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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."
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.
...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
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.
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
Repeat after me: fuck MD5.
MD5 is flawed
Given known current flaws in MD5, it is possible to produce bogus data that matches a given MD5, though no constraints can be placed upon the content. A trojan, for instance, cannot be placed in a MD5'd file, but the file can contain random data.
However, one of the fairly obvious ways to use MD5 is with a "tree" of checksums -- one for the whole file, one for each half, one for each quarter, etc, etc, etc. In this case, it is not possible to produce data that will pass validation.
eDonkey uses MD4 hashes -- which is significantly easier to attack than MD5 -- yet I haven't seen problems with forged chunks on eDonkey.
And while SHA-1 is nice -- and it might be just easier if everyone used it -- it is significantly slower. When I tested the md5sum and shasum implementations on my Linux box, I found that shasum ran at about a sixth the speed of md5sum.
May we never see th
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.