Slashdot Mirror
New File Sharing Networks
An anonymous reader sends in: "Most readers of slashdot have been following the exploits of the RIAA and their attempts to shut down Napster, KaZaA, Morpheus, etc. In response, it appears some live music fans have taken things into their own hands and started new file sharing networks made exclusively for trading live recordings of bands that allow that sort of thing. The main player, RNL has reached version 1.0, features a distributed architecture, supports linux, and is even GPLed. Another peice of interesting software is Furthur. Though still only in beta, Furthur has cool features like allowing a user to piggy-back another user's download to reduce the load of the uploader."
Haven't these guys heard of etree.org? Etree has been around for a few years, and exists to allow the trading of lossless recordings of live shows from bands who allow trading.
Its not p2p, mostly ftps and burn + post cds, but it has been there for some time. Loads of good shows too :)
This post will enter the public domain 70 years after my death, unless Disney buys another extension.
Before files start getting traded that the artists DIDN'T want released as free? Someone will crack it and ruin what these honest people seem to be doing, OR, they won't be able to keep up with cleaning out the non-free, copyrighted material.
Honestly, is it even worth doign anymore? Have a pure idea, watch it get cracked, then fade slowly to the background like the rest of the companies trying to do this. A sad world we live in today.
Or, maybe I am just jaded on these types of things.
*sigh*
Sent from your iPad.
I'm just wondering how they actually control the content of their network. If they really are just trading legitimate live recordings, then I don't really see how the RIAA could touch them. But I don't know how they can keep people from trading standard album recordings that will get them in [more] trouble with the RIAA.
If they do somehow control it, it'll be interesting to see how the RIAA reacts to this.
-Perrin.
Now I want you to go in that bag and find my lightsaber. It's the one that says bad mother-fscker on it.
This is what capitolism and a free market are all about.
The music sharing phenomenon is too big to be a fluke. There's a serious market here, and that's what really has the RIAA scared. They know that, at some point, a market will flurish which breaks their members' business model.
Now, I have no exposure to this new network, so I don't even know if it's commercial, but I can assure you that with a demand this large, there will be thousands upon thousands of people trying to figure out a way to turn it to their economic advantage, and I say more power to them! The first key is the fact that there are already bands that want their music recorded live (Phish comes to mind). Next, there are new bands who have nothing to lose by sharing their music.
Given these, I think you could build a base of bands that promote their music (more specifically, their concerts) via a file sharing network. Then, you just have to find a way to brand yourself so that you remove the geeky stigma of file sharing (make it easier to use, get some high-profile musicians to mention that they use it, give it away with low-cost student computers, etc).
This is going to be a really fund decade. I suspect that this particular business will not descend into the kind of deccadence of the current music industry for at least another 5 years or so, but then, perhahps I'm just an optimist.
Small excerpt from their About page:
Freenet is a large-scale peer-to-peer network which pools the power of member computers around the world to create a massive virtual information store open to anyone to freely publish or view information of all kinds. Freenet is:
- Highly survivable: All internal processes are completely anonymized and decentralized across the global network, making it virtually impossible for an attacker to destroy information or take control of the system.
- Private: Freenet makes it extremely difficult for anyone to spy on the information that you are viewing, publishing, or storing.
- Secure: Information stored in Freenet is protected by strong cryptography against malicious tampering or counterfeiting.
- Efficient: Freenet dynamically replicates and relocates information in response to demand to provide efficient service and minimal bandwidth usage regardless of load. Significantly, Freenet generally requires log(n) time to retrieve a piece of information in a network of size n.
-end excerpt-Current 0.4 version of Freenet is working fine and 0.5 will be released soon, which should be considered as stable for production use.
OS advocatists take note: Freenet has been written with pure Java, so if you can get a Java interpreter for your OS, you can run Freenet. And in this particular case, using Java doesn't always mean the software will run slow. It's all about the implementation.
Why not just open a unprotected share on you computer set max number of clients, run a port scanner that indexes all other open shares on whather class c you tell it to.
/IBM is going to remove the ability to network file share, make this p2p an extension of that. Most modern operating systems have the cabability built in.
:)
Set up an index server that does this as well as downloads a lists.txt file that has all the songs in your share directory indexed, a shell script on a cron tab to reindex and upload you lists,
FUCK the RIAA and MPAA, they would have to remove network capability from all computers.
Im not trolling Im serious. Make it as grey as possible. There is no way MS / SUN
GREY, GREY, GREY .
Make it about the comanies violationg free speech, not in the lame ass way others have tried, ALSO a point you can sue judges, and cout officers, police etc, IF IT HAS BEEN PROVEN they VIOLATED you basic civil rights, Making people stop sharing whatever they wish I belive is a violation of my free speech. Set up a honeypot service, that only trades uncopyrigthed materials and lie in wait for the RIAA and some overzealous most likey bribed judges, and open fire, first nail the RIAA on hacking attempts, then go after everyone in line.
If the courts become succeptiable to injury as weel, maybe some of this crap would never make it in the first place.
Yes, I have reached karma cap and need no more, please mod this down as needed
Sig went tro...aahemmm.....fishing........
Though I am no byte-level expert, this isn't really anything new or its misleading. What this seems to refer to is how the traffic would be routed. IE, if "Joe" has live Pearl Jam and 3 people request it, the network is smart enough to take bytes from people farther along in the download. Even then, thats more load-balancing.
Otherwise, this is no different from any other P2P filesharing mechanism where files naturally propagte from a source and are eventually downloaded from other nodes. Still, if your network were *smart* enough to resend packets as little as possible (IE, if the network would multicast concurrently-requested packets) then this would be leaps-and-bounds above current P2P.
As far as illegal uploads are concerned, there is a list of the bands and material types that are currently allowed. I haven't tried this app yet, I will as soon as I get off work, but I would imagine that client communicates with a centralized server to check MD5 sums and also check filenames so the only way to actually put up a illegal file for sharing is change its name to something like 11.29.98-Phish-David-Bowie03.shn and post it as a new file so a MD5sum is created. BTW my domain, http://www.phataudio.org was originally an old school phish mp3 site ;)
Presumably the record companies defer to the bands on this point.
Well, the way I understand recording contracts is that the recording company owns the recording, but the band still owns the music. The band rarely gets enough of a cut from the contract that sales hurt their personal bottom line. Huge bands like Pearl Jam, Metallica et al are big enough to negotiate that sort of deal. This is why Lars from Metallica was one of the few artists who cared about Napster. If you'll notice the RIAA, not the artists, is suing people. They claim they are protecting the artists, but they are really looking out for their own pockets.
Most bands dont make money on the record, they make money on the concerts and appearances. Granted, they do make money, but it's usually small compared to what they make from other sources...why else would they tour? The recordings basically serve them as advertisements.
The bands typically own all rights to the music itself (not the recording) and they have the right to allow or disallow fans to record concerts.
Usual dislaimers apply...IANAL, esp a contract lawyer, and have never seen a 'typical' recording contract and am just make observations on what I've heard and read.
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.-Franklin
I have been using Etree for three or four years now. For those not aware here, etree site-op's release their server content on the etree-announce mailing list periodically. Users can download, through FTP, high quality concerts from folks like The Grateful Dead and other microphone friendly bands. I think what keeps etree pure currently, is that with only a (relatively) few site-ops, control over content, is easily implemented. This will undoubtedly collapse under the massive abuse inherent in peer-to-peer networks.
.shn's of Brittney Spears 2/18/02 Cleveland Show being traded alongside some of music's most influential live bands. For what it's worth check out what is being traded on etree at their database site
It would be quite sad to see
Welcome to RNL!
/etc/hosts.allow.^C^C^C^C^C....^C^C...
/etc/xident.conf..^C^C^C^C^C^C^C^C^C....
Would you like to install xGator? xGator allows you to fine great deals on products specifically tailored to you!
[ ] Yes [*] No
installing RNL-1.0-01a.rpm.....
installing xGator-2.4.1....^C^C........
modifying
modifying
Congratulations! RNL has been installed!
your jesus is another mans xebu. chew on that hypocrites.
a good overview of different p2p architectures is over here at openp2p.com.
One system the author fails to mention is Circle, which uses a decentralized hashtable system., more about it at his system is in a pdf slideshow he'll be giving at linux.conf.au
My favorite quote from his page: "FastTrack (aka Kazza/Morpheus) is kind of like trying to optimize a bublesort", which leads me to believe he has a regular quicksort at hand. (actually he does claim O(n log n) seachs, so its about right)
Also to note are Chord and GISP which seem to use simular schemes, where Chord is pure acadamia (someones masters thesis). GISP is an implementation of something from JXTA, suns p2p framework.
this is my sig.
At this point, the question needs to be asked:
Why doesn't the RIAA come out with their own damn P2P?
It could be fully under their control. They would be able to block certain songs, and maybe only let certain 'hot' singles out. Most of all, this would give them stronger legal basis when fighting current P2P companies and networks. They can point to their own network saying they own all rights to distribute their music, and thus other programs are violating their own legal market. Their refusal to distribute music electronically has hurt them more than anything else. We 'steal' music online, because there isn't one good for-pay network out there.
But, of course we still don't buy into the fact that P2P has hurt music sales. I believe one problem is the fact that a average CD costs $15! When I was still paying for music a CD usually cost $12.99 - if it was $15 I wouldn't buy it. I was shocked to see "SALE!" signs over CD's at Media Play reading in the upwards of 15-16 bucks.
But by their own account P2P saves the Recording Industry money. They haven't admitted this out loud, but read this from their website: [speaking on why the price on a CD isn't 30 cents]
Then come marketing and promotion costs -- perhaps the most expensive part of the music business today. They include increasingly expensive video clips, public relations, tour support, marketing campaigns, and promotion to get the songs played on the radio. For example, when you hear a song played on the radio -- that didn't just happen! Labels make investments in artists by paying for both the production and the promotion of the album, and promotion is very expensive. New technology such as the Internet offers new ways for artists to reach music fans, but it still requires that some entity, whether it is a traditional label or another kind of company, market and promote that artist so that fans are aware of new releases.
Huh? Makes sense... kinda'. But when I search for an artist I find all sorts of new songs. Many of which are great, but never make it to the radio.
If the RIAA adapted the Fast Track technology [and of course make other than Windows clients] they could promote their own music on that main page. They could even tag certain songs as "hot" or "new".
I mean, they can iron out the details, but considering they've got loads of cash. They've got the marketing minds that brough us O-Town and the like. Why can't they put this together?
Why are we hard at work marketing their songs? Why are we using our bandwidth and time? Why are we donating our computers to distribute music? Why are we bothering with P2P?
Simple: It works. We've found a better way. It's not free music. It's because they refuse to step into the year we live in.
Wake up RIAA, you can't fight it any longer. Go after the guy pressing thousands of CD's and making money off of your work. Leave us alone, we aren't making a thing. It's wrong to be making cash on their works. It's not wrong to refuse to go back to an old system that is dying quickly.
Every computer today is sold with a CD-RW. Let us do it.
Get your Unix fortune now!
I run a website called Murmurs.com, which is for the band REM. We run a Napster-clone on our servers using SlavaNap as the main server (Windows yes, I know, but it was more stable than OpenNap). The desired client is WinMX.
REM has a kind of blind-eye mentality toward the sharing network, so long as what is being shared is live or unreleased tracks. As well, we allow sharing of other bands which support this mentality (Wilco, Pearl Jam, Patti Smith, Radiohead, U2, etc).
A lot of the files are sourced by someone running a free FTP server (called ThinkTankDecoy, which makes sense if you know REM history). People download from that server and it permeates through the shared server.
Ice Magazine recently ran a feature on our sharing system, a U2 one and Pearl Jam. Here's a quote:
"At www.murmurs.com, www.fivehorizons.com and www.u2bloodredsky.com- three unofficial but overt REM, pearl Jam, and U2 sites- one can easily nevigate past message forums and band news to locate mp3 concerts uploaded by fans. The U2 site is set up like a database, and provides tips for people un familiar with PTP. The REM site requires user registration, and directs how to install its own custom file-swapping software. It also recently featured an exclusive interview with guitarist peter Buck. when told that both a rare 1980 show and thhe entire, unedited portion of the recent MTV "Unplugged" broadccast had been posted to Murmurs.com, he replied "I like the fact that we've done this huge mountain of work, and that every now and then I'll find a bootleg of some 85 German tv show...."
Ice Magazine is maintstream industry press.
Considering the size of U2, PJ and REM, its nice to see that at least some big bands don't listen to the RIAA's squawking.
Ethan
After dabbling in p2p for a bit. I found PHEXworked for some large files. However I found all the p2p client/servers had a few things problematic about them.
'Piggy-backing' would be nice, but reliabe would be better. In the end it has a ways to go. Large files are the biggest problem.
make Linux, not Microsoft. sin(beast) = -0.809016994374947424102293417182819