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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."
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
in the first 3 client releases there was a banner ad space, but it never displayed anything except a link to napster.com. I guess we should have known the business model was fkd up when the new clients had no banner space.
Your first impression was correct. It made no money at all, and any money Shawn made was out of dumb-ass investors' pockets. If you ask me, it had no serious potential for making money.
but the only difference between Napster and shoplifting a CD is physical evidence.
yawn. mod parent -1, troll. No one can honestly say that they think that.
Here's a hint, if I shoplift a CD, the store doesn't have it anymore, if I use Napster, no one is deprived of anything. They're so completely different, not only are they in different ballparks, they're playing a different game.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
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.
You are missing the point. They should have kept Napster running and offered all of their music. Kazaa and Bearshare would have never been developed, or at best they would have been tiny. If you knew that you could get what you wanted 100% of the time, you wouldn't even mess with the rest.
Tell me how the music industry plan worked out so well? They are looking at their own demise - lost opportunities.
Here's a hint, if I shoplift a CD, the store doesn't have it anymore, if I use Napster, no one is deprived of anything.
And that's where you're wrong. You are enjoying the fruits of someone else's labors, namely that of the artist, the producer, the sound mixer, the recording booth operator, the marketing company, and all the secretaries, managers, and janitors that work for the above companies. They all work for a living, and they get paid when people buy the music that you just stole.
That's right, you stole it. You now have something you didn't have before, and you didn't pay for it. Copyright law says you have to pay for it. Intellectual property law says you have to pay for it. Common decency says you ought to pay for it. And if the long arm of the law catches you, you can be damn sure they're going to make you pay for it.
Look, you can hate the RIAA/MPAA all you want. I have no love for them at all. I think CD's are ridiculously overpriced, that the companies are gouging us while providing us with horrid content. I think the MPAA's control over the DVD format vis-a-vis region coding, CSS, and Macrovision is one of the most belligerent things a provider can do to a customer. However, none of that gives me the right to steal from them, and it sure as hell doesn't give you any moral credibility to be justifying your theft.
If you had any morals or principles at all, other than your own self satisfaction at someone else's expense, you'd be content to simply boycott the labels you don't agree with and trade music from bands that allow you to legally do so. Instead, you're just content to be a thief, attempting to moralize your actions because it allows you to steal and feel smug about it.
Face it, information is not free, nor will it ever be free unless the owner of that information chooses to make it so. Information is worth whatever the owner wishes to charge for it, and the rarer it is, the more they can charge. If you don't like it, I'm sure there's some nice socialist country somewhere that'd take you in. North Korea, for example.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
So really, fuck MD5 only if you're trying to make something secure against attackers.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
But you are not, in any sense, depriving someone else of something that they had, only something that they were entitled to on principle.
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?
Of course I've stolen something from you! I've stolen your time, your effort, and your creativity for my own personal gain, and I've refused to compensate you for it as was agreed before you began work. If I, as an employer, were to do such a thing, you could sue me for breach of contract and most certainly win.
You, as a consumer, have the same "contract" with the provider to compensate them for the assigned value of the works you are enjoying. That contract is called "copyright law", and you're completely in the wrong if you think it doesn't apply to the situation.
You're advocating hypocrisy here, but that's nothing new on Slashdot. Can't you rise above this petty thievery?
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Because there's a point for many people (not all) where paying a reasonable fee for a 'legit', reliably-good datafile, is much more convenient than spending the time and effort to sift through multiple p2p networks full of unknowns.
Of course, even if the per-track and/or monthly fee was reasonable (not in this life), I'd still have a major problem filtering my money through those bloodsucking middlemen instead of getting it directly to the deserving artists.
Assuming the artists were in control, I wouldn't pay for the ads^H^H^Hmp3's individually, but I would pay a flat fee for access to a universal service with users-like-you-also-like-this recommendations & ratings and such. Multiple islands of p2p would pale in comparison.
--
Power to the Peaceful
Sorry, but that's a poor example. What if no one liked your music? You'd still be broke, even without piracy. Hence, there is no implied contract here. A more realistic example would be if you put on a fireworks display, and charged people to sit on a grassy field and watch. Then, no one came because they all realized that the fireworks would be just as visible from another park that they could sit in for free.
The point that you're trying to make is that it's immoral to enjoy the fruits of someone's labor without compensating them for it. That's true. However, as Ronald Coase posits in his economic theory of externalities, a victim is rarely a simple innocent bystander. Most victims have put themselves in a situation where they will be victimized (Coase's classic example is that of the person who buys a house by an airport; he is a victim of noise pollution, but this is an issue he should have known about when he bought the house). In this case, the musicians are allowing themselves to be victimized by relying on an oudated economic model: profiting from the sale of pre-recorded music. The solution to this problem is not for people to hysterically shout "Stop pirating music!" The solution is to find a new model for the music industry to follow. Most likely, this will mean depending on live performances and merchandising, rather than recordings, for income. It will also likely mean that musicians of the future will have to accept lower incomes, the field will no longer be dominated by a few superstars, but by a larger number of middle class performers and an even larger number of hobbyists.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
Theft, fraud (hiring someone then not paying), and copyright infringment are three different things. They require different methods of enforcement, and different levels of punishment. If I copy some of my CDs onto my hard drive so I can play them in any order I want, the RIAA may say this is "theft", but I didn't steal anything. If I play CDs on an anti-skip player and I don't pay the RIAA for "RAM buffer copies", I didn't steal anything.
Here is an example of why this line of thinking for copyrights is absurd:
Lets say some bloke writes a song with the phrase "my dog fell down and he can't get up." Let's call him Dogman. The song becomes a #1 hit. In certain situations, people start using the phrase. After a while, Dogman decides using this phrase is "theft", and everyone who does so should pay him $1 each time. Would you pay Dogman just for the "right" to utter a stupid phrase? What if your dog really did fall down and couldn't get up? Should you have to pay so you could tell people?
Yeah, my examples are more marginal than sending copies to 10,000 of your closest "friends". The point is the RIAA uses the term "theft" as newspeak to increase the range of copyright laws. Mass redistribution of music is "theft". Then any CD to tape (or CD) copying is "theft". Then storing your CD on a hard drive for convenience is "theft". Then any sort of "RAM buffer copy" is "theft". Then, any use of any words in any song is "theft".
I think the "information wants to be free" whackos are...well...whackos. If "information" is talking to you, or you think "information" has desires like a sentient being, then you really need to see a doctor. But it doesn't mean everything they say is wrong.
Nobody has the right to a business model.
I couldn't agree more. However, the method to combat this business model is to boycott their products. By stealing their product, you are intrinsically admitting that their product has value (at least to you), otherwise you wouldn't do it. You have obtained something of value, yet have given nothing of value in return. This is a one-sided transaction no matter how you look at it.
If the artists don't get the money I would have paid -- boohoo, they can always get a real job or find some other way to make money
Would you listen to yourself for a minute? Can you grasp exactly what you just stated? Imagine for a minute that you were the person with the valuable commodity (say, your programming skills). You have just advocated that people have a right to your skills to use however they see fit, and you have absolutely no right to demand any recompense for it. That's beatiful! I'd love to have you working for me, since I'd never have to pay you!
Most talented artists don't make music for the money anyway.
That's a pretty big generalization. I'm sure interviewed all these artists and they responded in this fashion, right? Of course you didn't.
Regardless of whether they'd do it "for the money" or not, the point is it takes money to live. Without money you have no food, clothing, or shelter. Even musicians who compose because they love music must have a regular job to pay the bills. Professional musicians have devoted their lives to their music in lieu of a typical job, and you have no right whatsoever to pass judgement on the rightness of their choice -- it is their liberty to do what they like, just as it is your liberty to not partake of their product.
Sure, it is illegal to copy copyrighted stuff. But it is not immoral
That has got to be the most twisted, abhorrent, ridiculous statement I've yet to see in this argument. What you're proposing is tantamount to saying that no one has any rights to recompense for their works unless you say so. What arrogance you display!
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
That is something that many people forget or don't realize. This is exactly what I would want from the music companies. I'm not a starving student anymore: I have plenty of money to spend on CDs, but I want to be able to conveniently preview what I hear so the money isn't wasted. My time is valuable, so I don't want to spend it looking for poorly recorded crap on Kazaa. I've noticed that most of the CDs I purchased recently were because I heard songs on the soundtrack of one movie or another. I rarely listen to the radio other than NPR (that's how I discovered India Arie before she was popular), and MTV etc is just a waste of time.
The RIAA and their ilk should just forget about the people who can't afford to buy CDs. Trying to stop piracy from that quarter is a waste of their time and we all know it's a losing battle. When I was a student with no money, it would have been no big deal to spend my free time amassing thousands of tracks online. Now I just want to plunk down my cash and play a CD with no effort. I'm in the market they should be trying to serve. Instead, the more I find out about their tactics, the more I want to just buy CDs directly from the artists and bypass them altogether.
...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
The phenomenon of Napster was that it captivated the non technical crowd by giving them a way to find something they already wanted in a new format that was just as good as (or better than) the formats to which they had been accustomed. Napster was so popular because people wanted music. You can't make the vast populace want open source software just by creating a distribution system. Napster was the creation of a distribution system for a latent demand.
Lack of eloquence does not denote lack of intelligence, though they often coincide.