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Napster Alternatives Coming Strong
viking099 writes "File swapping programs such as Morpheus, Grokster, and Kazaa (all based on the same software from FastTrak) have grown over 480% in the past 4 months, and are set to break the 1.57 million concurrent connection record that Napster set." So who exactly is surprised by this?
Until the suits arrive and crush them all with lawsuits like before.
There's no way around it.
Get paid to code OSS
Someone please explain to me why people think violating GPL is bad (I agree, it is), but why trading music via Napstar-like things is OK?
no surprise here... someone was bound to take over.
So who exactly is surprised by this?
The riaa might be suprised because we all know how its a terrible thing to download music.
Maybe they will learn that technology is a multi-headed hydra. Chop off one head, and 5 others will grow to take its place. You can stop innovation, no matter how hard you try,
Viva la resistance!
... bog down ISPs and cause people to "Dump broadband, and dig out their modem".
IMHO at least, these services are superior to Napster in any way. I used the Morpheus client mainly, and loved it. Being able to preview mp3s/wavs in the client (like napster) and movies too (not like napster). Plus, in these guys your not limited to just .mp3s. You could search for mpeg, jpg, exe, wma, avi, you name it.
Plus, they tell you who has the biggest pipe according to them, not what the users says he has. I love it!
Looking for hardware (Currently need: Large Etch-a-Sketch) Have one? See my journal!
So who exactly is surprised by this?
Then why did you post it?
My entire apt. complex got put on notice of "termintation of Internet service" by minions of Sony unless we stopped allowing uploads from Kazaa, etc.
...they're all getting sued. By whom? Guess who.
"All mankind is at the mercy of a handful of neurotics". - Norman Douglas
Everyone is talking about online file trading programs, Gnutella clients, and so on. My question is, what services are out there and cross-platform to that 'other' alternate OS?
On Linux, I just used used OpenNap servers, but on my MacOS-laden G4, I have to use Gnutella, and the only decent client I've found is MP3Rage - an awesome program, but shareware (and I'm a little broke). Audiogalaxy is unreliable at best, and I can't log on anymore because of 'bad version', even though I can't find a newer version of the mac client anywhere.
Anyone have any suggestions?
--Dan
Oh come on..don't be unfair now.
Bowie J. Poag
The future is streaming audio! Throw away your old mp3s and join the revolution!
Not me.
I make it a point to not tell most people I know about Morpheus. Why? Because it works, it's fast, I can find almost everything I search for, and most of all, they're not yet attracting enough attention to get shut down by the court system!
So please, for the good of those of us who use and enjoy the service, let's just keep this our little secret, ok?
--SC
You read fiction? I write it! Lemme know what you th
I'm wondering how the court's recent ruling against the RIAA will translate into (in)action against these newcomers?
They're hitting the bigtime in terms of usage, but I don't see them having the mindshare (feh on marketroid lingo, but it works) that Napster did. People know Napster and what it's all about: the rest of these are just stopgap solutions to find what they're after. I don't think people can ever be passionate about, say, Kazaa like they were about Napster, but maybe that's just me.
Easy does it!
This comment has been submitted already, 276865 hours , 59 minutes ago. No need to try again.
I have been using AudioGalaxy and MusicCity Morpheous for a while now, ever since this whole Napster controversy started and I went out looking for alternatives. Morpheous is growing and a notable difference is present from it's earlier days. You can search for a song and 99% of the time you'll be able to download the full version in good quality. Yesterday I used AudioGalaxy for the first time in a few months and I was shocked to be greeted with a page full of red "x"s on my first search. When I clicked on the name of one of the songs I got a nice little message "You cannot download this song because it is copyrighted material." Well that's the first time I ever saw that on AudioGalxy, and it's the last time I'll use AG. It really is unfortunate though, you can do some cool stuff with AG like leave your sattellite running on your home computer, then go to the AG website at work and tell it to download songs. Now you can still download things, but the names are all skewed as to avoid copyright detection (I assume.)
~ now you know
GNUTella still kicks ass... better than Napster ever was at least. You can get faster more reliable downloads with the Xolox , which uses multi-source segmented downloading among other advanced file transfer features that make using the GNUTella network highly effective! The client basically downloads the same file concurrently from multiple sources, giving you greater overall transfer rates. The only problem with Xolox is that it currently only has a MS Windows port.
GNUtella is open, free, and it works great! Forget about these commercial closed networks.
COMMUNISM!
Quality straight pr0n goes here
..until they are killed by legal actions.
These services attack a multibillon dollar industry.
Does anyone think these guys will just sit back and watch their money float away ?
They have the power and the influence to buy any laywer, court and politian they want, so it's only a matter of time until these services are declared illegal by law and ISPs will be forced to block any connections to them.
But I personally don't think that this is bad. I never like music anyway and all this metallica and micheal jackson and brithney tits stuff sucks anyway. Music only distracts you from writing computer program and doing calculus, so it's very good when they make it expensive so that ppor nerds can't afford it anymore.
Owner of a Mensa membership card.
I have never actually used the real Napster program, but I still use gnapster, which I go on to the OpenNap servers with. Apparently there is something called Napigator which allows the Windows people to still use the Napster client, also via the OpenNap servers. So did Napster ever really die? Do we really need more services?
Best Slashdot comment ever
Should have posted this message to the current topic instead: why I now use Morpheus. Maybe people's anger at the RIAA has something to do with it.
KaZaA is totally awesome. The way it lists all the exact duplicates of files under the same heading, and can just dynamicly switch from one to another if one source fails, it's just too sweet. Not 10 hours after the Buffy Musical was aired, I managed to grab all 20 tracks off the the web, and that's just gravy.
none of these networks has achieved the p2p 'holy grail': and that is efficent searching in a TRUE p2p network. they can use the p2p buzzword all they want, but there are still central entities that take care of requests.
whores!
techienews.net
400k+ GB online, and only ONE person had Pirates! Gold. I SHALL CARRY YOUR TORCH, MICROPROSE!
it is legal to trade music with your friends as long as you are trading actual CD's. It is illegal for you and your friends to make copies for each other.
So who exactly is surprised by this?
I'm not. This just proves that people who want to steal will find any way to do it.
Advocates of Napster used to cry and scream that "CDs are too expensive!" and "Information should be free!" While I agree that Information should indeed be free, it's amazing how people lump "Entertainment" in with "Information".
The Napster subscription service is destined to fail. Why? Because Napster (who we ALL know started out as a way for people to steal music) turned into a company, and did what companies are supposed to do - they listened to the consumer. In this case, the consumers were whining about the cost of CDs. "CDs are too expensive!" Fine. Slap a $5 recurring monthly subscription fee on the service, and give customers access to the entire BMG library of music.
"Five dollars is too much to pay for music! Information should be free!" Christ people, what more do you want?
Oh, that's right. You don't want to spend money. So up spring these "Napster Clones" that do the same thing. From what I hear, Morpheus is pretty big on pirated software swapping, too.
Well guess what? To all of you idiots that bitch about music and software being too expensive... Guess what prices will do when people are stealing rather than buying?
In the immortal words of Peter Venkman, "They go up."
And don't give me this shit about "Oh! But I only use these Napster-like services to preview music! If I like it, I buy it!"
Whoop-dee-doo for you. Congratulations, you're abiding by the law. Here's a cookie.
Now, do you think that your lawful act makes up for the millions of kiddies who don't abide by the law? Do you honestly believe that there are more people paying for this music rather than saying "screw it, it's mine now."? Nope. So the companies continue to lose money, and people continue to bitch about the cost of their products.
Round and round we go.
(Oh, and a big 'Fuck You' to the RIAA as well. You're no innocents in this situation. Maybe if you realize you'd be in a dumpster without the artists you've signed, you'd loosen that fucking lock around your bank account and give your contractees a bigger cut of the earnings.)
You seem to be confused by the legal similarity of violating the GPL (violating copyright) with the typical use of Napster-like products (violating copyright). The legal basis, however, is unimportant. Law is not morality.
When someone violates GPL, they are generally attempting to restrict distribution of useful, non-personal information products. When somebody uses a Napster-like product, they are distributing useful, non-personal information products.
The consistent ethic is that free distribution of useful, non-personal information products is good, and restricting this distribution is bad.
Trading music via Napster-like things is OK because it doesn't violate any license. Well, maybe it does for some music, but there is a lot of music out there that is released by people who condone, or even encourage, sharing. Is that not what you meant? Then maybe you should have been more specific.
I've been using LimeWire for all my file collection needs. Windows and Linux clients available. Great app.
http://www.limewire.org/
--- witty signature
Consistently ever since I installed morpheus a few months ago, morpheus has about 550000 users at any time (indicated on the status bar). The largest amount of users I can recall being indicated there is about 750000, about half of what is claimed here. The lowest amount of users I can recall was about 350000.
500000 users is still quite nice since with napster I never had more than around 10000 users to connect to (it wasn't a very scalable network).
Jilles
As far as the litigation is concerned are they going after the individual companies that make the wrappers for the Fastrak engine or Fastrak itself? Are the other engines used being pursued as well? Stuff like WinMX and all the other sharing programs use a similiar if not the same engine.
Factoid: It's been mentioned that this is the third larges public uprising behind the 55mph speed limit and prohibition.
(I believe the above is attributed to Clay Shirkey)
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
Its like this .. napster clones keep popping up, each one broken down by lawsuits, each on costs the RIAA and cronies money, yet each one they beat down causes more to rise in its place! So the RIAA stops seeing the lawsuit business as worth the effort as it starts impacting their most precious (and unfortunatly deep) resource, their pockets. Things like this happen all the time in society.
Teamwork is a bunch of people doing what I tell them.
I think that most people just want to use the servicies to get free music, but the question you're asking here boils down to a very basic ethic and moral question:
When is it okay to share information and when is it not.
First of all, we have to recognize the fact that, unlike property or personal saftey, information is not a finite resource. It can be duplicated infinitely, first in people's minds, and now in digital format.
It's almost always better to give information away freely than it is to keep it hidden. This is a subjective viewpoint, but one that's very easily defendable. Look at the growing AIDS holocaust in Africa right now. The pharma companies are all doing their damndest to keep from from having their AIDS drugs, or at least the intellectual property rights to those drugs, taken away, nationalized, so that those drugs can be made more freely and be used to treat individuals.
Sure, it will hurt those companies if their patents are violated, but then how many lives would it save?
Yesterday, we talked about Hillary Rosen of the RIAA saying that online piracy hurt small-time artists. Any artist you talk to will tell you that the best way to 'get big' is to give your music away, getting it into the most hands and ears possible. There are dozens and dozens of examples I could cite here.
The GPL was written with this kind of sharing in mind. The overall purpose of the GPL is not to put restrictions on information, programming code in this case, but to make it as available to as many people as possible. Sure, restrictions exist, but now that the GPL is in existance, we have a wide, open body of programming code that anyone can draw on. The BSD license is probably a more perfect example of a 'Free' software license, but the GPL does a good job of preventing people or companies from becoming information hoarders, and encourages them to release their code back to the world at large.
The GPL would not have to exist, however, if there was no such thing as copyright law. The code could be as free as you like, without the need to protect it from companies that would otherwise hoarde it.
It's moral and ethical to distribute your code, and because of the GPL, you're also granted legal protections. It's unethical to violate the GPL because it harms everyone else, not just the person who originated the code.
The same kind of logic *ought* to be applied to music, but it's not. Instead, most music is protected in exactly the opposite manner. When individuals buy music, the sale doesn't benefit everyone. Instead, it benefits the very few. The record company, the record executive, and if he or she is very, very lucky, the artist who originated the music.
Even then, these same companies are going even further, trying to prohibit their customers from redistributing that information, music in this case, to anyone else.
In my opinion, placing an artificial scarcity on the music in this manner is immoral. It keeps people from doing what is in their best interest, namely sharing information, enjoying it, and quite possibly learning from it. It may be illegal to share music in this manner, but it is not unethical .
Let's all repeat the mantra, just so we don't forget it.
Legal is not the same thing as ethical.
Illegal is not the same thing as unethical.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
"Nothing is good or bad but thinking makes it so..." Actually as far as society goes, Something is only as bad as its effect on society. That said, untill it is seen weather or not that this "stealing" is having an adverse effect on society, we will all have to rely on the virtues of our philosophies ie "Information wants to be free" or "Ideas can be Owned"
Im not here now... Im out KILLING pepperoni
INTERNET PORN REMAINS POPULAR
SAN FRANCISCO, CA (reuters) - Despite a sagging U.S. economy and a war in progress overseas, the Internet Porn Industry is going strong says Mark Johnson, spokesperson for Web Association of Nude Knowledge (WANK). Johnson cites Americans' commitment to supporting U.S. companies in this time of need as the primary drive behind this continued popularity.
"People simply want to fulfill their duty as citizens", says Johnson.
Since the Sept 11th attacks the porn industry has faced increasing pressure as more companies have continue to lay off employees. With less disposable income, analysts feared citizens would direct their money towards drugs, or hookers rather than the traditional staples of booze and porn - but so far those fears have prooved groundless.
"Like, I was so scared, I called my coke-dealer and told him I may have to cut back my habit", says Misty Rayne, actress for Vivid Productions, Inc, known for her gang-bang of 500 tri-sexual midgets in 1999. Fortunately Mrs. Rayne has not been forced to reduce her 5 grams a day coke habit.
In this time of need, Americans have answered the call to arms. God bless America.
Shayne
Today I didn't even have to use my AK; I got to say it was a good day -- Icecube
Does anyone have the numbers on how much RIA and MPAA have spent via lobbying, bribing congress, etc.. trying to prevent the free spread of music? Now, does anyone have the numbers they said they lost in sales due to napster? Lets compare the two. My guess is that the music industry is spending more money trying to fight this than they'd actually lose if they'd just let it go. But I don't have any exact numbers, so I will have to leave it at a guess.
On a lighter note, I do believe at some music award show about 10-13 years ago, Metallica won an award, and forgive me for not having the EXACT quote, but I think it was somewhere along the lines of "we write music because we love to make music, and we love the fans, we don't do it for the money". If anyone can find an old video archive of that show, I'd LOVE to see it, and I'd LOVE to see it posted all over how hipocritical the 'big players' in the music industry can be, if that is really what they said.
I could really care less about bashing Metallica, I'd just like the truth to be known if thats what it was.
Can all fish swim?
Several other cliches apply, but I won't belabor the point.
The simple fact is that the technology exists and people will continue to do what they will regardless of the measures RIAA, et al choose to fight this.
Despite all their bluster to the contrary, copying bits is not theft. Downloading a MP3 off the net is no more dishonest than calling your local radio station and requesting that they play a particular song and then taping it off the air.
In the old days, musicians made their livings by performing live; their success or failure depended on their skill at performance and self-promotion; the only barriers were the cost of their instruments and thier ability to find venues to play. Then, recording came along, and live performace became just another way to promote album sales. Because of the high barrier to entry, the only way to make a record was to get a contract with a big company. The band's talent ceased to matter -- success or failure became a matter of what the record company wanted to promote. Now we are seeing the pendulum swing back the other way. The barriers to producing recorded music have mostly gone away -- a $20k home studio can duplicate what used to take a professional studio. A free web site can potentially reach as many people as an expensive billboard or magazine ad. File sharing programs can let their music reach as many listeners as if they were getting wide radio play.
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
viking099 writes "File swapping programs such as Morpheus, Grokster, and Kazaa (all based on the same software from FastTrak) have grown over 480% in the past 4 months, and are set to break the 1.57 million concurrent connection record that Napster set." So who exactly is surprised by this?
Since Congress has made the amazing discovery that porn is traded via P2P and the RIAA is now beginning to pursue these new P2P services, I'm rather surprised that the RIAA has failed to use that as an advantage.
"And look, Mr. Government Official (tm), you can prevent kids from seeing PORN if you shut these services down, not just benefit our "amazingly creative" artists!"
Do you like German cars?
on a side note:
my school has essentially blocked all of the popular p2p clients. even limewire.
in the back of my head, i always knew that having a subscription to a national dialup isp was a good idea.
Direct Connect is the best thing to come out of P2P, ever. Anyone can run a server, and each server allows something like 500+ clients. Most servers have minimum-shared limitations so everyone's sharing something, usually making the total amount available in the excess of 10 TBytes. Wonderful. You should go download it now.
For every head the RIAA cuts off, three more show up. After a while, you get the idea that maybe cutting off heads is not the right approach.
Flaw in the analogy: the RIAA is no hero here.
...I just alt + tabbed from my morpheus window over to my browser with slashdot open, and the lead story talks about how morpheus is going strong. With 542414 users online, and 416984.0 GB of files, I'm still having trouble finding last tuesday's Simpsons Halloween special. If you have it, share it!!
I use Freenet now for most music downloads. While it can be a bit difficult to navigate for at first, if you aren't afraid of reading and experimentation. It's far from perfect, but it works.
Ceci n'est pas une sig.
Build what basically amounts to list management software into an email plugin. You 'log in' to the network by emailing one of the 'peers', it replies with a list of other peers that it knows about, with maybe a timestamp. You then email your 'request' or search string, they pass it round via email, and the server answering the request emails you the file.
Further refinements are possible etc etc.
While this may be insane in actual practice, in theory it further demonstrates the idiocy of attempts to stop the internet doing what is was originally set up to do, ie, share files.
Hi Mr Troll, how are you today?
why people think violating GPL is bad (I agree, it is), but why trading music via Napstar-like things is OK?
Ignoring the fact that they are two entirely different things, here's a guess:
The GPL encourages sharing.
Napster encourages sharing.
Pretty simple, isn't it?
I'm not surprised, as well as most on slashdot I believe. However, according to this recent stiff: http://se.jupitermmxi.com/xp/se/press/releases/pr_ 102901.xml file-sharing (in europe) has dropped.
:)
So I guess atleast Jupiter MMXI should be suprised. Or should one perhaps interpret it as another bug in the *very reliable* ketchup-effect-curve-induced research performed by these types of companies?
While the simultaneous connection thing is pretty impressive and I love it, blah, blah, blah. This scenario is very different than what Napster had achiever in relation to the recording industry. Napster was MUSIC. Other file swapping systems include lots of other stuff - notably porn. So...don't look for this threat to be as high profile as Napster.....YET.
Taco puts the lotion on its body -- or it gets the hose!
The RIAA doesn't realize that every time they go after someone, it just increases the visibility of file sharing and gets more people involved. Napster climbed in popularity after people found out they were being sued (thanks to American media). Now it's happening again.
As has been said before, the RIAA is going to have to realize that what they're doing is simply feeding the very beast they're trying to defeat. They must adapt or be tossed aside as obsolete. So far, the RIAA has shown no desire to adapt and as such are being boycotted and otherwise damaged by the very customers who fund their legal pursuits.
Electronic Frontier Foundation for online civil rights information
Unlike Napster, the new file-sharing clients are not linked to a central name server. The system is truly distributed. When installed on your computer, the client software detects if you have a broadband connection. If you do, your machine will be used as "supernode", which takes the place of the central servers Napster used. This is also works better than Gnutella clones, as there are not the scalability issues caused by 56k dialup users and the resulting bottlenecks. MusicCity et al are just web pages that come up when the client is loaded to display advertisements. A lawsuit might shut down MusicCity, but as long as the client software exists on users computers, the file sharing network cannot be shut down. The ironic thing is that Napster was willing to bargain with the RIAA, but the Powers insisted on shutting Napster down, which created a vacuum to be filled by other more indestructable versions of Napster.
http://www.kazaa.com/index.php?page=download#lin
-- Viva FreeBSD --
Hey, I'm Irish and I never heard that song.
Where can i get it.Sounds interesting...
I love that in the previous /. article, they said, " The demise of Napster, a popular music-swapping service ... may also portend a stall in broadband demand.
" and then the next /. story is about all the other Napster clones popping up and going strong. Maybe those Cnet people should be more L33t and pay attention to new trends. I mean, Napster was so last year already! :)
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Oh bother.
Well I've used Morpheus occasionally and found it to be quite good, except for one glaring problem, no support for Linux. Furthermore, they've changed their protocols in such a way as to break GIFT, a GPL library used to speak to the FastTrack network. So not only are they apparently unwilling to invest the effort in a Linux client but are going out of their way to preven the development of that by other parties.
Why couldn't they just develop a Java client and then anybody could use it and this would all be so much easier?
Learn to use a computer and look it up yourself. A better question would be "How do I find the IP address of a website?" Then you can use the info to find usefull information besides the address of just one anoying website.
eDonkey is fantastic...it instantly shares any part of the file you've downloaded etc. It actually forces people to share some(there's also an enforced min upload; at least 10KB/sec, or you can only download at a limited rate.)
http://www.edonkey2000.com
Be patient trying to get a server to connect to, and when searching, you should click "extend" to extend the search to another server on your list(it only searches your primary server first, so it may not find a hit.) Don't do stupid searches like "mp3" or "movie" or "porn", and try to pick the category you're looking for so searches go faster.
eDonkey is a "set and forget" program...downloads may take a while, but it'll succeed where others fail, particularly with very large files. It will download even the smallest part from another user if it comes available, and will stream from multiple sources.
NONE of these programs will work if people don't share what they download.
Don't run a server unless you can support at least 500-1000 users and can keep it running; 100-200 user servers are pointless. The linux server is supposed to be able to handle more users for equal ram/processor specs than the windows versions, and it's easier to background etc.
I used napster when it was at its height; it had a huge selection and wide variety of material. Then Napster effectively died.
A friend told me about AudioGalaxy.com - now that was *cool*. Say if I was learning a new piece on the guitar. Something (relatively) obscure, like Piere Bensusan. I could find it, and reliably transfer it. Absolutely brilliant!
Now AudioGalaxy.com, while not entirely dead, seems to have caved in to the record companies. I tried to get "Yesterdays" by Wes Montgomery (a prominant Jazz guitarist), and was told that "searching had been disabled" for the track. OK that sucked. I tried Gnucleus (OpenSource windows Gnutell client) and it found a load of his other stuff, but not "Yesterdays".
My point is that, while "alternatives" will keep coming to replace thwarted music sharing systems, the users wont necessarily.
I've found the technology of these "next-generation" file sharing systems to be pretty slick, but the selection of music to be lacking. If they dont have the music Im looking for, it doesn't matter how many copies of the latest Korn or Limp Bizkit tracks are floating around, the technology is effectively useless.
Just my experience.
The moving cursor writes, and having written, blinks on.
Its working great so far....and if anyone has a copy of Cannibal! The Musical in DivX
To all who discuss about the good and bad of music exchange over the internet, I refer to this, mirrored here for an economist's perspective on why napster/gnutella/morpheus etc... are good things.
P2P's success will not be if we all 'quiet down' as one poster has said, but when REAL DAMAGE has been done to the record companies.
I believe it is time for the individuals or (preferably) individual responsible for the gnutella 'leak' from AOL to step forward and gain credit for starting this whole thing. After Cringely and ZDNET and the rest of the tech press have a person with 'tech cred' to quote for their articles, their coverage and complicit advocacy of p2p will lead to the REAL DAMAGE previously alluded to.
Then and only then will cd prices retail at reasonable prices.
Share on.
Game: Player 'Donald J Trump' now has AI skill level 'experimental'.
Too bad that in order to do provide such great filesharing service, they wreck everyone else's network experience. The client pulls all sorts of nasty against-RFC tricks in order to increase its avalible bandwidth, which result in Morpheus/Kaaza/MusicCity users getting more than their fair share of the network.
At the university I attend, things got so bad at times that although 50 or so people would be downloading movies at a given time at perfectly reasonable speeds, no one else could so much as surf the web without unacceptable lag. Worse, standard application-priority procedures didn't work because of the applications' non-standards compliant behavior. We ended up having to impose a hard limit on the amount of bandwidth allowed on that port, severely limiting the resources allowed to the programs, even when the network is mostly idle.
The bottom line is that there's more than ethical problems with these new services. By resorting to breaking network protocol rules in order to increase bandwidth, they're setting a very bad precendent. If more programs begin to follow their example of treating the host network as something to be selfishly exploited, network admins will be forced to impose draconian restrictions on network use. This would be a very Bad Thing (TM), and it's my biggest problem with these new services.
http://www.limewire.org/
Just shows you what a collossal waste of time it was to go after Napster, in fact the success of these 'napsterish' clones is owed most likely to the Napster Lawsuit. Not only that, these next generation ones, like gnutella are going to be virtually impossible to shut down without going after the clients themselves. Plus they'll likely use the Napster learning experience to ensure that it's tougher to go after them legally as well. The big record companies made their position known, took a hard line, and were completely ignored by the average Joe. As a bystander that hasn't used any of these products (I have a -gasp- radio on my desk), I'm watching with a detached amusement. Now if we could just find a way to stick it to Ticketmaster....
So, Internet file swapping does no damage to the music industry, right? Everyone in the music industry is obscenely wealthy and is only interested in squeezing consumers, right?
Just over a week ago, the great Canadian record chain Sam the Record Man filed for bankruptcy. The article notes that the failure was caused, in part, by Sam's being "squeezed by free music downloads".
This is a terrible loss for Canadian music. Sam was a widely known advocate of local music scenes in Canada, especially in Halifax, where bands such as Sloan got their start. Sam stores across Canada were known for their eclectic stock, not merely the latest top-40 drivel, which probably brought it into direct competition with Napster.
It's time to drop the Robin Hood rhetoric of valiant music traders against big, greedy conglomerates. Unprincipled free music trading is doing real damage to those lesser-known artists it is claiming to help, as well as to smaller music stores.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
OK, I have to admit, that even though I do download MP3 from sites like MP3.com (and have bought CDs from there as a result), I've never used any of these peer-to-peer open-source alternatives.
Are any of them truly IP anonymous services that encyrpt it in such a way that they can't tell who's hosting it and the network is randomized by region (IP wise) so you can pop up and drop off without major problems?
Obviously, as someone who's sold my writings, software (mostly done as freeware), and who supports musicians promoing their work without the bloodsuckers ripping them off, I'm totally into the concept. But I really don't know the pros and cons of the alternatives now, and now that we've got Super Carnivore out there from the feds, we have to assume RIAA's breathing down people's necks.
Anyone willing to be unbiased and tell me about which is which and if there are any that are upcoming that might meet the standard?
The main thing I hated about Napster was you could tell it was going to turn commercial in a bad way.
-
--- Will in Seattle - What are you doing to fight the War?
Morpheus, Grokster, and Kazaa ...
So the usership is growing huge and by that measure they successful, but what about their profitability ?
And what is the business model for these services ? How do the providers make money at this ? User fees or what ?
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
Courts are going to protect the copyright holders' rights (they HAVE to) and they don't like their orders to be ignored. They have the power of the government at their disposal, and can call on it to enforce their orders.
IIRC, governments derive their power from the consent of the governed. If enough people realize they are getting screwed they will demand change. As I see it, the only way to bring the issue to the table for discussion is through effective civil disobedience.
Compare P2P with the Boston Tea Party. The obvious difference is that the colonists destroyed the tea rather than taking it home and drinking it. In our case, the object of our anger has no physical substance. The only way to "destroy" it is to reduce its value by making it freely available.
Another hint for you. Once something gets a writeup on Slashdot, its not exactly a secret anymore.
No, Thursday's out. How about never - is never good for you?
I said it once, I'll say it again... the RIAA had the chance to work with Napster and create a simple subscription based service where people would pay for the rights to download music. Then they could have been dealing with just one online music service. Now they've got more than a handfull, on different technologies, and they're never going to stop them. It would have been so much easier for them to strike up a $9.95 all you can download deal with Napster.
Greed. Plain and simple.
nothing like the latest "girls gone wild" video, or any of a number of college girl webcam stripteases (check out Madison Chick....she's got like 5 different videos out there....)
My second favorite way is to go over to a friend's house and push files at his Hotline server over 100Mbit Ethernet.
--
"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
Mod this up.
it's got a win and a linux version (linux version is a bit buggy, but its just a beta release...at least it works!)
Well, I got it off Napster originally on Windows,
:-0
Then, when I moved to Linux, I rebuilt my small mp3 collection, I downloaded it again off gnutella.
Strange, but I can't actually find it there, probably because people have migrated to morpheus and stuff again.
Browse a couple of the different services, and search for "bugger off" - the artist is normally listed as something like "Irish Drinking Songs".
Another good one if you like that kind of thing is "the ball of kerrymuir". (That's a Scottish one)
Sometimes I wish I wasn't English, everywhere else seems to have really good folk songs, whilst I can't think of a single one from England
That is not obvious. The public resource used to share files is increasingly deminished. Reference SSCA, DCMA, and the horror stories being told about the demise of DSL. If no one is alowed to serve because very wires between our houses are owned by those who wish to cheat us, we loose. This stupid music and movie bullshit is the tool that will accomplish the destruction of the web. Stand by for inordinate government regulation designed to protect the proffits of large publishers and telcos. Do you have a license for that ftp broadcaster? Have you paid your static IP tax designed to pay for the upkeep of the media? The history of radio broadcasts is a roadmap for the web.
I once thought such ravings were paranoid. Now I know they are true.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
i've been wondering for a while why more people dont use usenet. to me it's much easier to get music that way. you might have to pay for a commercial usenet server to satisfy real addiction though. from what i've read you can get a good server for about $10 a month that archives the binaries for at least a couple weeks.
hell the nice folks at alt.bin.mp3 even have them grouped by decade.
-- john
The common complaint against the "big bad music industry" is that they squelch small-time musicians. Yet you advocate the free, unfettered exchange of copyrighted music ("information") as "ethical".
I disagree.
I write some music (this isn't hypothetical, it's true). I will probably never get a big-time music contract. So I'll never make any serious money. So what do I do? Unfortunately, I can't do anything about it, except offer it for a moderate price on my web site, and maybe MP3.com. But I can practically guarantee that if I did have a great song, someone on a Napster-like system will quickly make it available for everyone else to use for free.
I know the common arguments that hearing it for free will make people buy my products. Nice argument, but that choice should be up to me, just like complying with the GPL, or choosing to develop away from the GPL, is a choice for the programmer to make. IT'S NOT THE CHOICE OF THE CONSUMER. It's the choice of the programmer to determine how his/her software is marketed. Do you also advocate a Napster-ish exchange of copyrighted, non-GPL software?
In this case, just the same as with software, it's the choice of the composer to determine how they want to release their music. If they're smart, they'll make low-fi cuts available for free, or give away a few gems in hope that consumers will buy their CD. It's kinda like shareware.
But the choice is NOT up to the Napster-ish user. It is flatly UNETHICAL for anyone to presume that they're smarter, or better positioned to decide FOR THE ARTIST (or programmer) how his product should be marketed. It's simply theft.
The RIGHT thing to do is to choose to comply with whatever rules have been set by the owner of the intellectual property. THAT is ethical.
And although in SOME cases illegal isn't unethical, for the most part the law has tried hard to establish a fair, consistent match between legal and ethical. Our legal system was founded upon the principle that the Right thing to do *should* be the Legal thing to do. No amount of moral relativism can change that.
--Brandon / Split Infinity Music
I suggest you simply accept yourself for what you are: a petty theif.
So? Thieves steal from thieves. Just because the record industry uses price-fixing and other tactics to steal doesn't make it any less criminal. Well, it does according to the government, since those corporations will not have any of their assets siezed, nor will any employee spend any time in prison, nor will they even have to give back what they stole. Guess this is just another example of why the law is not the same as morality or ethics. So why should we care again that thieves are stealing from thieves?
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
I just don't by this argument.
Firstly, the argument here states that it is ethical to distribute music because it is not a scarce "resource" and differentiates this "resource" from things like property and personal safety. Copyright law exists specifically to protect the PROPERTY rights of individuals and to acknowledge their rights over said property. So...perhaps we may need to redefine our ideas of personal property but at the moment we regard land and things that can be owned and things that can be copywritten through remarkably similar forms.
The GPL and BSD license are fantastically different than distribution of music by Napster. I think it is worth noting (!!!) that the GPL - by the mere fact that exists - acknowledges the rights of creators of "stuff" to do with it what they please. Part of these rights are currently NOT putting your software out under GPL, right?
The RIAA has no objection to people freely distributing music that is offered as freely distributable. This is identical to the GPL. Are you proposing the removal of all copyright law? It kinda sounds that way.
It seems that in the world you describe, if there is a marginal difference in a piece of information, a bit of technology, a piece of music relative to total frivolity that it is ethical to distribute it freely without the consent of the creator or the owner of the article?
There is a far great social interest in breaking down market barriers such as cost and ease of distribution for AIDS medications than for music - this is not apples to apples in an argument that is based on ethics, is it?
So, I sound like I'm pro RIAA here don't I. I'm not at all, but I think that calling this a SIMPLE ethical situation is naive. I'd put this in the "wow...that's a tricky" one category.
Now...what napster TECHNOLOGY can do is remove what has been the driver of RIAA control and the screwing of the artist - control over the methods of distribution. Distribution is what the artist can't get...until now. So...music should be cheaper...I don't think we should be paying for the unnecessary costs associated with the current structure of record industry...but I don't think that if someone creates something as amazing as a piece of music that it should be freely distributed without any potential for financial gain by the creator...unless that is what they want.
So...I have the RIAA because they defend the old world. They know that their companies exist because they have filled the economies-of-scale role necessary for a small artist to get their records out into the big world. But...I'd be happy to pay 2 dollars for a bunch of music if that maximized the cost/value ratio and still rewarded the artists. No problem.
Yes, Morpheus is "under the gun" for music swapping. However, it's easy enough to start using it for other purposes.
For example, the next time a big distro releases a new version, if people put big tarballs on their local morpheus client(server)s, we could all get it that way -- instant mirroring. And the more people download, and keep a local copy in their shared folder, the better the selection of mirrors.
It'd be great if this concept could be extended, in some way, to serving up whole copies of web pages, pictures and links and all. And then port it all to Freenet, for guaranteed privacy.
Or something like that.
If you bought it for $100,000 and later sold it for $480,000, yes.
No, Thursday's out. How about never - is never good for you?
I don't receive a nickel from Sony for my sold CDs
Needless to say who is winning and who is losing in all this P2P discussion.
-=-=-=-=
I know life isn't fair, but why can't it ever be un-fair in MY favor!?
Reality
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
Looks like the next version of morpheous will be based on rebol. This is great news! Check out the link.
http://www.rebol.com/news1a31.html
They are already being sued
I think you spoke too soon...
I hope they do shut down the fast track network. It just means something even better will come along. I remember when I used filequest for all my songs. When it closed I moved to scour and on to napster. When Napster died I moved to some Gnutella clients (I regret this as it is a poor excuse for anything) and now on to Morpheus.
There is no fighting it. The more you fight the stronger we get. So what if people have shrek burnt to VDisc 1 month before its out on DVD. Its unstoppable if you try well just roll over you like we've done in the past.
Pardon this rant...
I was happy to see that Aimster's wrongdoings are being made known to all at none other than FuckedCompany. Nothing would make me happier than seeing ol' John Deep living in the streets of Cohoes, NY. Come on, won't you pay $4.95 for... absolutely nothing? I wonder how far he'll really go in his efforts to turn his daughter into a pr0n star? Maybe we'll see! Stay tuned, maybe Club Aimster will turn into an affiliation between Aimster and Club, the European porn mag!
God damn, I hate those fuckers.
rooooar
Great point. And totally true.
:-)).
In the flat I share with 3 friends, Morpheus/Kazaa just screws the connection (ADSL, 256Kbits). When one of the guys (including me sometimes, to be sincere O:-)) downloads more than 1 file at once, everything, from IRC to web surfing, lags badly. Junkbuster even timeouts when doing DNS queries. Go figure.
That brings me to the point of traffic control. It's implemented in 2.4.x kernels through tc ("Traffic Control"), in the iproute package. But, looking at the Advanced Routing HowTo, it's damned complex. In my little and non-very-TCP/IP-knowledgeable opinion, of course.
Again in my opinion, simple things should be simple. And tc use didn't looked like that last time I checked. Does anyone know of a better way of handling this, besides pre-2.4 things like traffic shaper?
I think that if I only could set priorities for TCP traffic (by port or IP, for example), that could be great. I could set IRC/ssh on the highest priority, then www, and last ftp and "unknown TCP" (which is what Etherape tells me that Kazaa traffic is
My weblog in spanish
Is there a Linux client to connect to the Morpheus network? I know many of the file sharing programs are based off similar code bases, but is there an free (yes, that free) Linux version around? The OpenNap servers seem to be agreeing less and less with me.
http://www.talknerdy.org
I think it should be pointed out (to people who don't know), that Kazaa uses multi-source segmented downloading.
...
Even though the system was most likely designed to allow for multiple source downloading, another good side effect is that only the speed of the download is effected when you lose a server. Then you can just 'search' for more sources and keep going
... this is the kind of technology that was needed to bring movie downloading to home broadband. Too bad the MPAA would rather bitch about it than capitalize on this tech.
----- rL
What's going on with /. lately? I can paste my post into notepad and see that I closed the anchor tag after that second link. I don't know why it doesn't get closed after I submit.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
Well actually I mean frontend...any suggestions?
First of all, I see file-sharing as more of an act of self defense than a crime. The record industry has no problem using whatever means necessary to get money from consumers, regardless of whether they have to break the law, or buy the law. People can't compete with such large industries in the areas of lobbying. What is left but to simply ignore the law whenever possible? It's kind of sad to see that everyone jumps down the throats of the file-swapping software makers and those that use the services, yet when the record industry steals from the public, they never get more than a little slap on the wrist, if even that. When the government is too beholden to corporate interests, we all suffer, and this is a perfect illustration of that.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
Why yes, I would have a citation of that law :P
... based on the noncommercial use by a consumer of such a device or medium for making digital musical recordings or analog musical recordings." 17 U.S.C $ 1008 (emphisis added)."
Napster used it in their origional defence:
UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT
NORTHERN DISTRICT OF CALIFORNIA
SAN FRANCISCO DIVISION
A&M RECORDS, INC., a corporation, et al.
v.
NAPSTER INC., a corporation
Date: July 26, 2000
Time: 2:00PM
Courtroom: 15
Part IV.
" 17 U.S.C $$ 1002-1007. The SCMS allows unlimited first generation copies of an original, but prohibits second generation copies (copies of a copy). 2 M. B. Nimmer & D. Nimmer, Nimmer on Copyright $$ 8B.02 & 8B.03 (2000).
Section 1008 provides: "No action may be brought
While I can't find the quote right now, the head of the RIAA was quoted saying 'It's cool to share your music with your friends' back in the 80s or early 90s regarding taping off purchased tapes.
I'll find the quote later.
can U imagine a bEoWuLf cLuStEr of those?
do you mean "eat my shit, peanuts"? and if so, what does Charlie Brown & Co. have to do with it? i mean really. thanks.
People think CDs are to expensive. The action of not buying music because you want to send a message to the record company is flawed in todays culture.
As a teen it's almost expected that you listen to music. This combined with people's need to fit in is the reason people download songs off the internet.
If you never saw a movie you'd never be able to understand why some people say the things they do. As a kid I didnt have cable, it took me over 7 years to realize all the jokes that my friends repeated were skits from saturday night live. People can't stop learning culture or it will make them social outcasts.
That being said, the reason I pirate music is because without it I would become uncultured. Imagine if you were talking to someone about september 11th and you didn't see the world trade centers fall and you didnt see all the people holding up signs looking for loved ones. Your emotional tone would be different than popular culture and Im willing to bet the person you were speaking to would get the impression that you were a heartless bastard because of your lack of culture.
You've got me curious about this... I'd like to know what sort of non-RFC-compliant things an unpriveleged userland application could do that would cause so much trouble. Do you have any specific examples? And what sort of "application-priority procedures" do you use, because I'm not familiar with that term either. I'm passingly familiar with QoS and related issues, but I'm afraid I don't really understand.
The obviously not sharing (violating the GPL) is bad.
Seems so simple to me...
the numbers the client reports are incorrect, because morpheus/kazaa/grokster use a p2p stats system that was designed to handle up to about 500k simultaneus users. in reality the number of users online is well over a million at any time.
When you download a song, are you stealing anything? The original is still there, isn't it?
When you rip a CD, the CD still contains the song, doesn't it?
When you buy a CD, with all those little nuances in the metal that makes the sounds when you play them, are physical things.
You're not comitting piracy because you are not profitting off of the copies. You're not even paying money for the media that it is delivered.
You're not stealing the song from a store. You're not stealing them from the artist. If I want to go out and buy a little flat piece of round plastic with metal, I will. If I want to listen to a song, I'll turn on the radio or listen on the net. Only on the net, I have a choice of what's played.
Selling ideas or 'intellectual property' is like a peddler on the streets.
'I'll sell you this stick.'
'What does it do?'
'It keeps lions away.'
'No it doesn't.'
'Do you see any lions?'
The whole aspect of IP rights is ludicrous. Selling tickets to a concert for fans to buy and hear the author play live is an actual thing. Renting out IP rights for people to listen to is not.
I don't know about you, but I can never find what I am looking for on Morpheus, or I get very limited results. With Napster, I could always find anything, no matter how obsure. From the sound track to my favorite cult movies, to rare live recordings from... whoever, to the Brown and Williamson tobacco theme song. I could get absolutely anything. On Morpheus, if I try and search for a pouplar song from a well known band, I get almost nothing back, or a bunch of incomplete files, or downloads so slow I can't tollerate it (i.e. less than 2 k/sec). When I look for something more obscure, I'm lucky if I get any results back. If Morpheus has so many friggin users why can't I find any of the songs I want?
Some friends and I spenda few hours a week surfing Audio Galaxy looking for the most wacky and wierd ass songs out there. We found oneby Dahlar Mundi (from India) it is a pop music song called "Tunak Tunak" that also hasa music video. We laugh so hard when we watch it. Totally cheeze.
Then there was the "Loch Ness Monster Song" and the "What do Scottsmen wear under their kilts" song.
Not to mention the radio recordings of DJs doing totally hilarious stuff like a fake Winne the Poo story where he finds some heroine, gets high and goes ape shit and kills CR, Piglet, Rue, then himself.
and then there are the several recording of guys using nothing my Arnold Swartz. MP3s from movies to make a call to various tech support lines. Those are great!
To me that makes AG worth while. I don't give a rip about finding songs from artists out now days. I'm a classical music fan and apparently no one rips that stuff to share besides me so I don't use Napster.
robi
It isn't. It's an artificially-granted limited monopoly incentive, and the whole point of granting it in the first place is to get you to act in ways that serve public ends.
They can fight against Napster, Morpheus, audiogalaxy Musicity, Kazaa, Gnutella... and they might win individually, closing Napster, maybe Kazaa, defeating Limewire, but it is quite stupid to think that they can stop it.
Napster closed, so what? Alternatives appeared, and for everyone that is shut down, 5 new ones will appear.
I can tell you, a lot of people demands this service, now it is on the mainstream public, some of them have a big time trying to find where are the downloaded files the first time but they use the services anyways.
How wonderful it is to get that song, now! It cannot be stopped... it will never be, this way is better and besides it, much cheaper.
Now my advice for the music industry: it cannot be stopped, join the wave! you'll have to stop charging 12$ per CD, maybe give them away free, focus on promoting concerts, live music, offer a file-downloading service, flat-rate (it will have to be cheap though!) and always highest-quality non-broken non buggy-names MP3s and I would be on it.
Boys, reshape your business or it will die... I think it will die.
What if we just rethought the whole idea of copyright itself. If I understand it correctly, you the artist does a few hours/days/minutes work creating something, and then get payed royalties on it forevermore amen(especially after companies like Disney(tm) keep paying of your government to move out the date that stuff becomes public doamin). If this is such a great idea, why shouldn't the rest of society enjoy the same rights? Lets pay the guy that built the sidewalk a royalty everytime the sidewalk gets used. Or the guy who build your microwave everytime you nuke something. What makes artists(or more importantly the companies that own their work) deserve ongoing payment for work long since completed anymore than the guy that cleans up dog turds off the sidewalk? What wouls happen if we abolished copywright law altogether? "The artists would stop making music cause they wouldn't get paid for it" is the first argument that comes to mind. This is BS, since some of these "artists" get paid tens even hundreds of thousands of dollars for each concert they give. Which, by the way, I'm fully in favor of. Paying Weird AL Yankovich $50,000 for a two hour concert is a great idea. Monies paid for time worked. But paying someone forevermore for an hour's worth of work is ludicrous IMHO. "But they put years into developing their talents that led to that one hour of "brilliance."" Also another bad argument, because so did the guy who built the sidewalk, so by that reasoning he should get royalties too. Nuff said.
That is absolutely not true. Both Supreme Court decisions and the writings of Thomas Jefferson make it clear that, in the U.S., copyright is not a recognition of any sort of property rights in content. Court decisions and Congressional reports also make it clear that copyright holders' interests are supposed to be at best secondary to the interests of the general public when it comes to formulating copyright law.
What copyright actually represents is distortion of the normal operation of the free market -- in the hopes that the benefits of the interference will outweigh the drawbacks.
When copyright holders understand they have some obligation to the public, this can work well. When they start thinking that the public doesn't matter and that the Constitution may be bulldozed around in the name of protecting copyrights (DMCA and SSSCA, anyone?), then the action of handing out valuable copyrights has gone horribly wrong -- just like if you took pity on a stray pet and fed it, only to have it bite you and give you rabies.
The President of the Recording Industry Association of America ("RIAA") has said: "it's cool to make tapes, it's cool to trade them with your friends. It's good to share music" 2d Pulgram Decl., Exh. J.
Moreover, the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992, 17 U.S.C $$ 1001-1010 ("AHRA"), expressly immunizes any such "noncommercial use by a consumer"
It's a piece of shit that barely runs, probably written by 13-year olds
That just means that it's increased it's numerical value, through inflation, rising prices of land, or just because I want to rip you off. If I bake a cake, who physcially gets 480% of the cake? It's impossible to talk in percentages of more that 100% of anything.
I only work for the campus network admin, so I don't have a complete understanding of what we do and how it works, but I'll give it a shot.
As I understand it, Morpheus does not heed the various TCP/IP limitations concerning speed of connection attempts, numbers of concurrent connections/connection attempts, etc. Therefore, trying to limit its access to bandwidth through TCP/IP traffic shaping doesn't work the same way it does for say, Napster or Gnutella. With those applications, we were simply able to assign them a low priority, such that they would only get bandwidth which wasn't being used by more critical applications. With Morpheus, we've had to impose a router-level traffic cap on the port, which is an imperfect fix because a lot of the time, it would be perfectly alright for Morpheus to be using say 60% of the campus bandwidth when nobody else is interested in doing much. Instead, it always has to be confined to 15% or so.
Ironically, the cheats that Morpheus uses to get more bandwidth actually resulted in it getting less in this situation.
How does such an obvious troll like you still have the karma to post at +1?
That conclusion, which even if it were true, presupposes the owner of the intellectual property wishes you to "affect" their sales. It is not your decision to make.
Just fess up and say you like free music and you don't feel guilty stealing in your own home. All other args are horseshit.
Where would the money to make the cd's come from? SO everything would be in crappy digital format
Yeah as opposed to those wonderful analog CDs...
This is urban legend, and no more. It is most definitely not legal to make a copy "for a friend".
When you see a legal definition of "friend" in US law, tell me. I expect it'd be quite entertaining.
And while I have issues with the RIAA as well, some of the artists actually want to make a living. Really and honestly, they aren't all just secretly backing your wish that anyone could rip off their music.
But like all of the other posters you presuppose that this is what the content creator wishes. You are taking it upon yourself to impose your own standards on someone else's intellectual property.
When you purchase a CD you buy the rights to your own fair use of the product, not to make a free copy for everyone on the planet.
When in doubt, just remember, theft is wrong, and you know damn well this is theft.
This is a cutting bit of humor...
Yeah, and if we did genetic tests on everyone at birth, and euthanized any baby that was genetically predisposed to have cancer, then we could remove those genes from the gene pool, and future generations would have much smaller incidence of cancer. Too bad THAT THAT'S FUCKING EVIL
Personally I think this whole argument is bullshit. People in Africa can't pay for the drugs in the first place. It's not as if by letting those countries ignore the patents the pharm corps will lose tons of money. Africa is what? 1, 2% of their total revenue?
Actually, the drug companies ARE providing billions of dollars worth of drugs for free. The problem is that idealistic IDIOTS take that a step further, claiming that all drugs should be free: Everyone on Slashdot feels that they have the right to not only choose their own IP rights, but to choose the IP rights of others. It's a lot like the hilarity of the open source business model.
-Make open source software
-???
-Tonnes of money!
Instead in these clowns minds it's
-????
-???? -Free drugs for everyone!
Fuck you people's after-the-fact attempts to justify what is essentially murder. They can save people's lives without lifting a god damn finger: just let the countries make the drug for themselves.
Unbelievable. Tell me: How much money have you donated to Africa? I mean REALLY. If you're not living in a box on the side of the road, donating 95% of your income (presuming you have one) to Africa, then you are a MURDERER. Do you understand that? Do you realize that instead of having McDonalds you could have fed 3 starving children in Africa? I'm 100% serious. If you don't live a life of pure squalor (what the hell are you doing on the Internet hanging around on Slashdot, apparently with a COMPUTER for God's sake? Go save some lives!) then you have absolutely NO GROUND TO STAND ON.
The basic fact of the matter is that some people care more about the right of the drug companies to make massive profits than the right of some poor African to continue living. And that is just repulsive.
What a moral high-grounder. It must be tough looking at all those bastards, being so righteous as you are, eh? The basic fact of the matter is that socialist clown idealists like to takes the fruits of an IP-protecting world and pretend like it came as a gift from no-where, created out of nothing by goodwill ambassadors. People like me realize that most of the drugs that these idiots are saying should be free exist ONLY because people like me have defended the rights of IP holders in the past. It's the difference between someone who knows the difference between fantasy land and reality.
And if so many users are sharing and so many files are swapped, why do I have so much trouble finding the music I want? It's not like people don't have it... somebody has to or I wouldn't have the knowledge to search for it. What's going on?
Your idea doesnt work, and the internet age mixed with "Napster-ish" programs, demonstraights it doesnt work. It doesnt work because copyrights are not ethical. While I dont agree with the previous poster in the limited view that information needs to be given away for free, I also dont agree that the creator should dictate how that information is used once the creator hands it out to someone else.
Its obvious other people should not tell us what to do with information *we* possess, whether its someone who thinks the information should be free, or its someone who thinks the creator has the right to tell us what to do. That just does not work and its going to fail. No one should force you to give up information you dont want to, and no one should force you to keep secret information you dont want to, both positions are just unethical. Just as its unethical to torture someone to release information, and its unethical to prevent freedom of speech, reverse engineering, modifications, and improvements to software is like constructive criticism and should be protected but they are not, no one can take *any* copyright work and improve it and show to the world that it can be done better (notice I stress *any* because GPL software does allow this). So copyrights conflict with the first amendment and the foundy fathers knew this, and the only reason they adopted copyrights was not to give creators rights over freedom of speech (which is what you are suggesting), but to stimulate an information market through government regulation. But it does not have to work that way, maybe it was good in the past, but today and in the future things are changing, and its not going to work anymore, and if given the choice between the first amendment and copyrights I almost guaratee most people in the US will choose the first amendment over copyrights.
disclaimer : My views do not represent those of every one else in slashdot.
>File swapping programs such as Morpheus, >Grokster, and Kazaa (all based on the same >software from FastTrak) have grown over 480%
Doesn't this sound fishy to anyone? I don;t know about everybody else, but my crystal ball is glowing on this one. I may sound a little paranoid here, but these new services smell a little like a setup. Think about it: Napster goes away, there little nothing that can be done about Gnutella. But, if the MPAA/RIAA makes it's own client, pawns it off as several different things, and then gets to sue the crap (or jail) a buck-jillion people, that would be a victory for them. BEWARE!
The current system actually DECREASES THE INCENTIVE for drug companies to develop drugs to CURE AIDS.
As things currently stand, a drug company will make more money developing drugs that stop AIDS from killing a person while NOT curing AIDS. This way they can keep on selling the drug (at a huge profit) for as long as their Patent lasts. A drug that actually cured AIDS would only make a limited amount of money per-patient (because an AIDS infected patient would only take the drug until he/she whould be cured).
Even more, since in practice drug companies can Patent an approach to curing AIDS, they can avoid that other companies explore that approach to develop a cure (eg "sure, we'll license you to produce that chemical which is essencial for your drug - it will cost you a million per miligram produced").
I would say +1 "Inocent bright eyed youngster"
Then again the Unless they're complete hypocrits deserves a +1 "Funny"
I had to binary search and replace the audiogalaxy binary to change whatever the old master server was to the new one. I forgot the numbers for both, but for the old one, check your log file, and the new one MIGHT be 64.245.59.169 (garlic.audiogalaxy.com). Or maybe 64.245.59.137.
should be financially compensated. Making music is not easy, distributing it and managing artists is real work, sometimes very hard work. Finding talent among the giant pool of wannabe's. Recording engineers often have to go to school to do what they do. Musicians who are really good make it look easy, but it isn't, it takes many, many hours of work to play like Eric Clapton.
Okay, we've got all these great file sharing clients out there and all is well. I conjecture, however, that we can't completely survive a major crackdown by The Lawyers. What I mean is that we aren't experiencing problems right now only because we aren't being pursued very actively.
There are a few fundamental problems that need to be addressed:
1) The network can be monitored. This can be fixed using various encryption schemes, so that I can't tell what other people are doing unless I have the client. Even if I have a client, onion skinning can be used so that I don't know where the queries are coming from.
2) The queries can be monitored with a client. This can be fixed by using partial searches that return many false positives, and are combined at the source to get the final search results. This way even if searches match my files, I don't know if the user really searched for those files. I can't combine the partial searches from my end either, since each partial search is onion-skinned to look like it originates from a different place. Thus a lawyer CANNOT say "ooh, look at all the copyrighted stuff they're searching for"
3) A lawyer can get the client, search for, and download copyrighted material. "Look how easy that was. Let's ban the client!" This, I'm afraid, is THE FUNDAMENTAL PROBLEM. I don't think there's any way to stop it, since we can't detect who is a lawyer and who is not. There may be some way to require a user to participate in sharing material before they're allowed access, but this would require strong AI in order to be fully automated and decentralized, and I'm afraid we don't have that. Plus the problem of who decides who gets access opens up a whole can of worms.
Oh well, I guess we can't win in the long run.
Music speeds up when you yawn, but does not change pitch.