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?

Comments

GPL and Napster-like things

[deanj]

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?

Re:GPL and Napster-like things

[Sentry21]

Argument 1: Because the 'big bad music companies' are companies, and gouge the artists, supposedly. Artists hardly get any money from a $16 CD. Theoretically, this justifies not letting the artists get anything at all, by pirating the CD.

Argument 2: Stealing music helps sales. The first year that Napster was out, sales of CDs went up by a lot. People argue that this is because people could 'try out' the music. I argue that this is because dial-up users pay more for their dial-up connection than they do for CDs, so they try one song and then buy the CD. Broadband users have no such problems. Also, I'd expect that people just bought more CDs through normal market forces.

I agree it's rather hypocritical. Me, I pirate music only to the point where the CD isn't worth getting. If I like a song, I'll download the song. If I like an album, I'll buy the album. If I can't find the album in stores, I'll download it.

--Dan

Re:GPL and Napster-like things

[Verteiron]

It's not that it's ok, and despite popular opinion, whether or not it's ok isn't the point here. The point is that instead of trying to find the source of the problem, the music companies are trying to demonize P2P as a whole and litigate it out of existance, along with a few other things. The question they should be asking themselves is not "how can we shut down all peer-to-peer systems to curb copyright violation?". The question they should be asking is "why are people setting up these elaborate networks to share music in the first place?"

The answer is not to destroy existing systems and spend all your time and money chopping off heads of the hydra. The old adage "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" springs to mind here. It's becoming increasingly clear that P2P file sharing is here to stay, and no amount of litigation and FUD-spreading is going to stop it. The music companies need to solve the problem by adapting themselves to the new way that things are going to work. Offer people a better system than the existing over-priced retail one.

How? I don't know. But I bet if you turned all the resources that the music industry is spending on trying to squash the future of music towards finding an answer to the problem, you'd come up with one.

Re:GPL and Napster-like things

[slow_flight]

You aren't 'trading' anything if you still retain the original to be 'traded' again. What you are actually doing is bootlegging and bartering copyrighted music. Rationalize it to yourself however you choose - at the end of the day you are stealing.

Re:GPL and Napster-like things

[Danse]

You can try to call it something else, but using illegal tactics to screw customers out of their money is just as much stealing as infringing on copyrights is stealing. Why is it just "disagreeable behavior" when the record industry deprives consumers of money through illegal acts, but "criminal behavior" when it happens the other way around?

What's more, your opinions do not represent a majority view.

Do the majority of Americans know a single thing about the record industry or copyright law? Hell, most of them don't even know who their own House representative is. I'm sorry to break it to you, but if we have to depend on what the majority knows or believes, we're in deep shit. Now if you'd said "majority of people who are fairly well informed on the subject, then you might be onto something. But I'd really like to see some evidence of that.

Of course they will break the record

[Judg3]

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!

Subtext: RIAA warming up the attack dogs?

[dave-fu]

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.

It's pretty simple really.

[Nindalf]

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.

There is a way around it!

[Mordain]

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.

Morality, Ethics, and Law...

[Bonker]

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.

Re:Morality, Ethics, and Law...

[ergo98]

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?

Classic anti-IP FUD. The reality is that drug companies don't just "give it away freely" because those drugs cost billions of dollars to develop in the first place, and the earnings from sales finances the NEXT round of life saving drugs. In other words it's real convenient to say "Geee, thanks for the drugs...now let's make them free!", changing the rules after they've been developed, but the reality is that that would DEMOLISH the future of drugs that will save countless future lives. Your position is the compassionate position, but the reality is that it's the simplistic position that equals countless deaths/shorter lives because you've undermined the whole foundation of why these drugs exist in the first place.

Re:Xolox

[nabucco]

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.

Someone tell me if this is ridiculous

[Vryl]

But hey, we have Aimster ... why not say: "outlookster" or "muttster" or "pinester" etc.

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.

yes, there is a way around it.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:That is stupid...

[JabberWokky]

Bzzzt. It is technically legal to make a free copy for a friend. This only applies to music, and dates back to bad analog copies and a different revenue system in the music industry. It could be seen as a archaic law, or possibly one that was once archaic and now is becoming newly appropriate.

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

Dirty tricks and bad precendents

[D_Gr8_BoB]

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.

what it means to be unlawful

[oni]

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.

Re:what it means to be unlawful

[grytpype]

"Consent of the governed" does not mean it's improper to enforce a law against a particular individual who disagrees with it as applied to him.