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2002 MP3 Winners and Losers
An anonymous reader writes "MP3newswire.net is running their annual losers and winners list in digital media. Each has 8 finalists with the big winner KaZaa for becoming profitable and doubling Napster's peak traffic despite setbacks like getting briefly booted from Download.com. The big loser? No surprise, it's the RIAA who despite several wins in court have failed in their quest to stem file trading. Lawrence Lessig and Dmitry Skylarov also made the winners list, though as the article points out it wasn't exactly a great year for Dmitry."
I seem to remember hearing something that might reverse the positions of Kazaa and the RIAA. :)
++ Say to Elrond "Hello.".
Elrond says "No.". Elrond gives you some lunch.
Those are all well deserved winners in my mind, how about you?
yeah, kazaa is profitable... almost enough money to pay off all the law suits.
_
click here for cool windows stuff
I'm sure thompson media was a winner as they collect royalties on ANY product/commercial software that uses the mp3 format.
That's why patents are good, you actually make money from your ideas/discoveries.
Stanley Feinbaum, professional journalist and master debater! God bless the USA!
With that kind of economics, no wonder no one can beat Microsoft.
Except that maybe Microsoft is using its OS & browser monopoly to gain market share by undercutting the MPEG-4 price?
A story was on this a few days ago
I think they're forgetting about Radio Shack's investment into RIAA. Radio Shack has invested heavily into ASCAP and RIAA over the past few years. They were hoping for some backdoor alliance with music technology and consumer spending. Guess RS should go back to the drawing board and make blueboxes for Steve Jobs. ;-)
Beep. Boop. Beep. You have questions. I have answers and your home address.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Offtopic: Just how bad will it look on RIAA's system administratiors resimay to have worked there?
+1 Interesting? This post starts by talking about being able to get to music online, then goes on to talk about retirement funds. It didn't make a whole hell of a lot of sense.
All the mods on crack today?
What we _should_ be discussing is world peace, starving people, dying nature, that kind of stuff.
But we're not, we are discussing mp3, so i fail to see how parent is not modded -1 offtopic.
Heh, sounds like something right out of Catch-22. Buying eggs for 7 cents and selling them for 5 cents at a profit.
I love this euphemism. It isn't trading, it's just plain stealing. You can't trade what isn't yours.
they could be the big winners. as the conglomerate that owns the content that are converted to mp3s, if they just offered a comparably convenient, legitimate solution to p2p filesharing, they would make money and save money (instead of paying all those lawyers).
smd4985
Did anyone notice that CowboyNeal was one of the finalists for big loser? Apparently he still hasn't found that mp3 of "Feel like a woman" he's been looking for.
using namespace slashdot;
troll::post();
You may notice a large number of posts made on Slashdot concering KaZaA, or similar programs such as Gnutella or FreeNet. Often these will be posted under "Your Rights Online" (YRO), in order to show how the use of KaZaA affects your "rights". You may wonder what the hell programs whose sole purpose is to circumvent copyright laws is doing on a conservative (yes, I mean it) site such as Slashdot.
Let me explain to you. In the back of their minds, most Slashdot readers ("Slashbots") know that they simply don't want to pay for anything which they can get illegally for free. Most people are exactly the same way. KaZaA et al allows them to get music for free, so they use it. They know that this is copyright violation, which is a bad thing to do. This brings them feelings of guilt which they want to do away with.
How do they do this? They rationalize it away. It's the copyright laws that are wrong, not them. DCMA needs to be rewritten. The MPAA needs to be destroyed. It's an expression of free speech. And those greedy record companies take all the money anyway. Never mind that with pirate mp3s the artist never sees any money anyway. This way, they are sticking it to "the Man", who exists to make life difficult for 31337 Linux users like themselves. Yes, it is flimsy, and yes, it allows them to take the moral high ground by robbing hard-working artists. Yes, many will say that modern popular music is all horrible anyway, and that their favorite music is the only worthwhile type, but then go on to slam others for being "elitist" in any discussion in which Gnome or KDE is mentioned.
And what about the United Linux beta? Didn't that violate the GPL by attaching a boilerplate Non Disclosure Agreement? And remember the cries of the Slashbots that United Linux should be sued, destroyed. boycotted, etc.? All because United Linux who was helping out the Linux community mistakenly added a certain clause to their beta, which violated the GPL. As you can see, the "community" is quick to cry foul when the copyrights on their software is violated, even by companies with good intentions. Our copyright good, yours bad.
It's called "hypocrisy" and if you read Slashdot enough, you'll have to get used to it.
Now ask yourself exactly why ther is coverage of KaZaA on a site obstensibly devoted to Free Software. KaZaA is proprietary as hell. Isn't proprietary software bad? Isn't all free software superior? Isn't "open sourcing" a piece of software the best way to improve it?
These are all bleatings of the party lines. Here, we consider proprietary software Evil until Rob Malda tells us otherwise, or it gets ported to Linux. Then it becomes a special class of proprietary software which somehow becomes better than the rest. KaZaA is one example. WordPerfect is another. Somehow, they are able to ignore this seemingly large discrepency by claiming that these companies are "helping" the "community". The only one being helped is VA Research^W Linux^W Software who gets to sell ads to these people after giving them free publicity on the most popular "Linux" site of them all.
Stop lying to yourselves.
I hope this is really good news in the long run.
Today I finally went over to the EFF site and joined up after I had an epiphany of sorts. I realized that now is the time to keep the internet from going the way of marijuana and any other ideas, items or whatnot that have been made illegal. Just to keep someone's pockets lined with green that he's sharing with a few of his buddies which help make and enforce our country's laws. I love my country, but I feel we are not really as free as we should be, and that our freedoms are being traded for profit.
What is it going to take before the companies realize that the best way to fight their losses is to join in on it. By that I mean that they could release high quality mp3s (or OGG, but hopefully not wmp formats) with commercials tagged at the beginning and end. Sure, most of us here can edit them out, but they will still be heard. My idea probably sucks, but there has to be a solution, a compromise, or we all will end up losers.
--naked
Very popular slashdot journal for adul
except that's not what he was talking about. mpeg-4 is video, windows media player does video too.
...though as the article points out it wasn't exactly a great year for Dmitry.
May I be the first to say: "No shit!"
mstyne: real name, no gimmicks
So you use your murder rates to compensate?
hi.
suck my fat cock.
bye bye now.
Kazaa, it seems to me, is a fundamentally flawed approach to file sharing. Sure, it's a strong program, well implemented, well maintained - but it seems to violate the very principle which makes file sharing symptomatic of a wider, very important issue in the music/film industry - openness. They have yet, for example, to port their software to Linux or Mac OS X. They don't release their source code. They are profitting on something which qualifies, very obviously, as stealing. How are we to make the principle of file and information sharing and open models legimitate if the main proponent of anti-corporate file sharing is a corporate, profitable entity in and of itself? The only way to make file sharing a legitimate cause is to make it an open cause - to force the middle men out of contention by making a legimate counter-movement and unfurl the banners of open source, open information, open everything. I don't support KazAa for this reason. It's a very efficient(and for them, very profitable) way to steal. The music industry needs incentive to reform, to make something as easy as KazAa available to its demographic. It has yet to do this, and I don't see how KazAa is helping.
I'm not sure Kazaa being profitable is that good of a thing for the 'net in general.
Remember, Kazaa is a Spyware/Adware-filled program which brings along with it a lot of annoying programs that pop-up ads while users are browsing sites other than their own, redirect click-through commissions from sites other than their own, and spy on users when using programs other than their own.
Kazaa simply has no morals. They're not just stealing from the RIAA, but if you run a website they're stealing from you too. If you haven't noticed, they don't have much respect the laws of the U.S, Canada, Mexico, U.K... or anywhere else that says stealing is wrong.
Kazaa should just go away... the online world would be better off without them. Them being profitable is a very scary thing...
Both the linked article and the /. story has it wrong.
If you doubt me compare this with this.
I just think the error shouldn't be allowed to propagate.
Besides, I woke up this morning and found out I had mutated into a spelling nazi. I just hate it when that happens...
Any sufficiently advanced libertarian utopia is indistinguishable from government.
go to Pajonet.com
New babes added daily to the hot or not contest!
I was surprised that emusic.com didn't make their list. As one of the largest online providers of legal, non-DRM MP3s on the net they should have at least garnered an honorable mention. With practically unlimited downloads for $10 or $15 a month, I'd say consumers are the big winners here. I've been using the service for the past month and my music collection, especially jazz, has grown larger than it ever could have at $15 a CD.
Contrary to the belief of the article's author, "portend" is a verb.
This just goes to show that you can get an actual, paying job in journalism with little more than a pencil and a thesaurus.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
Hey, it was posted by an Anon Cow... but what he says is true.
The fact is, Kazaa does nothing that the good ole WWW can't do with the use of a "Where are you?" CGI and a network of mirrors. The only point of the program is to obscure the identity of the server you're connecting to, and make servers of a hard to track transient nature so that the RIAA and other copyright owners can't come down and hammer the server owners so easily.
MP3 and P2P aren't illegal, but the way Napster, Kazaa, and the like have used those technologies for illegal purposes have made people think that there's nothing legal that can be done. That's damaging to the progress of absolutely everything on the 'net.
...will never have a long life span. too many users = too much of being in a public eye..and this equals being noticed by the riaa. however..trading/ripping groups on irc (such as the ones of efnet for years now)...will, i think, never go away because it seems no one has noticed them enough to mention them. they should be #1 on the list of winners for longevity.
c ted.ath.cx</a>
and my take on this whole riaa vs. mp3 thing, people still buy cds if they want the quality (like if your entering into a car audio competion) because cd's burnt from mp3 files are lower quality. and if cd sales is in fact dropping, then if the musicians were really worth a da** then they would make their money in live performances.
oh yeah, that rant felt. good.
misty
<a href="http://multifacted.ath.cx
">http://multifa
"It's a time machine Napoleon, I bought it online."
No we don't want anything like that to happen. But both Adobe and US justice system should apologize for Dmitry's detention and make sure nothing like this will happen again. Otherwise, they will have no recourse when a tourist from Texas is jailed in Europe for keeping a firearm in his house.
There are other ways to protect local laws. US certainly could deny a visa to Dmitry or make it illegal for anyone to buy or sell his/her software while in the country. Countries can also sign extradiction treaties to enforce common laws. But if I do something which is legal in my country and then come to yours and follow your laws while there, you can kick me out but not arrest me.
I know someone will say that IP laws are different from making people wear a veil or stay away from a particular religion. But, just imagine you didn't grow up conditioned to the stuff. Then, one day someone tells you a story that you like very much. You are happy and share this story with your friends. Would you expect to end up in jail, even if that someone asked you not to repeat it?
Also, consider the Church of Scientology. If a country accepts their IP rights and prevents people from distributing scientology texts, isn't it a form of religious control? True, in US you will probably get some cease-and-desist warnings before you get arrested for practicing unlicensed scientology. And you might go to a nicer jail than in totalitarian countries. But now we are talking about methods, not principles.
Anyway, countries should just agree to only abuse their own citizens and just decide weather to let others in. In the meanwhile, I hope Adobe is carefully considering foreign laws and background of their employees before sending someone on a business trip. I hear preventing someone from backing up programs they bought is illegal in Russia.
The Arabs they let in will kill them all, speeding up the process.
I don't understand why there is no single word about Edonkey in articles. Kazaa doesn't work in Linux (at least without Wine) and AFAIK lack few features of Edonkey network.
Why Edonkey community is ignored in such comparisions? Is it really so small?
How does one invest in the RIAA? It's not a company, it's a lobbying organization.
Huh? Who calls mpeg-4 free? Alex St. John has called mpeg-4 a "technology cartel" in CPU. It's a group of companies who got together, wrote a spec, and are *selling* it for a price - mostly to themselves, so they can pass on the cost to you, the consumer of devices. You'd prefer everyone collude on price rather than have multiple parties compete, driving the price down, and making things less expensive for the customer?
They weren't in trouble because they had a product that was sold in Russia. They were in trouble because they sold the product in the U.S. With a major point being that they used servers owned by an American company. As with the recent court cases concerning whether Calif. courts have jurisdiction, that fact was important. Without the sales in the U.S., they could not have been tried.
p.s.-- The client remains nameless out of superstition. As long as it works and very well at that, I'd rather the enemies of the MP3 not be aware of it. I'm certain that they are, but let's not let them know that it has any preference in the world, mkay?
First of all, p2p is used for more then piracy. Its not the "sole intent" as many people like to pretend.
Yes pirating occurs.. but so does drug running on our roads.. does that make it the 'sole intent'. No of course not.
Plus you are also not considering that waht you consider piracy only applies to YOUR country. many do not reconize copyrights, so its NOT, I repeat, NOT piracy there...
Try to spread the truth, not biased lies desgined to skew public opinion.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
"An acquaintance recently purchased the new Peter Gabriel CD. It played fine on her standard CD players, but would not play on her computer at work where she regularly listens to music to pass the tedium of her job. What did she do? She simply downloaded the files from the Net onto her PC and played that instead. The problem is she was still angry that the CD she bought was intentionally disabled, preventing her from using it as she wished. Do you know what she did next? She returned the CD. A perfect example of a dissatisfied consumer who (had) already committed to the purchase and was completely discouraged by the intentional hampering of the product. Scariest for the music industry was when I heard her angrily mutter these words..."I won't make that mistake again."" Did you hear that, RIAA? Your antics are really pissing off your customers! Oh wait - I forgot...you don't call them customers, do you? You call them thieves and pirates!
Beautiful DMCA fearmongering... but this doesn't have anything to do with MP3s.
If you have a product that's legal in country A, but you market it to the citizens in country B where it's not, to the point that you attend a conference in country B to try to market your product, you are going to have a hard time leaving country B. Dmitry wasn't just a tourist, nor was he baited into this country by American authroities. Oh, BTW... Dmitry was freed, so maybe the courts can lead to the right result once in a while.
The rant on Scientology is totally out in left field. They publish books and qualify for copyright. Since their book isn't as old as the Bible, not's not in the public domain. Sorry, there's no exemption in the law for texts some people claim to be holy. Are you saying their books should not qualify for the same copyright protection as everybody else?
Misinformed ranting about a popular topic leads to a +5 around here? Come on mods, say it ain't so...
So can someone post the results to the RIAA website? There's no point using Newswire's bandwidth...
Xix.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
First of all, p2p is used for more then piracy. Its not the "sole intent" as many people like to pretend.
Those who use P2P for legal uses are fine. Those who use P2P for illegal uses are in trouble, it's a bad sign that there's more in the second category than the first.
Yes pirating occurs.. but so does drug running on our roads.. does that make it the 'sole intent'. No of course not.
The highways in the United States are used for legal activities that the government actually wants to occur far more often than drug running occurs. We do make an effort to arrest the drug dealers who use the highways that way. Besides, if the highways were being used by drug runners at the same percentage that illegal files are going over P2P, the government would likely have stopped maintaining the highways anyway.
Plus you are also not considering that waht you consider piracy only applies to YOUR country. many do not reconize copyrights, so its NOT, I repeat, NOT piracy there...
Check the list of countries that don't enforce the simple (non-DMCA-like) copyright laws, and you'll notice that they're mostly countries that have problems with human rights as well. Since you're capable of posting on Slashdot and are refering to copyright-lawless lands as "there" rather than "here", I assume you are not living in such a country. If you'd rather their set of laws for its copyright feature, be willing to accept the rest of the package.
Try to spread the truth, not biased lies desgined to skew public opinion.
A biased selection of facts designed to skew public opinion is what you practice.
The honest internet-using public, when Audiogalaxy went down. It's been a while, now, since the RIAA sued AudioGalaxy and shut down their service.
It's not like they were the only ones to go last year. The reason it pissed off a lot of people was that it it was the best popular audio sharing client to date, and everyone loved it. It was so easy to use and it was absolutely brilliant at finding anything, even really obscure stuff.
Best of all, it did an excellent job of blocking pirate downloads. You tried looking for a single by any popular artist in the past fifty years, odds were you couldn't find it. Probably seemes like an unwanted daft feature of file sharing client, but it made the system that much less illegal. That's why it was such a shame to see it go - the RIAA charged our beloved AudioGalaxy with piracy and gave it the death sentence, all the while letting Kazaa, WinMX and the other 'real criminals' roam free.
To this date, there are kids on the Kazaa and WinMX still actually costing the recording industry money in CDs some of them actually would be buying originally, and pedophiles sharing entire collections of unsavoury child porn. Yet looking for harmless TV themes today on the service that never hurt anybody, I can't find shit.
If he wasn't talking about MP3s, why did he title his post "Mp3 itself was a loser"?
Apple has sold only 600,000 units of iPod till now & has a measly 2% of the mp3 player market. If MS had such paltry figures, /. would have already considerd it dead
What I want to know is: why would they choose Kazaa as the number one winner?? That makes absolutely no sense. They talk about how great it is that they are profitable, and then in the same breath explain how they got that profitability: "by stuffing the app with adware, spyware, and most notoriously Brilliant Digital's Altnet, a distributed computing program covertly placed on users machines when KaZaa was downloaded." What is the author trying to do, promote such underhanded moneymaking techniques? When other developers and companies read this, they will undoubtedly make a connection. "How can we be more profitable? Well, Kazaa did it with adware, spyware, and lying to its customers." All those things should of course be mentioned, but in the Losers list, not the Winners. The adware, spyware, and covertly placed programs were the reason I never downloaded Kazaa, and never will. If Kazaa is going to be number one, they should be there because of the FastTrack network, which I think is wonderful. My vote would have gone to Kazaa Lite, which should definitely be up there on the list. It connects you to the FastTrack network without spying on you or lying to you.
Kazaa Lite is the real winner, not Kazaa.
Lack of eloquence does not denote lack of intelligence, though they often coincide.
Having recently picked up an iPod, I think it's great. However, I do have a few qualms with it. The wonderful device can only be "linked" to one computer at a time, and if you ever accidentally hit "Yes" when you've plugged it into the wrong computer you lose all your songs and have to set them all back up again on your main iPod computer. I have several computers on my home network, and they all have MP3s on them. I wanted to be able to use my iPod to transfer files between each of them, but you cannot take files off the iPod. The Firewire connection is blazingly fast, and I love that, but in my mind its inability to transfer files between computers is a crippling issue. If it had this capability, it would be number one on the RIAA's hitlist, which could become one of its biggest selling points. After all, the MP3 Winners' List said it itself: in this post-Napster world, the number one indicator of the quality of a product is the fervor with which the RIAA wants to kill it.
And by the way, connecting the iPod to that little FM transmitter they sell at the Apple Store is incredible. You sit down in your car and all the music you want is playing on the radio, without commercials. It's like satellite radio but you choose ALL the music, not just the station. I love my iPod, and I think it should have been placed higher than Kazaa on the list. It is better for the music lover than Kazaa, because Kazaa can pretty much only be used for stealing shoddy versions of the music. The iPod can be used with MP3s ripped from CD, so you can control the quality of your music. I hate downloaded music, because so much of it sucks (qualitywise).
Lack of eloquence does not denote lack of intelligence, though they often coincide.
I'm not sure how to take a list of 'winners' that has KaZaa listed in the number one spot except to say that the 'winners' of 2002 my be the big losers of 2003.
The entertainment industry has won the right to sue KaZaa in the US. This will most assuredly ensue during the next few years. I'm not sure that under the law KaZaa is guilty of anything. What I am sure of is that the entertainment industry is far more finically capable of engaging in litigation than KaZaa is in defending against that litigation.
Napster made the mistake of providing a list of shared files to their users. The implication of this is that Napster should have known that most files shared where copyrighted and were being shared without the copyright owners permission. Further, the fact that Napster provided information as to where the user could find specific copyrighted materials meant that Napster was actively aiding in copyright infringements.
P2P programs like LimeWire that sprang up after Napster's legal problems began didn't inform the user where to find specific files. They only provide some of the IP addresses to computers on the network. It is the individual clients that must provide content lists. In this way LimeWire and other P2P software providers can distance themselves from copyright infringements. P2P networks have legitimate uses just as a hunting rifle has a legitimate use. It is no more the P2P software companies responsibility to ensure that user don't break the law than it is for the manufactures of hunting rifles to ensure that none of their products are used in murders or other crimes. At least that will be one defense that will probably be put to the courts.
However, I believe that the entertainment industry will crush these companies by driving them into bankruptcy through litigation. It's not right but it's just one more symptom of our societies being taken over by the Corporations.
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
I work in IT. Whenever I talk to other people who work in IT (and for that matter people who don't), most of the time I hear that the music distributors (e.g. RIAA) have outlived their usefulness. Once Hilary Rosen remarked that the IT industry was swallowing their industry.
It is. We are.
When you can electronically transfer music and burn it to recordable, red book-compatible media, when you can print cover art on an inkjet or color laser printer, there is absolutely no need for music distribution companies. No need whatsoever. And, more importantly, no need to pay US$21.99 for a music CD anymore.
The problem that the RIAA has is that people aren't nearly as stupid as they think. Uninformed perhaps, but not stupid. When people are clued in I always see the same response: we should either be able to download music for a small fee, or call our local music store, tell them what we want burned and printed, and head over to pick up our custom CD for all of 5 bucks.
So yes, the IT industry is going to swallow the record distribution industry, just as the automotive industry swallowed up the need for horses and buggies (and buggy whips).
Check Versiontracker for software to take files off of an ipod. And click the preferences in itunes so it won't overwrite the ipod. It's not that hard...
It's MPEG-1 Layer 3, and 1+3 is 4!
If we had drug runners over our highways in those percentages, then drugs would already be legalized and taxed. (not even heavily taxed, with that many drugs!) ...And screw the highway system, we'd have money to get back our SPACE PROGRAM! AND FREE DRUGS ON MARS!
At least /.'s writers usually have a clue as to the meanings of the words they misspell.
To avoid seeing this message again, always shut down your computer properly by selecting Shut Down from the Start Menu.
Try to spread the truth, not biased lies desgined to skew public opinion.
You're new to slashdot, aren't you? :)
"Wow, you're like some kind of superhero able to ward off happiness and success at every turn."
-- Ryan Stiles
Kazaa was doing pretty good until very recently -- my guess was that this list was compiled before the whole "US has global jurisdiction" thing, which sets a very dangerous legal prescedent. First Yahoo, now this?
If there is going to be a global community, there have to be global rules -- rules which are mutually agreed upon.
Plastic kills the environment, so if there is a way to reduce plastic production, I'll give it a look.
Downloading mp3s to my hard disk instead of buying a compact disk reduces plastic production. I feel more guilt about destroying the planet than I do about copying some data. WAKE UP. There are more important things to do in this world right now than worry about the profits of a bunch of suits.
A user has given a Insightful (+1) moderation to your comment, RTFA, attached to 2002 MP3 Winners and Losers. Your comment is currently scored (3).
*Raises eyebrow*
I just copied and pasted text from the article.. nothing insightful there..
"Edonkey: sounds like ass, works like ass."
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
I am sorry, I have no sympathy for the labels, or even the artists really (sorry) when it comes to losing their CD profits.
Let's not forget, not so very long ago, there really wasn't a way to record music. So, music, like every other form of "service" us humans provide, was a 1:1 ratio. If a show charged a fee to see, you paid it. If you wanted to see it again, you paid again. Much like 2 donkeys for 2 dollars, 4 donkeys for 4. Music was an artform, experienced first hand.
Then one day, technology advanced and shook things up. For a brief period a loophole was opened for a very small segment of individuals. It was discovered that an "artist" could "perform" only once, yet make virtually limitless, 100% accurate copies of their performance and sell them to everyone on the planet for pennies of production costs. Amazing! Sure, doctors, architects, automobile makers, any just about anyone else on the face of the earth that builds something or does something for money will never be able to (barring huge advancements in quantum replicators) do this. But who cares! Musicians could!
[this part is my opinion, disregard if you disagree] Music turned ugly. It went from meaningful art created one off, by the artists themselves, straight to celebrity fame, gaudy fortune, ass and tit shaking, commercial trash. Are there exceptions to this rule? For the love of God, YES! But, come on... Britney Spears?
Anyway. For a few decades music became a massively profitable industry. Handed to the labels by techological advancements. But now. The very same technology that gave musicians and their "masters" an unfair advantage has advanced once again and taken that cash cow away.
And I can't help but say... boo... fucking... hoo.
Welcome back to the rest of the world, where hard working people turn one kind of material into another, or provide a service for money, and are limited by the constraints of how much time is in a day, and how much the original materials cost. It may have been fun while it lasted, but I am not going to cry that you're losing it.
I'm Rick James with mod points biatch!
I don't understand why they added Xolox. Nobody uses Xolox anymore. It's infested with spyware and it's GUI sucks. It is also very behind in Gnutella technologies (I think it only recently added Ultrapeers, yikes). I don't think MP3Newswire is too informed in P2P because they should of at least listed Shareaza which has been hailed as the leader of the "new Gnutella" (Shareaza's Gnutella2, noteably). Frankly, Shareaza is currently the most advanced and best looking P2P client out there.
Oh well, maybe next year.
I wouldn't want to be an advertiser on the Losers page. It looks like their product is one of the items on the MP3 Loser's list!
In FIght Club theres a line which sets me a little off guard, giving me this "wow"-sensation:
I kinda had the same sensation with this suggestion. Good one!
Not Buzzword 2.0 compliant. Please speak english.
Their choice of the RIAA as #1 is absolutely moronic!
Repeat after me. The RIAA's goal is to MAKE MONEY. Whether they win court cases, or lose court cases, or stop downloads, or increase downloads, is totally irrelevant.
They said it themselves in the article. Their sales are UP this year.
Do the words "laughing all the way to the bank" come to mind?
I object to that article, and to the next reply.
If you want an mp3 player that can also be used to transfer files, try the Nex IIe. There was a review and an slashback article about it on /. awhile back. Takes up to the largest compact flash or IBM microdrive you can find (about 1 GB currently). You just dump raw mp3s on to it and whatever other files you want and off you go.
Woopty Doo Basil, what does it all mean?!
At #1 is RIAA - an acronym that's become all-too familiar. When I was young, and my buddies would all buy different Albums & trade cassette tapes of them, where was RIAA then? When we'd record the radio, and then cut out the commercials, where was RIAA? Was our group so unique? Was the recording industry of the time so much wiser then that they realized our money was limited, and we could only buy so many albums?
Here's my suggestion - let's boycott the music for one month. How about "Musicless March"? ("Fxck'em February" has a nice ring, too, but may not get the right attention). RIAA assumes a direct correlation between downloaded music and their lack of sales. Let's show them the correlation between pissing off their customers and losing their profits.
"The large print giveth, and the small print taketh away" -- "Step Right Up", Tom Waits
RIAA does not want to acknowledge the the PC has become a feature in the home, and that it is capable of storing and playing music, and is very suitable for delivery of music. Same goes for MPAA.
Their actions are tantamount to telling us that it is unlawful to enjoy your music on your computer. (Why else are they enrypting cd's and making it illegal to crack the encryption)
The RIAA should realise that it should not wish away the problem of PC's being used to enjoy music. The have to realise that PC's have lowered the value of CD's. Its simple economics. Substitute goods causing a reduction in the demand for CD's.
It is not unlawful to get people out of business. Nobody still uses a typewriter these days. If they think they are immune to changes in teh market place, then 10yrs from now the music industry will be a case study in business lectures about how not to resist inevitable change and 'go with the flow'.
Windows 3.1 Beer: The world's most popular. Comes in a 16-oz. can that
looks a lot like Mac Beer's. Requires that you already own a DOS Beer.
Claims that it allows you to drink several DOS Beers simultaneously, but
in reality you can only drink a few of them, very slowly, especially
slowly if you are drinking the Windows Beer at the same time. Sometimes,
for apparently no reason, a can of Windows Beer will explode when you
open it.
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