinking they have defeated pirates. Oh well.. let them smile..
Nope, not me, I must be someone else...
...When somebody downloads Dr. Dre music from Napster it's stealing. But when Dr. Dre steals others music, it's called sampling?
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