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The Rise and Fall of Napster
Jedi Paramedic writes "Boston.com has an interesting story about the rise and fall of everyone's favorite file-swapping service. Also the subject of a new book by Joseph Menn, the story goes into great detail about the unfortunate-but-heroic Shawn Fanning and his reluctance to admit that his uncle, who in the end masterminded little more than the lining of his own pockets, had taken advantage of him. From getting screwed in the original 70/30 split with his uncle to his uncle's refusal to loosen his iron grip on the company even at the expense of its very being, the article (and the book) go a long way in chronicling the rise and fall of Napster, and crediting Shawn for not airing the family's dirty laundry. An interesting and well-written read."
My grandfather told me about how when he was a kid, they traded files on Napster, and how it got in trouble for something about "copyright." I'm not exactly sure what that is, but apparently, information wasn't free back then. I'm glad things have changed.
Its too bad Napster had to do music sharing. The technology between P2P networks pionered by Napster was something though. This type of network along with open souce and GPL software, along with MD5 checksums could be a great combination.
everyone's favorite file-swapping service
It sure as hell wasn't my favourite...
...watching the musical! :-/)
Seriously, doesn't this seem a little like 'great expectations' or something (only problem being I'm not sure if GE got made into an musical or if I'm getting it confused with something else.
The two "spotlight reviews" on Amazon are interesting.
napster's rise was stunning, as was it's fall - but it's left behined something that the riaa/mpaa CAN'T take away, and that is the concept of p2p sharing of media on the internet. pre-napster internet use and post-napster internet use are two completely different things for numerous age-groups now...
cheers,
i wish i was but oh well
Can anyone explane how Napster made money? AFAIR there were no ads on the site or in the client (save the cdnow link that was in later versions of napster). It obviously made some kind of money, however, because I remember hearing about how Shawn Fanning made a lot of money.
err, the uncle did it.
In all seriousness, GE sucked. I'd write a longer review, but this about sums it up.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
...please scan it in, OCR it and "share" the contents with others on the net, because I don't think people should have to pay for it.
Seems though the RIAA succeeded in crushing it in doing so it has created a cultural icon that shall be remembered for years, even decades to come.
:)
Now, if we could just form a religion based upon the cat-like diety, perhaps we could defeat the DMCA as a form of freedom of Religion
I guess you could make the argument that music and information want to be free and that life without music would be a terrible existence, but the only difference between Napster and shoplifting a CD is physical evidence.
http://www.remix.net/
I thought Napster was bloody awful.
Audiogalaxy was far superior in every way. It's a damn shame they got shut down. I think AG's model and design is the best starting point for the music industry to get into a paid-for music downloading service.
Unlike Napster, it just worked. I didn't have to sit around to make sure the download started and that I didn't get cut off, and I didn't have to find other sources. I just queued up as many tracks as I wanted, and AG made sure I got them.
-kidlinux.
Or something.
Look, Napster didn't do much that Hotline didn't already do.
It added two things.
1. A single worldwide tracker instead of having to know an entry point. This meant that everyone saw everything. This had its good and its bad.
2. It made everyone's machines look like a single machine. On Hotline, once you found the stuff you wanted, you still had to connect to the server which had it.
See article on what was going on in 1998.
Wired article on Hotline
http://cgi.ebay.com/ebaymotors/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?Vi ewItem&item=2411725682&category=6212
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Frankly, Napster was about as harmful as radio.
Except that radio provides a wildly different service than Napster does. When it can feed you high-quality audio pre-broken up into tracks, where the DJ doesn't speak at the beginning and end of the track with the CD and track information inserted, and gives you whatever specific track you might want on demand *then* radio is comparable to Napster. Napster is far more able than radio to replace a CD purchase.
If people were using Napster to save money, then how come $400 iPods are popular? $400 buys you a pretty good number of CDs.
Not an argument that Napster didn't decrease CD sales:
* You're assuming that a significant percentage of mp3/ogg listeners own iPods. This is, in my experience, false.
* mp3/oggs provide some nice features that CDs don't. Portability, custom mixes, ease of obtaining a given song, etc, which could be worth a portion of those $400. That doesn't legally justify infringement against the copyright owners, and *does* produce lost CD sales.
* Marketing. The iPod had a *lot* more money put into marketing it than a CD does. People make irrational purchasing decisions all the time based on marketing.
* Gift-giving. It's fairly reasonable to assume that a lot of piracy goes on when people don't want to drop another $15 at the store...but people give gifts at birthdays, anniversarys, and Christmas. Since the gifts are going to be given anyway, a $400 iPod at a holiday can be more attractive than a series of $15 CD purchases on ordinary days.
* The psychology of large-ticket item purchasing is very different from that impulse items.
May we never see th
WinMx is a zillion times better than Napster. Cut off on head, seven spring from the stump.
to paraphrase you: its theft because you stole it.
what beautifully circular logic. just because the law saws something doesnt make that moral, right or rational.
walking by a car that is blasting the latest p. diddy song is "enjoying the fruits of someone else's labors" without paying them for the priveledge, and to call that theft is laughable. downloading an mp3 bears much more resemblance to this example than taking a piece of property from someone.
i have never seen a convincing arguement that aquiring information is theft, because its an impossible argument. theft implies the deprivation of something, and information can be copied infinitely to only gain.
stretching the laws of physical property to ideas is so rediclously flawed.
tasty electronic music vittles
I have yet to see significant uptake of Gnutella and various other services for legitimate uses.
Because most of them are wildly inefficient. BitTorrent is not uncommonly used for large-scale legitimate large file distribution among the tech-savvy now, and eDonkey is similarly useful.
May we never see th
Comment removed based on user account deletion
It's the sharing option. One can throttle the sharing down to where it really is non existent. The ratio of leeches to sharers is about 100:1. to give a conservative figure.
Napster had it right, you had to share at least one file. This ensured that everyone wasn't a leech, you'd eventually get your song. With WinMX you can see everything that's out there, but it is basically out of reach.
Everybody on Slashdot already knows how great it is to work on something without getting paid! Afterall, that was not only the original idea behind Slashdot, but of course Linux, etc.
Sounds like an interesting read...Since I am morally opposed to paying book publishers...I was wondering if anyone knew where I could download a PDF copy of the book?
"In your pathetic little mind"
i'm really sorry that your arguments are so weak that you feel have to resort to blatant ad hominem attacks. very nice. when you feel like growing up and discussing as adults, drop me an email.
"That falls under the realm of something you can't avoid, and you have no active control over not hearing the music. If you choose to be within aural range of the music and don't wish to wear earplugs, you have to hear it. You don't have a choice in the matter."
well, what if you *choose* to stand next to that car? are you stealing from anyone? no. thats rediculous. what you are talking about is legislating what information a person is allowed to learn, which is a really scary concept.
"Okay, you've just removed the primary motivation to find the cure in the first place."
if you honestly beleive that money is the primary motive behind science you are much more sheltered and ignorant than i had thought. ahve you met and talked with many scientist? furthermore, its amazingly short sited to think that granting monopolies on information is the only viable method of funding science. all you have to do is look how far science, art and literature progressed before IP laws existed. public and private grants have been happily funding the progression of the arts and science for millenia, so why do some people suddenly think that IP monopolies are the only method of funding?
"Why bother researching ANYTHING anymore (faster processors, better food, space travel) when there's no way you can ever recoup your costs for it?"
why bother implementing an entire OS and give it away for free? your suggestion that people wouldnt innovate if it wernt for a cash insintive is laughable and has been proven wrong by people deeds throughout all of history. but i suppose its a little to challenging to look past the last century in this debate.
tasty electronic music vittles
"So if I hire you and allow you to work for me for two weeks, but then deny you a paycheck, I haven't stolen anything from you, have I?" this is not theft, its breach of contract. major distinction.
tasty electronic music vittles
Furthurnet has (twice? three times?) removed all Phish shares because some moron put up a disc or two Phish was selling from their website. Everything on it is supposed to come from tapers trading shows where the bands authorize audience taping. Some good stuff, lotsa hippies.
There was a nice 10 minute mpeg off GuerillaNewsNetwork a while ago that was distributed through BitTorrent. I actually went and installed the bugger to download the damn thing, and I've gotta give the credits where they are due. The thing downloaded from about 10 different sources in all, switching to the next source when the previous one dried up, and I had the movie as fast as if I had downloaded it straight from one fast server.
Daniel
Carpe Diem
i'm really sorry that your arguments are so weak that you feel have to resort to blatant ad hominem attacks. very nice. when you feel like growing up and discussing as adults, drop me an email.
It has nothing to do with weakness, I assure you, since your argument is the one that cannot be backed in any legal, moral, or realistic fashion. It is my opinion of your thinking skills, which at this point are not anything remotely approaching "respectful".
if you honestly beleive that money is the primary motive behind science you are much more sheltered and ignorant than i had thought
If you believe that all science is motivated by altruism, you're the one living in a sheltered dreamworld. Billions of dollars are spent every year working on things like Rogain and Viagra. Did the companies that created these products do so solely out of the desire to allow men to have hairy heads and more sex? Of course not! They did so because they know that people will pay even more billions for products that allow them to do so!
And while individual scientists may be altruistic enough to donate their time, knowledge, and efforts, huge projects like fusion power, cures for cancer, etc. require huge teams of researchers will billion-dollar labs and equipment. People don't just give this stuff away, it requires money. Investors will not invest if there's no return to be had. If you don't believe this, you're the one living in the unrealistic, simplistic worldview.
why bother implementing an entire OS and give it away for free? your suggestion that people wouldnt innovate if it wernt for a cash insintive is laughable and has been proven wrong by people deeds throughout all of history.
Your spelling is the laughable component of this argument, but I'll ignore it for the moment and concentrate on what appears to be your point.
Yes, Linux grew out of thousands of people's efforts, and many of them received nothing more than passing gratification for their efforts. You've proven my point while being ignorant of it, it seems. These people chose to make their time available, volunteering if you will. They made a choice to say the dollar value of their time spent was zero. That is their choice, just like it's someone else's choice to say their time is worth $40 an hour, or $400 an hour. It is not your right to say what anyone else charges for their time is right or wrong. Quit playing God with everyone else's pocketbooks. You'd have quite a different tune if it was your money at stake.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
sorry man, of course mp3 sharing is *illegal* but that has no bearing weather or not it is *moral*. for proof, see Slavery.
tasty electronic music vittles
As a business, Napster was a lousy lousy idea. If anyone was taken, it was Napster's uncle, but I'd say he took himself with his short sighted greed. He believed that he could, in effect, twist the industry's arm. He was wrong. He lost.
"If you believe that all science is motivated by altruism, you're the one living in a sheltered dreamworld" no. aparently you arnt able to comprehend my argument. if you go back reread the full text of my comment you might notice that i gave mention of how indeed science has managed to get funding throughout the ages without needing copyright and patent monopolies. so what's changed this century? why suddently do people like you claim that there can be no funding of arts and sciences without copyrights and patents? science and art will progress without copyrights and patents just like it has for all of human history.
tasty electronic music vittles
...instead of defending the ones we've taken apart.
If someone says "I'll play my song for you at your party, but you must pay me $20 per hour for my time", you're obliged to either pay them or they're not obliged to show up. You cannot take what someone else is offering without paying them what they're asking for it. If you do, you're stealing."
"It is the same way with any human (or group of humans) that has a skill that is in demand. Do you work for free? You must perform some work to pay for your car, apartment, etc. How would you like it if someone took your skills and failed to pay you? Oh, I forget, stealing is only okay when it happens to other people."
both of these examples would be a breach of contract, not a theft. do you not understand the difference?
tasty electronic music vittles
are you REALLY equating the act of downloading a file without the file creators permission with enslaving a person, stipping them of all their free will and forcing them to do work against their will? this analagy just holds no water. why dont you stick to logic rather that obfuscating the holes in your argument with layers apon layers of unrelated, broken analagies.
tasty electronic music vittles
seriously, you need to go back and look at the history of intellectual property. copyright is only a few hundred years old, before which all the foundations of our societies were laid. "Just about everything you see around you is the result of a system based on compensating people for their efforts, thoughts, and inventions" of course, but why do you think that the only form of compensation revolves around the restriction of intellectual property? this just isnt supported by history.
tasty electronic music vittles
"Ah! So, just because someone has a lot of something, that gives you the right to take some of it, because they "won't notice it"?
Great! I'm sure you've got some money in your bank account somewhere. I'll just take some of it! You shouldn't care, because you had a lot of it in there to begin with!"
see there you go again with the bad analagies. in this case the person is literally deprived of money from their bank account, which is clear theft.tasty electronic music vittles
so when you cant come up with any rational argument for this insane idea that sharing information = theft, just change the subject? show me once where i cloaked, muddled, deflected or obfuscated. all i've done was argue ratinally and point out the gaping holes in your assertions which you cannot defend.
tasty electronic music vittles
if you cared to notice my web page you would know that in fact i am a content creator who encourages the free trade of my music. so instead of trying disqualify my rational arguments based on ad hominem attacks, why not try logic?
tasty electronic music vittles
and stop putting words in my mouth.
"you cannot force others to give their services away just because you do"
nowhere did i say this. it has nothing to do with my point, so cut it out with the staw men. i brought up the fact that i am a content creator because you keep trying to paint me as some shiftie-eyed theif trying to jusitfy their crime spree instead of listening to the reasoned argument i make. you know nothing about me, so instead of wasting your time trying to impeach my character, try dealing with my logic.
as of yet you have made no convincing argument of deprivation from file sharing, but your managed to waste a lot of energy with personal attacks and misleading analagies.
are you intellectually able to lay off the personal attacks and stick the discussion at hand? do you understnad hte concept of ad hominem and how badly it reflects on a) your reasoning skills and b) your argument?
"The blinders you wear are gargantuan, and it must be nice to life in your own little world. Let me know if you ever become reconnected to reality."
i'm very sorry that you are unable to talk rationally without resorting to playground insults.
tasty electronic music vittles
"Okay, steer around this one, o high and mighty one"
its pretty sad that you can't write one response to me without throwing some insult.
"you're sharing information that the information creator has declared to be unshareable. You are going against the wishes of the person who created the info in the first place."
sharing, distributing, and deriving from information without the consent of the original author is commonplace and perfectly moral. reporters regularly publish internal memo's from companies, the authors of which clearly never intended for a public eye. the is perfectly moral and legal.
"Take the GPL for a good analogy. You are free to share all sorts of stuff under the GPL, but you must meet certain criteria set forth by the creators of the GPL and the software authors. I recall that in the past several companies have attempted to take GPL-protected works and use them in commercial software without crediting or compensating the original software authors. What a horrendous outrage ensued on Slashdot, with everyone screaming for blood at how awful it all was! I'm sure you were somewhere in the crowd, raging on how unprincipled the violator must've been to violate the GPL in such a manner.
Now, here you stand advocating the exact same kind of action! The author of the works has decreed that you must comply with certain criteria if you wish to make use of their work. In this case, they demand to be paid. You, feeling smug and self-assured of your righteousness, violate their wishes, partake of their efforts, and give no thought whatosever to the fact that you've done something wrong. Quite to the contrary, you think you've done something noble! What a farce! What an amazing, absolutely mind-boggling amount of self-deception you've engaged in! You're more than happy to tread on rights, so long as they're not your rights! How self centered and egotistical you are to think in this manner!"
you have this whole mystique built up about me even though you know nothing about me. in fact, i side much more with the BSD style license which allows people to take and resell free software derivatives. further, i actively encourage people to take my works and make derivative works from them. so really, this whole indignant passage you wrote has nothing to do with me, or the argument at hand.
still, you have not laid down any evidence of deprivation or harm caused by someone downloading and listening to a song they didnt buy.
tasty electronic music vittles
i think this is key. i've been working on launching an open source record label soon and this i think cuts to the quick of the morality of this for me. if feels wrong when someoen "takes" someone elses work and sells it as their own because you are misrepresenting their work as your own. this is clearly immoral. i think this is the key behind hte BSD license: "take it, do what you want with it, but please keep me credit where credit is due." sounds good to me.
tasty electronic music vittles
Now, if we could just form a religion based upon the cat-like diety, perhaps we could defeat the DMCA as a form of freedom of Religion :)
Does Satanism count as a religion? If so, I think they'd simply form the DMCA religion, which would be very much the same (yes pun intended).
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I was fucking around with my new cable modem connection, picking songs at random to download. I queued up about 20, then set about to play some NES emulator games. I realized that my GamePad was unplugged, so I plugged it back in. Wham, BSOD. I cursed at the computer for a few moments, then turned off the monitor and went to answer the ringing phone. When I came back about an hour or two later, I turned the tower off and then tried to turn it back on. The power supply was dead. Kicked the tower, then went to get a new power supply, and brought it home to install the next day.
When I got the new power supply installed, I went to check everything to make sure nothing had disappeared. "That's funny", I think to myself, "why is there 300 MB of free space gone?" You got it. While the computer was in BSOD mode, completely frozen, AG had been working in the background, downloading 15 of the 20 songs I had queued up. That's a killer app.
what, you mean a site besides f.scarywater.net, which is mentioned on slashdot just about every time a big downloadable file is mentioned(matrix trailer, animatrix, anachronox, broken saints, etc) that also carries redhat and knoppix isos?
Sure, both were innovative but I doubt either would exist as the did/do now if it wasn't for IRC coming first. To an end user Napster was little more than an IRC network that gave file sharing priority over group chatting. ICQ is IRC with a foundation of individual chat instead of group chat.
Though that may be an oversimplification.
I believe you're confusing the software's intended use with its primary use. BitTorrent is a program to assist in the distribution of large files, period. It just so happens that the most highly demanded large files on the internet are also illegal. BitTorrent doesn't really even directly facilitate piracy in the way that Napster did; you can't search it. It depends on people to provide the end user with trackers, and the indexing of these trackers is entirely separate from the BitTorrent program itself.
Each site that indexes BitTorrent trackers essentially becomes a mini-Napster. If you want to shut down the piracy of a given file, all you need to do is send a C&D letter to the person hosting the tracker, and no new people will be able to download it without someone sticking their neck out to repost the tracker on a different site. This is much like the old days, when we searched the web for our mp3 files, and waded through porn banners the old fashioned way. The only difference is that it doesn't cost humongous amounts of bandwidth to the person hosting the tracker.
People see BitTorrent and how it's used, and assume that it's just the next generation of piracy software. But it's more than that; it's the future of all online distribution. While it makes illegal uses easy, it makes the legitimate uses even easier. Even if it isn't right now, BitTorrent really should be the preferred distribution medium for just about any time-sensitive content. Imagine downloading the newest Redhat or Debian distro through it. All of a sudden the bandwidth bills for sites like redhat.com aren't quite so exhorbitant.
The only downside to BT that I've observed is that there's a sharp falloff between when a file is new and the downloads fast, and when it's old and completely inaccessible. It lies on a file's popularity to provide the extra bandwidth, and as I've noticed in the anime fansubbing community, you generally can't download a file over BT more than a week or two after it's released. This makes it ideal for time-sensitive stuff like news feeds or weekly netcasts, but completely useless for archival.
Anyway, to claim that BT is contributory infringement is practically to toe Senator Hollings' line. It's the amazingly useful technology that would be banned because it doesn't have piracy checks.
I have yet to hit a site that provides (i.e. iso's, databases and etc..) using BitTorrent.
It was pretty much the *only* way to get ahold of Red Hat 9 isos in the first days of it being publically downloadable -- the FTP sites were packed.
And you're right that the majority of content out there on P2P networks is pirated -- but that happens to be because they're the only real way to distribute massive numbers of copies of large files, so they're pretty much a prerequisite for movie piracy. While there are legitimate large files available, aside from isos, usually there isn't such a strong need to transfer so much data.
May we never see th
John Fanning just took money for nothing while Shawn fanning did all the work. I think John Fannning would make a good record company executive, or perhaps he could even replace Hilary Rosen as head of the RIAA. Maybe Napster would still be around if that huckster had never been involved.
How ya like dat?
Don't circumvent the law, reform it.
Sure. How are the millions of consumers supposed to reform laws that were bought and paid for by huge media company lobbies?
Apparently expressing your opinion in the form of civil disobedience isn't enough. Apparently thousands and thousands of calls, faxes and letters to congressmen aren't enough either. Apparently lawsuits that go to the supreme court aren't enough either.
The IP laws are unjust. People with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo are allowed to railroad laws through congress with little or no public commentary. They should be ignored even by people who are otherwise law-abiding citizens. When the law fails us sometimes all we have is subversion.
--- Wherever you go, everyone is always connected...
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Wow, too bad you are having so much difficulty showing people the "light".
Well, let's look at a few interesting things instead. How about the US's decision to disregard European copyrights back during the formation of the country? Seems that in order to build a local publishing business they needed some creative works to publish. Most of that was coming out of Europe and the US publishing houses were free to republish these works without paying any royalties. So, we jump started our publishing business by "stealing" from others.
Now, we jump forward to today. We have a bunch of record companies complaining about how music downloading is "stealing" and causing loss of sales. Now, when you actually look at the numbers we find that during the height of Napster sales actually increased. Additionally, we look at testimonials from people like Janis Ian and we find that the publicity of these P2P sites and free downloads on their web sites have lead to, wait for it, increased sales.
So, this only benefits the obscure, you might argue. Wrong. Look at Eminem's previous album (before 8 Mile). It was the most "pirated" album on the P2P networks and bootleg CD's for an entire week before the album went on sale. Guess what, he still enjoyed record sales when it came out.
Meanwhile the same companies that have been crying foul in the face of this evidence are quietly signing deals with the FTC to try to make price fixing charges go away.
So, now which do you think would hurt sales more:
1) Increased publicity?
2) Artificially high prices?
--- I wish I could hear the soundtrack to my life. That way I'd know when to duck.
whats utterly unprovable is your suggestion that the artist looses anything because of some fictitious "future revenue" ... lets say someone downloads 60 gigs of music from every artist they can, regarless of how they feel about them because they are interested in having a "complete" music collection? now, its is utterly impossible that they could have ever afforded to pay for all of that, so what future revenue did the artist loose? none, its a rediculous idea.
its akin to saying that person A who ruins the end of a movie for person B by telling them the ending or just saying "dont go, it sucks" STOLE from the movie house since they are "depriving" them of some theoretical future revenue "lost" because person B probably would have gone had they not run into person A. this is such an inane idea. it doesnt hold water for a millisecond.
and, "dude", just becayse you say "it's theft" doesnt make it so. in all this babeling there there has yet been one convincing argument that supports that idea. sorry.
tasty electronic music vittles