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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.
You mean Texas?
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?
A very good article. I think if anything Fanning will be remembered for jump starting the p2p revolution, getting the attention of the RIAA who had obviously underestimated the power of technology, as well as bringing awareness to a lot of average consumers on certain unfair aspects of the way the 'music industry' works, and last but not least introducing a lot of us to a lot of wonderful, independent music. Anyone know where he's working these days? The article didn't mention it.
Let be honest here. Getting single tracks off P2P networks works pretty well.
But, I would just love for someone within the RIAA (or BPI - UK version) to actually sit down with a list of 5 albums and try to download entire CD's.
It's barely possible. The chances of finding 10 tracks in the same album which aren't badly encoded, labelled wrongly or sampled at 96kbps is extremely high.
Now that doesn't mean that what is happening is ant the less worse (after all, it's a free for all sharing of copyrighted material than many people do not already own) but personally I think that it's only really single sales which are damaged as much as the RIAA/BPI make out to be.
Getting all the tracks of an album decently encoded is bording on the impossible most of the time.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
Yes. Price-fixing is a felony. Shoplifting a CD isn't.
No you're not. Downloading a song off the internet is, at its worst, making an unauthorized copy. The law allows for that under some circumstances. If you send it to cassette tape, then you're covered by the AHRA...
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!
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 have an immense respect for Mr Fanning. Here's a guy that quits school to try to write code on his own and changes the world. You think the word is too strong? Everybody remembers the Napster days. People burning CDs like crazy, sharing rips of old albums, live concerts, weird one-of CDs picked up in cut-out bins. I made my best compilations during that time. I received awesome CDs from my friends, packed with stuff I had never heard. A guy at work started making CDs with kids songs. Another made the most hilarious Christmas songs compilation. These were people that had almost no interest in music before Napster arrived. I could go on and on... I miss Napster. Every day.
Thank you Mr. Fanning.
there's no place like ~
These semantic arguments are not silly and boring. They are crucial to how the debate is framed. If you are charged with said actions, it will fall under violations of copyright law, not theft of property. The morals of each is are starkly contrasted; one is the literal taking of another's physical posessions (ideas are no posessions; ). The other is violating set of chains American society placed upon itself to promote "useful arts and sciences" and is embodied in laws defined by solely by corporations, with no regard to public interest; read Jessica Litman's "Digital Copyright" for how exclusionary and pro-settled-corporations copyright law is set up.
There is nothing inherently morally wrong with reproducing information; it doesn't go against the principles of freedom that are described in the Declaration of Independence or Constitution. This is talked about in at http://www.furinkan.net/display.php?pageid=75