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Shawn Fanning Interview
peter303 writes "The Wall Street Journal (via MSNBC) interviewed Shawn Fanning, the founder of Napster.
Shawn talks about the end of Napster and his personal plans."
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..its to locate your servers in a country that doesn't give two shits about the american lawmakers.
But, far more importantly, mad propz to the WSJ for knowing the difference between "less" and "fewer".
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
if you're reading this, please let it be known that I hold you in the highest esteem for setting off events that exposed the veiled side of the receording industry.
And thanks for all the music!
Use ISO 8601 dates [YYYY-MM-DD]
The most important question, to my mind, was not addressed in the interview.
Why in God's name did they accept the settlement they did?
What were they thinking?
It should have been plainly obvious to anyone above the age of six that the instant they added any "real" DRM to the servers, they would die. Napster had nothing they could possibly leverage to make a profit other than a brand name image. They had no community, no meaningful service, and absolutely nothing to keep anyone to stay besides those file-swap-advert servers. They just had a recognizable brand name. But that's at least something-- they should have done something with it. Doing the one action guaranteed to get everyone to stop using napster simultaneously-- locking out all old clients and forcing you to download a new client, at a time where alternate programs to napster were already available and just as easy to download-- without first lining up a very definite reason why people would continue to use Napster as a service caused anything positive about that brand name image to evaporate instantly.
Just about everything Napster ever did was stupid, but this one is the one with the most unfathomable motives. Why?
WSJ: Compact disc shipments fell 7% in the first six months of this year. The recording industry says its data show consumers who download music from the Internet are purchasing fewer CDs
And in this time of unprecented economic growth, prosperity and consumer confidence, theres no other explanation for that, right?
I was pretty disappointed that Fanning replied "It may be hurting the music industry at this point ..." instead of pointing out that six months is not a large enough amount of time to gauge the real effect of p2p networks. That may be obvious to Slashdotters but Average Joes (and Janes, don't want to be sexiest now...) might be tempted to take the RIAA's word that p2p is obviously to blame.
Fanning also misses a prime opportunity to explain that the "proposed legislation in Washington that would excuse the industry from antihacking laws" is essentially giving RIAA the freedom to engage in cyberterrorism. He, instead, just makes a bland "it won't work" statement and leaves it at that.
It really upsets me that someone who was on the forefront of p2p networking and is now giving an opportunity to speak to the masses via newspaper completely wastes this opportunity to explain the pro-p2p viewpoint to everyone. If we don't start getting some big name people to clearly and coherently explain to everyone why p2p is not necessarily evil, the public may well indeed support the RIAA's tatics simply because they haven't thought deeply enough about the problem.
GMD
watch this
Perhaps you can mark it up to his age, but I was impressed by the candor and honest that Fanning demonstrated in the interview. Even though he didn't go into too much detail, I was surprised at how candid he was about the mistakes he and the company made... I think he'll go far and we'll be hearing more from him in a few years!
This is why I love emusic. They provide a link to download the entire album, all at once.
;)
People need to start ripping albums and tarring them up in their entirety before they violate copyright by putting the album on p2p (hint hint). If the record companies beat the copyright violators to the punch and charge a reasonable fee (I'd eagerly pay $7.00/album if it was encoded at 160+ and sent through a big enough pipe), they might be able to turn file swapping into a win.
Winmx, Kaaza, gnutella, they all have one thing in common: Complete lack of sortable, searchable contextual information. Audiogalaxy seemed to be on the right track, but we all know how they ended. A record label (or a joint venture of multiple labels) with tight control over their online inventory could expand their service from one of merely providing music to one of helping people find new music, providing a forum for users to suggest new music and opening up a search api for users who want to create their own queries, data aggregations and what not.
I'd love a music collection on my hard drive that was tightly organized and easily searchable/indexed. I hate queueing up tons of d/l's and sorting them out afterwards.
I know there are solutions out there to do what I want, but I think there is value in me not having to download and implement these solutions myself, but to have the labels do it for me. After all, they ARE responsible for the packaging of the media aren't they?
Ya see, I don't figure the decline in CD sales as a result of piracy, or of changes to the consumer economic model. I think it is good old-fashioned grass-roots protest. I know, myself, I haven't bought a mass-market CD since the RIAA started their petty little lawsuits to drive everyone out of business, and I know I'm not the only one. I also know a good deal of friends who are using KaZaA(lite), Freenet, LimeWare, et al, in protest of the death of Napster.
I say Rock On to P2P! 'Real Soon Now'(*), people will figure out that it's the downturn in your economy and protest from consumers over price and silicone-inflated plastic singing Barbie clones that is driving down sales, not P2P. Perhaps, in some fit of irrational sanity, they may actually examine why people use P2P, and figure out that if they can improve on the model with, say smooth resumes on interrupt, distributed Akamai servers, no bogus files, live cuts, better indexing, and proper labeling, that they may actually be able to charge a resonable amount per month to let people download mp3 or Ogg files. But, alas, they cling to "We'll only release music that is old and out of date, and we'll insist on proprietary formats, and DRM that ensures that you'll never play this on another computer, or even your own if you have to reinstall, or if we go out of business."
So, while you're at it, write your congressperson and senator, and urge them to kill any bill which requires DRM enabled sound cards and speakers (which, yes, has already been proposed), let alone any bill which requires anything electronic to be DRM.
Next week: How to get your Barbie to record Britney Spears songs! (By some odd coincidence, the electronics get implanted in her chest, she switches randomly between anatomicly correct and "anatomicly unidentifiable", and Ken does all the singing anyways)
(*)Mad Propz to Jerry Pournelle and Chaos Manor!
http://www.jerrypournelle.com
If I knew the wedgies I gave you back in 6th grade would have resulted in this . . . I might have taken a moments pause.
I'm in the same category. My music collection *blossomed* by about fifty CDs while I was using Napster; I'd hear a band, either on Napster or on one of the many streaming music stations, and I'd get to listen to a wide variety of their music. Then I'd go out and buy the CD, and I was rarely dissapointed.
Now that Napster is gone, I make it a duty to *not* purchase music from the RIAA. I listen to local bands, and rip friends' CDs to MP3 at insanely high-quality, because I'm not going to give those goatfcskers one more red cent. Why? Because I don't think it's right that I should have to pay $20 for a product that I can't sample beforehand, and *can't return* if I don't like it.
Young Mr. Fanning is obviously the kind of person who is going to be just fine, and be successful at whatever he does. He did not achieve fortune, but he did receive the fame of being a true inventor. It's appalling how he was treated after he created something so new that it literally rocked the entire world. We should herald and praise our young inventors, even when their craft appears witchy at first glance. Instead our countrymen repeated the mistake they have made over and over - they saw something new, like a tribe or a lion. It looked scary to them so they killed it.
"It's like walking into a titty bar after a lifetime of burlesque shows." - Maxim - it's Playboy with bad writing and too much clothing.