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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?
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?
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!
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.
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.
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!
I'm a Gnutella fan as well. It's just a matter of time before the RIAA closes down closed networks like the FastTrak (Kazaa/Morpheus) network now is with these new authentication schemes.
Right now Gnutella is the most popular open P2P network which has open source servents (like Gnucleus). It also has some brain-dead (which doesn't necessarily mean bad) servents like Bearshare and Limewire which are easy for the average person to figure out and use - possibly easier than Morpheus in any event.
Gnutella is just a really cool protocol and network, lots of fun for techies to play with, which inevitably means lots of new innovations. I love the ability to get most of the audio and video I want right away over the net, and I'm happy with their competition with the authoritarian music/movie business distribution model (Go to the store, sorry we don't have the band you like, just this NSYNC/Britney/Backstreet Boys CD we're pushing, that'll be $17).
I haven't heard of Xolox before, I'll look for it.
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.
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.
Note that I haven't stated my opinion on the issue... because I don't really care; I play my own damn music on my git-fiddle, and they can pull it out of my cold dead hands. If the RIAA becomes brutal enough, the artists *will* revolt - or at least the ones who are really the artists or entertainers. The ones in it for the fame don't care about the art or the audiance, and I've personally had enough of prima donnas (who care about themselves over art or audiance) to last a lifetime.
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
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.
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.
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.
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
not true. FastTrack will emerge unscathed in the end because they are not participating in any copyright violations anymore than microsoft is for including a TCP stack in windows. They don't facilitate the network with central servers.
Some of their customers have licensed their technology for obvious illicit use (call your company Music City? give me a fucking legal break!). However p2p technology like fasttrack, mojonation or freenet has many perfectly non-infringing uses that save companies lots of money on bandwidth/hosting.
One biggish issue for p2p companies to realize is that though having a single connected network of peers has benefits, they may need to explicitly segregate customers who engage in illicit activities if they want enterprise customers to sign on.
Support gift project; an open source fasttrack clone.
I'm so sorry by your grief, but honestly you can't turn back in time. It happens, that in history of humanity things that used to be for granted stoped being so after certain events came in place.
No matter how much you cry, applaud or ignore these events, things like that will happen, and expect to be common place in the near future.
In my opinion, no matter how many lawyers, money or corrupt politicians the powers that be throw at the matter, eventually it becomes evident that those in the sharing scene outnumber all the combined efforts against it; and after some dark and painfully times, eventually they will have to give up and adapt or die with the most that couln't find a way to remain profitable in the new conditions.
On the other hand it can happen to be better in certain aspects and worse in others. Indie records while great in quality also had a very short limited production. On the net your copies never end, and only one is needed; but often all you get is bad quality Xing mp3 crap or bad rippings.
It also happens in this strugle that those powers that be think they have the god given rights to make it "harder" for users to share their stuff, so enter the multitude of "copycontrol" mechanisms that usually only achieve worse quality distribution with higher price and infinite annoyances for legitime users that eventually get pissed off and drop the whole "original" thing and came to engross the growing net community.
One way or another we are going to see some interesting changes in the way media is produced and distributed, but don't miss the point, its a revolutionary rather than evolutionary thing (or maybe both?).
No matter how much we rant, there is little that can be done for history to come to change.
Artix
Your Linux, your init.
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?
Frankly, if "the suits" had any common sense at all, they'd have negotiated with Napster a year and a half ago. As things stand now, they can "crush [morpheus and friends] with lawsuits."
If they do that, then those programs will be shut down. The users will wake up the next morning, and download Gnutella clients. Fifteen minutes later, "the suits" will have no choice short of shutting down the entire Internet. Gnutella has no fixed port, no central authority, and no single programmer. Once it becomes the standard - which is certain to happen if they force the presently popular programs to charge fees - the RIAA and MPAA are permanently and totally screwed.