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All The Rave
One thing's certain: Menn, who covered Silicon Valley for the Los Angeles Times, meticulously researched his subject. The book is loaded with facts and figures, but more impressive is the level of National Enquirer-worthy details Menn milked from mountains of transcripts and one-on-one interviews.
Menn's discoveries can be described as nothing less than shocking, at least for anyone who hasn't followed the story blow-by-blow. We learn about Shawn's money-grubbing uncle, John Fanning, whose shady business practices cost the company numerous investors, but also the respect of his own family. Menn writes that at first Shawn Fanning was pleased when his uncle drew up papers incorporating Napster, Inc. Then the elder Fanning told Shawn he would be getting only 30 percent of the company. John Fanning would keep the rest. Shawn was stunned.
Menn also exposes Napster executives' ignorance of copyright laws, the company's pay-off to rapper Chuck D so he would publicly support file sharing and rockstress Courtney Love's flirtations with Shawn, whom she once introduced at an award show as her future husband.
With a boatload of rock stars and other curious characters, you'd think the spectacle of it all would overshadow the book's business patois. Menn attempts, valiantly, to do so, but it's still evident that All the Rave is a long-handed exercise in business reporting rather than a drama-filled account. There is little surprise in the overarching Napster story because most readers will know how the story ends before cracking open the front cover.
If you're still committed to All the Rave, the best reading takes place in two separate sections: the first on the peer-to-peer program's incubation, and the second on Napster's attempt to take on the well-muscled music industry.
In Chapters 1 and 2, Menn introduces Shawn Fanning, an unassuming high school kid who comes from humble beginnings. Though his life doesn't exactly make for a Horatio Alger story, it's interesting to see how Shawn stops pursuing a sports scholarship for college and instead focuses on computer programming.
After his uncle John gives Shawn his first computer, the aw-shucks kid from Massachusetts comes across a brilliant idea, peer-to-peer file sharing, which he develops with the help of friends in several online communities. The story is touching, and it's fascinating to take a behind-the-scenes look at how the program originated, first through Shawn and then as the product of a tight-knit online community.
Techies of all stripes will be amused as Menn attempts to make computer programming jargon edible to the mainstream reader. Just imagine explaining terms like IRC and warez to your grandma, and you'll have a good idea of the language in these beginning chapters. Despite a few cornball explanations, however, it's still refreshing to see past Napster's media hype and to see Napster for what it started as: a labor of love created by a kid who wanted nothing more than to take advantage of the online universe.
Following chapters barrel through the company's beginnings, dedicating much space to vilifying John Fanning, who seems to deserve every bit of consternation the reading public can muster. After the shock of the elder Fanning's behavior wears off, however, you'll find yourself dragging through painfully detailed accounts of acquiring executive and meetings with skeptical venture capitalists. Anyone who isn't utilizing All the Rave as a handbook on how not to run a business can skip to Chapter 7, in which Menn shifts the book's focus to Napster's delicate dance with the music industry. It's a Davey and Goliath tale for the 21st century. To accent the vastness of the undertaking, Menn dishes out a brief history of the music biz, offering such a compelling analysis of the Napster/music industry camps that it could easily be expanded to fill an entirely different book.
If you don't want to read at all, you can simply look at the pretty pictures midway through the book. Talk about a yearbook: there are pictures of Shawn's hacker pals, a photo of a wilting Lars Ullrich from Metallica, Jack Valenti and other corporate clowns, smiling like there was something to be happy about.
And maybe there was. In the end, Menn shows how Napster was, like other dot-coms, "little more than a publicly supported pyramid scheme, built on the long-true presumption that an even dumber investor was just down the road."
If you want a solid study on copyright law and running a business, Menn's read will not disappoint. If you're looking for a fluffy piece of literature that will keep you awake into the wee hours, try the one with the bespectacled boy on the cover. You probably know the one I'm talking about -- Harry something or other...
You can purchase All the Rave from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
When the hell did Jon Katz start submitting slashdot articles again?
GMD
watch this
I was stuck on a 56k pay-per-minute modem back then. It was cheaper to buy CDs. I'm making up for it on DC now that I have 10Mbit though.
In the book it details the story of the savenapster.com hack. Pretty interesting that one of Napster's own did the hack (this was after savenapster.com gave the finger to napster).
I've already read this, and would say that's a pretty decent review, once you get around the fact that you just PAID for a book about napster
Today we glamourize criminal behaviour the way they did for Bonnie & Clyde or Billy the Kid years earlier. Not to say downloading MP3s is tantamount to murder
Trolling is a art,
YOU FAIL IT!
one does not ask for an fp
Support Israeli punk bands. Man Alive.
A few points:
1) The word maven is very irritating
2) I used Napster only a handful of times because I regard illegal filesharing as theft
3) I don't consider myself a culture "maven" but I am into music
4) Dancing with wolves? What on earth are you talking about?
""If you weren't spending your spare time in the years 99-00 downloading MP3s like a champ, it's likely you were still in diapers or dancing with wolves. ""
Or maybe I was a practising technology lawyer lawfully earning six figures between salary and bonuses by serving techies who were grown-ups and maybe I was actually buying whatever the hell interested me, including music and movies.
I never understood the appeal of Napster. I tried to use it a few times, but the signal to noise ratio was so pathetic it wasn't worth the effort. Nice try, interesting concept, largely unusable in my experience.
this is getting old and so are you
blog
If you weren't spending your spare time in the years 99-00 downloading MP3s like a champ, it's likely you were still in diapers or dancing with wolves.
Or maybe you hadn't yet convinced your old-fashioned parents to buy a computer...
Or using ftp, irc or usenet. Or not using them at all.
I prefer whole albums myself. Napster never made that easy.
-
ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
"It's a Davey and Goliath tale for the 21st century. " Wow...while this could be a good comparison, Davey seems to lose in this situation, which doesn't fit with the Bible...maybe a better comparison would be...hmm...the battle between me and the ant on the ground?
Lyle can tell you why it's really called "Napster"!!!!
Hi. I would just like to say Napster sucked. The opening paragraph makes it sound like all the legends were using napster.
The legends were getting shit off IRC, and later on bittorrent, and/or trading privately amongst themselves.
Only windows kiddies (like those that use kazaa now) were using napster.
Thanks
Its such a shame how we cannot get free music anymore now that Napster is dead. Err, uh. Nevermind.
[FromTheMorning]
Or on dialup. 28.8 dialup. On a 5 machine home LAN.
It is painful living in a rural area, there's still no broadband.
YOU FAIL IT!
This post brough to you by a proud member of the GNAA!
I can't think of a better way to find out about a new band than on Napster (the way it was). I heard about numerous bands that I would have had no exposure to otherwise. While I think it is wrong to steal people's work, I think it is really important for music to circulate to its audience -- If Napster could sell ads, why couldn't they just use that to pay royalties? Besides, for the 999th time, no one is paying 18 bucks for a CD with one good song on it.
stuff |
After his uncle John gives Shawn his first computer, the aw-shucks kid from Massachusetts comes across a brilliant idea, peer-to-peer file sharing, which he develops with the help of friends in several online communities. The story is touching, and it's fascinating to take a behind-the-scenes look at how the program originated, first through Shawn and then as the product of a tight-knit online community.
Did the members of this "tight-knit online community" become employees of Napster Inc. or did Shawn just ditch them once he realized just how big a thing p2p could be? I'm not trolling, I'm asking. I don't recall Shawn giving a lot of public thanks to his computer buddies during Napster's hayday.
GMD
watch this
If you don't want to read at all, you can simply look at the pretty pictures midway through the book. Talk about a yearbook: there are pictures of Shawn's hacker pals, a photo of a wilting Lars Ullrich from Metallica, Jack Valenti and other corporate clowns, smiling like there was something to be happy about.
Uh... then why would I buy it?
right you are sir. good show.
--sa
Uhm..isn't the usual idiom "All the rage?"
Unless there's a pun here I'm not aware.
...but I did get one song that I alreadyhad on vinyl: I'm the Urban Spaceman by the Bonzo Dog Do-Dah Band.
I essentially didn't listen to music before napster. The occaisional random CD, but I (for some reason) never listened to the radio, never watched MTV, etc., and was pretty much entirely out of the loop regarding popular music. Actually even unpopular music.
Now I have a 20gig mp3 that I quite literally carry around with me *everywhere* and I have a much more diverse music tastes (can listen to rap-rock, baroque, ska, and big-beat sequentially without batting an eye) than I could ever have gotten through normal music-discovering means (radio, MTV).
Thank you Napster.
[SIG] It's like putting a moose in the blender -- a recipe for disaster!
I consider the copying of music and other digital media to which I do not own the copyright or to which I have not been given the express permission by the owner of said copyright to be theft.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
and even if you are tired of hearing it, it doesn't make it any less true:
ALL COPYRIGHT = GREED
and copying music is NOT stealing in any sense of the word "stealing"
PERIOD
people only follow the rules they want to
I like how things have turned out. Kazaa is just as good as Napster was at getting music but you can do so much more. When you throw in video to the mix I would prefer Kazaa over Napster anyday.
$p->handler(start => \&start, 'attr, attrseq, text' );
What would be a good movie for me to pick up at the rental tonight? I'm kind of in the mood for an off the beaten path comedy, such as Twin Town or Suicide Kings.
And the book isn't even about that. It's more of a post-mortem business analysis; and could/would prove very handy to someone looking to get into internet ventures. This is a great idea becaues it may help to broaden the pulic's (Joe Sixpack's) understanding of what is going on with all this online P2P contreversy stuff. It could prove very beneficial to the cause of P2P supporters; while maybe shedding some light on just how corrupt the music industries tactics can be. I think this is great idea for a book and there should be more like them.
"Reality is a crutch for people who can't handle drugs" - George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950)
Whoptee doo. Napster was where you got songs for free. Guess they never shared music/movies with friends. Sharing like that was DECENTRALIZED, as was Usenet binary postings. All he did was make a library of all user content and then be a lookup agent.
Wow!. He created a search engine. And centralized at that so the whim of Mr. Judge could pull the plug.
Sounds like the book's a "WASTE". Wonder when you can get it on kazaa?
But I avoided Napster like the plague. I stuck to my guns and continued to use IRC.
A buddy of mine told me about it back then, "Hey you gotta check this out! All the songs you could ever want!"
I found out that he registered the software and created the account using his real name. Makes it easy for the RIAA and the FBI... I wonder how many other knuckleheads have done that?
Do they ever play classic videos or legendary music ? No . BACKstreet,Nsync, Gaysync.....whatever. Bullshit , if you ask me.
I use WinMX now [http://www.winmx.com]. It's so Napster-like, it's almost funny. The selection seems to be quite good and it has some nice feautres like multi-point downloads. But mostly, it's just like Napster. Woohoo.
My bicyles
a beowulf cluster of ... ouch!
Haven't there been over a half-dozen Napster books written. Do we really need another?
I consider wandering off with a CD I haven't paid for to be theft. I consider downloading songs I haven't paid for and don't have permission to download copyright infringement, because that's what it is. I don't consider either to be acceptable, but neither to I consider both of them to be identical.
Ita erat quando hic adveni.
are belong to us.
"I am slashbot, hear me roar!"
And "Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins" if you're up for a double feature.
And he backshot his victims.
... people refer to events that happened two years ago as something akin to "back in the days of yore" or as in this case "when loved ye when". Jesus. It was two fuckin' years ago.
...
Otherwise Napster Shnapster. Somehow, all the people I know are *still* getting buttloads of free music, and, somehow, I think they will continue to
Chr0m0Dr0m!C
If you weren't spending your spare time in the years 99-00 downloading MP3s like a champ, it's likely you were still in diapers or dancing with wolves.
If you were spending your spare time downloading MP3s from Napster you were in total need of a situation which we humans refer to as a live.
Just waiting for this to get modded -1:Troll, while this gets modded +1:Insightful
--
it's interesting to see how Shawn stops pursuing a sports scholarship for college and instead focuses on computer programming.
Sounds familiar?
Real h4x0rs user IRC to get their MP3s... because IRC ain't goin no where! Eh? - j
Sweet Jesus! Let me catch my breath! HAHHAHAH! Oh, crap! I can't stop laughing! HAHAHAHA!
And we all know that the wholesale copying of material you do not have a legal right to, and for which you have not paid for is, at best, rampaging selfishness.
You have the gall to call their actions "greed" when you are committing the exact same sin (for lack of a better word).
Whatever, Beavis.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
A couple of suggestions which in my opinion are "off the beaten path" comedy:
Grosse Pointe Blank (the humor in contract killing)
Very Bad Things (who knew dead hookers and amputation could be so funny)
MORTAR COMBAT!
Sure, it's not as big as Napster in its heyday, or even Music City (running Opennap) before the traitors went to other things, but Opennap is still alive and kicking, I exclusively do my downloading from Opennap and Slavanap (ugh) servers.
As someone already mentioned (fairly cluelessly however) that WinMX is "napster like", it's connecting to Opennap servers and they likely don't even realize it.
Lopster and Lopster for windows are two clients I suggest, given your preferred OS (not sure what to suggest for Mac honestly..)
Sure, irc trading has gone on for years, BitTorrent recently, but at least on Opennap you can also chat and have some sort of knit community outside of a Forum.
Remember, don't feed the trolls.
You're not funny, not loved, etc.
I think I'll just download it on KaZaA ;)
--
you'll LOVE Meet The Feebles. it's like the Muppets, if Jim Henson huffed butane.
8====D( * )sexxxualasspussy
Regretfully Yours,
AC
Fact : x86 is dying
It is official; A Monastery of Brazillian Nuns confirms: x86 is dying One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered x86 community when IDC confirmed that x86 market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of a recent A Monastery of Brazillian Nuns survey which plainly states that x86 has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. x86 is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a The Pope to predict x86's future. The hand writing is on the wall: x86 faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for x86 because x86 is dying. Things are looking very bad for x86. As many of us are already aware, x86 continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
AMD is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time AMD developers God, Jesus only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: AMD is dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
Intel leader Santa Claus, Satan, and My mate Jason states that there are 7000 users of Intel. How many users of Transmeta are there? Let's see. The number of Intel versus Transmeta posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 Transmeta users. IBM posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of Transmeta posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of IBM. A recent article put AMD at about 80 percent of the x86 market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 AMD users. This is consistent with the number of AMD Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of Compaq, abysmal sales and so on, AMD went out of business and was taken over by Dell who sell another troubled OS. Now Dell is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that x86 has steadily declined in market share. x86 is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If x86 is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers. x86 continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, x86 is dead.
Fact: x86 is dying
'Hell comes to Frogtown', starring Rowdy Roddy Piper. It takes place in a post-apocalyptic world where frogs have mutated into humanoids.
The king frog kidnaps six fertile females, which are worth a fortune due to the fact that radiation has rendered most people infertile, and Sam Hell (Rowdy Roddy Piper) is recruited to go to frogtown, rescue them, and then hump their brains out until they're pregnant.
Some swearing, a little bit of nudity, a whole lot of laughs. All in all, I give it a two thumbs up for camp value. A lighthearted and fun movie. If you like beer and hate frogs, well then sir, you just found your rental!
Except for a very very small block of time RIGHT before they shut down (during which time they were quite enjoyable to use and featured a wide variety of music) Napster always struck me as having shitty, uber-mainstream selection, annoying users, download speeds that seemed to almost always drop to 0.2k/s or just drop altogether once the file was half-downloaded, a total of zero users who were correctly reporting their (modem or cable?) download type, and an absolutely horrid (at least at first) macintosh implementation. Moreover, finding a full album on napster was absolutely impossible, badly encoded mp3s were everywhere, and WELL, WELL over half of all mp3s available on napster were incompletes-- but NONE were labelled as such.
I hated napster.
I spent the entire Napster period downloading mp3s, just as i had for a very very long time before Napster was ever invented-- from search.oth.net and other FTP-search based sources. Yeah, Ratio was a bitch, but at least you KNEW the server was going to stay up for a few hours at least, and you knew nobody was going to put an mp3 in their main collection if it was an incomplete.
Also, there was this convenient thing in that basically, the majority of ftp servers had a 1:5 U/D ratio set; the vast majority of ftp servers had exactly one file that i wanted to download of about 6 or 7 megabytes; and i had an mp3 of cookie monster singing "C is for Cookie, that's good enough for me" that was 1.5 megabytes. So i could zap up cookie monster, grab what i wanted, and get out quick. What was wierd, though, was that i think i started something; once i started doing this, the cookie monster mp3 started spreading quite a bit. I would sign onto mp3 servers i'd never been on before and find my cookie monster mp3 already there-- and not in the upload folder either, in the actual sorted mp3 collection. Hmmmm.. ^_^
Uh, and since i see to be admitting to illegal acts above: i downloaded mp3s solely to sample music which i was considering buying or which was not available in america, i was too young to be legally tried as an adult when the events described above happened, i never downloaded mp3s, this post is fiction posted for humorous purposes, i don't even know what an "mp3" is, and i don't own or know how to use a computer.
Oh, and slashdot claims that this is my 700th post posted with my account, though i notice a lot of my earlier ones aren't in the archive.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Foreshadowing comes before, not during or after.
The tech market began it's implosion in April of 2000, about the same time that Judge Jackson laid the smackdown on MS. The twits on wall street fled in terror at the thought of chopping up MS, even though they should have been running for entirely different reasons. (i.e., a ridiculous amount of investment in crappy business 'ideas'.)
Uh, you should probably say 'David and Goliath'. 'Davey and Goliath' connotes Napster users as button-down Christians and the music industry as a big dumb dog.
Okay, it's half right.
No self-respecting culture maven can deny their love affair with Napster. If you weren't spending your spare time in the years 99-00 downloading MP3s like a champ, it's likely you were still in diapers or dancing with wolves. Oh, Napster, we loved ye when.
I saw Napster (and the rest of them) as being for lamers. The fun was the hunt of the file...like a big game hunter in Africa. It was all about anonymous FTP for me. And when Napster was shut down, there were people moaning about not getting their MP3 fixes...whereas I still hunted the anony FTP sitez and found my prey (usually.) As P2P becomes more of a target and RIAA keeps shutting them down (perhaps bittorrent will be next?) the FTP keeps on a chuggin'. Kinda hard to shut down that which isn't as public as the P2P stuff. And IP addresses can change oh so easily.
No self respecting geek would use Napster EVER, no one I know ever touched it, and we all downloaded MP3's *like a champ*.
It's called usenet...premium servers please. All of us *in the know* knew that once Napster went under, and it most definitely would, that all the kids hyped up on *free* would be flocking to usenet, flooding the groups with crap posts, begging for instructions and calling everyone *fag*. Sure enough, they did.
Napster single handedly brought piracy to the masses, made it a household word and brought the ire of RIAA etc. upon us all.
I cant believe that this story was intro'd like this. Napster is, was and always will be a blight and a bad bad period in mine and others opinions.
"...in diapers..." man, gimma a freekin break.
Or maybe you were just a conscientious person who instead of ripping off your favorite artists (yes, they do get SOME of that money, just not much) were buying their discs and ripping them from legitimately purchased media and thereby also helping make sure that the labels saw how much they were selling.
Now porn on the other hand
It is more productive to voice thoughtful opinions (reply) than to judge (moderate) others.
A few months ago, there was an interview with Shawn Fanning linked here, where he was asked to marvel at how he's not a billionaire. I was marveling that there was a time when it seemed perfectly reasonable that a company with no source of revenue and whose only activity was facilitating massive violation of the copyrights of enormous companies should, of course, be making a fortune for its founders.
Although the same interview had Fanning talking about growing up on Cape Cod in Hull, MA -- apparently unaware that his home town is nowhere near Cape Cod.
Menn also exposes...rockstress Courtney Love's flirtations with Shawn, whom she once introduced at an award show as her future husband.
This might make sense, if you're one of the people always mentioning Courtney Love as a supporter of Napster, except that Love's plagiarized essay actually denounced Napster and supported Lars Ulrich. I suppose that's her being her.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
It's the income that is theft/stolen (revenue) not the music/cds/files.
It's not the same as walking out with stolen cds but it is the same as ruining some farmers crops or giving them away when the family isn't home. The hard work pays off with return that feeds the kids and that's what you steal when you napster/gnutella/morpheus/kazaa music. QED.
If it were done when 'tis done, then t'were well it were done quickly... MacBeth
Actually, it's the potential income that is stolen.
The problem is that it's very difficult to prove that had a user not been able to download the song, that they would have gone out and bought it.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
just visit the local public library!
The word you wanted was condemnation, Mr. Livegoat. Consternation is the rough equivalent of confusion, which doesn't fit the context of your sentence at all.
Techies of all stripes will be amused as Menn attempts to make computer programming jargon edible to the mainstream reader.
Edible? Try intelligible.
With a boatload of rock stars and other curious characters, you'd think the spectacle of it all would overshadow the book's business patois.
Patois, which means roughly the same thing as jargon or lingo, is nonsensical in this sentence. The spectacle of rock stars overshadows jargon? Really?
An informative review, if one can overlook these bloopers.
Neopets - the best free game on the Int
Does Slashdot have the equivalent of the Bulwer-Lytton Awards? Maybe we should.
Let's see... what was I doing at the cusp of the millenium? Oh, yeah, that's right... I was working, not figuring out ways to waste my employer's bandwidth downloading old Ace of Base singles. So much for my status as a "self-respecting culture maven" *snort*.
I looked into the abyss, and the abyss looked into me--and we both winked.
Davey and Goliath, the stop-motion "cartoon" of the 1960's.
Though, I'm not really sure how Napster vs the RIAA is a Davey and Goliath story of the 21st Century.
http://www.daveyandgoliath.org/
If you love to read abou the dot-com bust--over and over--this meticulously researched tome is for you. Keep a drink handy, however, it gets dry in parts
Where does that fit on the usual 1-10 scale?
Where does the school board find them and why do they keep sending them to ME?
likewise it is hard to prove that the farmer would not have made income if one had not just given all his beans/corn away (to the needy, etc.) And it did seem that the most "traded" music was also popular music, not just the fringe stuff - which should probably be given away to gain listeners.
If it were done when 'tis done, then t'were well it were done quickly... MacBeth
The Server of the Unknown File-Sharer
I'm thinking a sculpture of a nice server, with space for extra hard drives, and A cable modem or ISDN line beside it. Instead of an Eternal Torch, we can have orange LED modkit lights, and instead of a changing of the guard, we can have a rebooting of the system every 24 hours.
Napster's height coincided with my immersion into the internet, and I have fond memories of downloading 3.5 MB songs over my 56k modem(Running at 54000, booya) at an agonizingly slow 3 or 4 kb/s. And now, when I can download a movie in less time that a half an album used to take, I can only look ahead to a steady 1 gig connection, and a new 120 gig hard drive or two.
And thus the need for the memorial, to remind we pirates, we digital bucaneers, plundering the high seas of bandwidth on the good ship Broadband of our heritage. God rest ye Napster, and fare-thee-well.
Mod Points: Helping you keep your opinion to yourself.
Or maybe we were interested in actually *buying* a legitimate product, rather than ripping it off?
Yeah, the RIAA seems to be run by morons who couldn't find their own ass with both hands and a contour map, but that's no excuse. Don't like the prices or business practices? Fine; don't do business with them.
With Napster out of the picture sites like Kazaa are the only place to file share, and they are shady shady shady. Napster was a terrific venue to listen to and download some music so that you don't end up with 500 cd's at one good song apiece. I have an extensive music collection which I have paid for at the record store, and more than half of it I would never have purchased without the help of file sharing. Thanks Napster. Blow me Kazaa and all of your porn sharing popup making virus laden cousins.
More legal precedence than you can read in a lifetime agree that they are not identical, and that copyright violation is not a subset of stealing.
It's like arguing that pickpocketing and armed robbery is the same because the same money is stolen. Both are illegal, but under different laws. Likewise with stealing and copyright violations. The result is pretty much the same (someone has an illegally obtained CD), but the *process matters*.
I don't disagree with your moral argument. But your legal one seems to be of the kind "When all you have it a hammer, everything looks like a nail."
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I used Napster a handful of times too, but only when I was looking for a specific song off a hard-to-find album.
Although the law does not technically distinguish between the two cases, I would argue that my use of Napster was not unethical, because if everyone did it, it would not have a significantly negative impact on the production of music, and because the music industry has provided no legitimate alternative. Meanwhile, downloading thousands of songs to avoid paying for music at all is unethical, because the downloader benefits from musicians' work without giving them any possibility of compensation. If everyone did that, the availability of music would likely decrease as fewer people could afford to produce it, and everyone would suffer.
Your argument, that breaking a law is black-and-white regardless of intention or magnitude, is the sort of logic that puts petty thieves away for life under three-strikes laws. It also implies that legality is the same as morality, and sets up the government as the ultimate judge of correct social behaviour.
And I think those who download music should consider that because they can do something, it doesn't necessarily mean that they should.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
Pitchman: I have a 19-year old programmer who wants to promote a system that distributes other people's copyrighted works and will probably give rise to all kinds of troublesome legal issues, but he does it on the Internet so it's really cutting edge.
VC: Here's a truckload of money.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Obviously. Becuase if you used Napster and achieved the 100+ kbps downloads you know that Kazaa is only a shell of what Napster was. Of course Napster would have changed with the times or new software with the same model would have risen up, but the server model helped a lot in terms of download speeds.
This is my digital signature. 10011011001
What if I invented an inexpensive device, that when pointed at a loaf of bread, created a duplicate of it. I could do this as much as I want, for negligable cost.
This device would obviously be a great boon to society, making food virtually free. Certainly this technology would have a big effect on society, and society would need to adjust. Farmers would be less useful, highly creative chefs would be more useful.
Sadly, that adjustment would probably be to pass laws against the use of the device, saying that it constitutes theft of bread. Even if you do it in the privacy of your home, to bread you bought legally, and you didn't sell the dupe bread to anyone.
Theft: the act of stealing. Stealing: to take the property of another without right or permission.
At one instant in time you did not own a copy of that song, encoded in any given format, on any given form of media. Should you choose to acquire the song, the owner of the song demands that they be paid a set price for it, and that it be distributed on a specific media. So, in order to obtain the desired song, you must purchase the designated media at the designated price.
Instead, you choose to circumvent the process and obtain that song from someone else, who is not authorized by the song owner to distribute it, in a format and media that is not approved. In effect, you never acquired the designated media that contained the song, hence, you were never granted use of the copyrighted work. You now are in ownership of a tangible item (the encoded song). In most cases, you may have even placed this song onto another, solid media (such as a CDROM). You have just obtained the property of another without right or permission. This is why logical people relate this act to theft. In today's information age, with the manipulation of data so easily performed, downloading a song off Kazaa is akin to walking out of a Warehouse music with a CD that you didn't pay for.
Only a criminal that is attempting to justify their crime would try to over-analyze the situation and find semantic technicalities that make them seem "less guilty". Regardless of the mask you try to hide behind, you're still a petty theif.
Theft is theft. Anyone sued by the RIAA, like the kid that lost his life savings, deserved it. If you don't approve of their business tactics then don't buy their products. Stealing makes you no better then them.
I bought way more CD's when I was using Napster. It made it much easier to check out some new (or old) artist that you had maybe just heard in passing, or was recommended by a friend. Sure, there are still ways to check out music, but none of them are as easy as napster was.
but you're not making the music.
/. would have a big problem with that. Even the people like you.
No one would have a problem if you listened to a song and then sang it in the shower at home.
By your logic, there is nothing wrong if Microsoft takes bits of Linux code without following the GPL. After all, the Linux code is still there.
No, I think that people on
That's like saying "I like web sites, not file sharing"
What happens with regards to bittorrent is exactly what would happen if bandwidth were simply higher... people would post stuff to websites, and people would download it. The only difference with bittorrent is it helps lighten the load.
That dogfukker JonKatz stole my post for his book and I didn't even get a lousy T-Shirt![*]
[*]All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective owners. Comments are owned by the Poster. The Rest © 1997-2003 OSDN.
If you weren't spending your spare time in the years 99-00 downloading MP3s like a champ, it's likely you were still in diapers or dancing with wolves.
Or, found far far better uses of one's time. Has the definition of "culture maven" been updated to include "loner geek pirating mp3s in their parent's basement"?
John Kerry is a Joke!
*sigh* When you need Mod points, they are nowhere to be found...
This is such a brilliant post, that it is sure to draw shrill shrieks from those trying to salve their seared consciences.
You can tell a great deal about the character of a man by observing those who hate him.
Umm... The kid that lost his life savings was running a search engine that indexed Windows file-shares. Are you saying search engines are now theft?
But not from Napster.
Most of my MP3 snarfage took place on public IRC channels wherein certain users (who were often marked with a +v mode) would open up their entire libraries to search and download. I remember being able to snag some really neat stuff, including whole albums full of strange Japanese techno. Waiting in a queue was sometimes a bitch, but in that case I simply idled and let my script automatically capture the download when it finally did come.
Man, those were some good times.
Is that mmalone@vt.edu ?!!!
Honest, guys, you should have realized a long time ago that this "we're so anti-establishment that we don't have to do things the right way" mentality just makes you look like a bunch of clueless dweebs. Even worse, it drives away readers.
Downloading an OCR'd copy over a p2p network is the proper way to pay homage :)
Yay!
Thank god not all Slashdot posters are idiots. It's good to see there are some decent human beings left.
What does Napster have to do with raves??? From my memory, there were plenty of Barry Manilo songs you can "evaluate" during its heyday.
No Shit - Amen Brother
.. but not, apparently,
there wasn't a single person out there that didn't
know damn well what they were doing was against
the law - there isn't a single person out there
that doesn't know that what they still do is against
the law. how the fuck we're supposed to slosh back
some drivel about assrammer fanning's 'age of
innocence' is beyond me
beyond your friendly neighborhood slashdot editor,
famous the world-over for their unique views on
'reality'
this place just amazes me to death
a total of zero users who were correctly reporting their (modem or cable?) download type
The secret was to find people who reported using 14.4 modems & had a shitload of MP3s @ 256kbps. Either their modems had really good compression or they were on T3's. Those were the quality rips too.
This story is really a landmark. Slashdot has posted a book review that is actually lukewarm!
Gone are the days when every book review was a total geekgasm. I'll remember those days fondly. (well, not really)
take
/.? Do we have to beat you over the head with it or what?
1-5 deal with taking pills, or capture, hunting, etc.
6 : to transfer into one's own keeping:
a : APPROPRIATE
b : to obtain or secure for use (as by lease, subscription, or purchase)
So then we look at appropriate:
1 : to take exclusive possession of : ANNEX
2 : to set apart for or assign to a particular purpose or use
3 : to take or make use of without authority or right
In general, we can see that it is indicating a exclusive transfer of ownership and possession. That is, when you take something from another person, they no longer have the item.
Filesharing isn't taking, it's copying. Hence it is copyright infringement. Not that either is right, but one is not equal the other, and copying music is not the same as walking out of a music store with a CD hidden in your jacket, as there is no physical loss of properly.
How many times has this been mentioned on
C'mon everyone! Let's follow LordNimon's lead and add livegoats to our Foes lists! We may not be able to moderate story submissions but we can sure make our discontent with this "review" felt in other ways!
"Stealing music is wrong, Daaaaaaaaavey."
Actually, it might be more akin to buying the farmer's crops and planting the seeds to grow your own. And then giving away your crop. Is that immoral? What if the farmer doesn't want you to do that? Should that be illegal?
All my MP3's are rips from personally owned CDs, or a few I downloaded from MP3.com legally. Of course, I'm also working with an Internet company that didn't spend thousands on ergo office chairs, uses an XP style design and development process and actually has had a product for a couple of years that makes revenue.
Guess I'm square.
Sig under construction since 1998.
The School Children are out of class for the summer.
...to its slow unraveling in 2001, a foreshadowing event for the rest of the dot-com world.
Wait! You mean the rest of the dot-com world is going to unravel? I thought it was a secure place to be. I mean, it's now mid-2003 and Napster is still the only dot-com to bust, right?
How are you going to keep them down on the farm once they've seen Karl Hungus?
Not sure which 2001 you lived through . . . the dot-com world's "unraveling" was well underway by then.
Just had to bring that up, to add to your comparison.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
All these file sharing services have done is prove that the public can't responsibly handle the ability to easily transfer digital media.
It's been said: With great power comes great responsibility. And it looks like that power might soon be taken away.
Thanks a lot napster.
(and no i never used it)
vk.
Napster and it's ilk were never and are still not anything but mass distribution of culture of the lowest common denominator.
I seriously don't get why people are so thrilled to download Britney Spears, Puff Daddy or REM. Music you can get at your local supermarket for a fiver anyway.
If people were using it to get hold of that 100 copies Aphex record, the latest Tom Jenkinson smasher months before it's released, or even hard to get classical/contemporary music like Ligeti or Ruyichi Sakamoto, then I would understand it.
How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life
Loved it, I found all kinds of hard to get tunes. Mainly from european users, but the stuff I was looking for was from bands that no longer existed, record labels that were bankrupt and by and large I was replacing my rapidly wearing out tape collection...so again, who was I stealing from? No one as ar as I could tell...
So rise up, all ye lost ones, as one, we'll claw the clouds.
As someone who never touched Napster (or KaZaA or whatever) and considers so-called "filesharing" to be blatant theft of service, I reject your premise outright. Thank you, please drive through...
Anyone who's seen "The Italian Job" knows that Shawn Fanning didn't come up with Napster - Seth Green did. Fanning stole it from Green after he fell asleep, thus, 'Napster'.
:)
You cannot defeat the real Napster!
ps The Italian Job is a fun movie. Go see it before it's gone! C is for Charlize (Theron), and that's good enough for me...
As you noted, the music on the CD is covered by a license.
The same as the code on a Linux CD is covered by a license.
Stealing the music CD from a music store is the same as stealing the Linux CD from Frye's.
Copying the music from a music CD is the same as copying the code from a Linux CD.
If you don't want to follow the license, don't use the code.
Come on! We all know this! He stole it!
I thought it was common knowledge that Sean Fanning stole Napster from his roommate while he was sleeping...
It's about time someone figured it out! The *AA are the cause of the .com bust. After all, while Napster was around everything was good. When Napster was attacked things got rocky. As their situation got worse, the bottom fell out.
Does anyone remember this program? It was P2P and came before Napster. Fanning just made a better version of it IIRC. Those of us at Northeaster were all about "sharing."
Shawn's college roommate invented Napster; Shawn stole the disk while he was asleep. Officially Shawn said he didn't consider it stealing; he was just borrowing the disk to see if he liked it.
Oh, good. That means it is OK to steal anything I don't like, I don't much like Rembrandt. Guess I'll fly to Amsterdam and starting letting those nice Dutch museums "share" with me.
Stop whining about CD's with "filler". ("Yes, judge. I stole all that stuff, but because I think its filler, I'm innocent.") . Try better musicians; no one is forcing you to buy anything. Better yet, just wait to grow up and you'll have better things to do with your money than blowing it on music with a 5-minute lifespan,
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
No other medium allows for exact digital copies, so true to the original that most users NEVER REPLACE THEM WITH ORIGINALS. Sure, everybody has stories about buying albums they would not have before hearing them as .mp3s, but the dirty little secret of the file-"sharers" is that damn near nobody buys most (much less all) of the albums they copy.
Music may be inexpensive to duplicate, and Napster & its ilk make it darn near free to do so, but it costs money to make. And sell. And ship. And store. And you buying two albums to get one album of songs you want is what pays for those things. There's an awful lot of crap music out there, and it costs just as much to make as the stuff you like, and until it's out there nobody knows if it's crap or gold. THAT is the basis for the music industry, the balancing of risk - charging enough for the bestsellers to pay the costs on the no-hit wonders. Of course the price for GREATEST_CD_EVER is too high, you are also supporting the work of GONNA_BE_A GOOD_BAND_SOMEDAY_MAYBE.
I don't think it's a very good system, I don't think it's a very efficient system, and I'd love to see another system replace it. But taking the money out of the system via Napster/Morpheus/Kazaa/whatever means there won't be any money to fix it, and telling the industry they're a bunch of fscking thieves isn't much incentive for them to help you out by creating a new system. You want things to change - what are you willing to do differently that DOESN'T take away their livelihood?
If your entire defense is gonna be "oh, I'm only breaking the law a little ..." maybe you might just want to keep it to yourself.
Hmmm. Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
Amazon has it 13% cheaper than bn.
As large as Napster was in its hey-day, as large as Kazaa is now - sorry, you're gonna get bad files. Most people (read: not geeks) don't bother with cleaning their download directories. They dont remove incomplete, damaged, or low quality files. Rather, they just go around them and then share those bad files with the rest of the world. For those of us who actually have a decent understanding of the technologies we use, if we download bad files most of the time we can only blame ourselves.
Most Metallica songs are upwards of 5 to 7 minutes long. Now if you're downloading a copy of (Welcome Home)Sanitarium and its file size is anywhere under 8mb or so, sorry, you're getting a bad file. Either the song is incomplete (did you check the running time?) or the bitrate is so low that you may as well just hum the song to yourself for all the sound quality that file is going to have.
Granted there are bound to be a few exceptions. Maybe you're sampling a certain band for the first time.
Or maybe its like these new retarded demo copies with the swooshy noises the music labels have leaked onto P2P networks.
As for incorrectly named files - I share your frustration. The best solution I've found for that is to use the hotlist features of these programs to 'bookmark' certain users whose habits and tastes mirror your own. Find a few users like the one's on my hotlists and your problems will be greatly diminished.
I've had little to no trouble out of all the major p2p apps that I've used (provided we're talking about the spyware-free versions), and I believe its because I put thought into how I use them rather than just clicking a few times and hoping the program is clairvoyant enough to weed out the bad results for me.
Before the p2p scene grew to such large proportions, people were warezing around to find the stuff they wanted. And there were tell-tale signs to look for to determine the quality of a file before you grabbed it. All p2p has done is provided a way to save a little search time, and avoid badly and/or cleverly written web pages that hindered the process. File quality was never implied and if it was you should have realized the lie when you read it. You still have to look for those tell-tale signs. Quality (in this case) is up to the individual - not the collective networks or the applications that use them.
We're not talking about reading, and you know it. We're talking about stealing by making and distributing illegal copies. Some folks go to absurd lengths to rationalize their own theft via filesharing, like arguing that the CD's they want have only 2 tracks worth listening to. How you can get from "I don't like 80 percent of this CD" to "That gives me the right to steal the other 20 percent" is beyond me. If that is true, then I have a right to walk out of those Amsterdam museums with Rembrandts under my arm simply because I don't like 80 percent of his work.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
No no no. Following the original principle, that gives you the right to take highly detailed colour photographs that don't damage the original in any way.
Theft involves taking something the owner no longer has any possession of. Lost IP sales count merely as unrealised potential revenue -- if everyone who copies something would otherwise buy it, the amounts would be the same, but that's rarely the case and it still doesn't count as theft.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not defending IP infringement -- it's illegal, after all -- and some level of IP protection is a necessary part of our economy. I just think that in most cases it's an ambit claim by the "victims" (*AA, BSA, etc.) who probably write most of it off as a brand-building cost anyway.
deus does not exist but if he does
In my book, "Lost IP sales" due to illegal copying counts as theft, even if it is potential earnings.
However, this is largely a semantic gambit. Copyright infringement is a crime, whatever we might call it otherwise. I've yet to see an argument justifying it as legitimate that doesn't sound like something dreamed up in a debate club of 12-year olds.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
I think that the backlash against IP crime -- like the backlash against terrorism -- is going too far, too hard and too fast. Look at some of the decisions being handed down...
.mp3 being declared an "illegal file format" -- although I need to check if any Congresspeople had drunk enough of the corporate Kool-Aid to be parroting that line.
(Re terrorism: the government here in Australia wants laws passed to lock up anyone -- adults or children -- indefinitely, without charge, if they are suspected of possessing information about terrorism or terrorists.) This reminds me of
Sure, the consequences of that are more serious, but in both cases the punishments are out of all proportion to the damage caused by the crime -- given that being "under suspicion" is soon to be considered a criminal act here.
deus does not exist but if he does
Yes, it is a crime, because some people, influenced by those who stand to make big bucks off of it, made a law.
So fucking what?
Law is only sometimes about morrality. In this case it is not. In this case and, increasingly more frequently today, in many other cases, law is about protecting power/money/privilage.
If you could successfully argue that what benefits the RIAA benefits the People, then you could argue about the morality of file-sharing. But nothing the RIAA does benefits the People. Quite the contrary.
So all you're left with is the position that file-sharing is illegal. Granted, it's hard to take a moral high ground in favor of civil disobediance in this case, but the fact is that it's just law, not holy writ.
Get off your high horse.
... laws in most countries disagree with your view of filesharing as stealing. The crime is called copyright infirngement in case you want to know.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Life.
Life.
Life.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
The feature I miss most from Napster is the ability to browse another user's list of files. My Napster usage pattern was typically -- go looking for a couple of tracks that were somehow similar, then browse the lists of anybody that had most or all of them. This was usually a good sign that the person had other stuff I'd like.
AudioGalaxy had a variation of this, but it was extremely awkward to use.
Are there current systems available that let you do this? I imagine it's more difficult (and probably a lot slower) with the current systems' necessarily decentralized models...
Slashdot quality declines as the number of hot grits posts decreases. - Provolt's Law, Apr-09-2005
First, you have a moral obligation to obey the law, even if you disagree with it.
We see a lot of juvenile attempts to justify theft by pointing at the RIAA's less-than-subtle behavior. But,the RIAA's behavior is not relevant to this discussion. They could be killing babies, but it still wouldn't change the true nature of filesharing: it is theft.
You can't dress up greed for free music in some kind of civil disobediance garb. Civil disobediance entails people deliberately violating a law so they can provoke arrest in order to challenge the constitutionality of that law in court. So, unless so-called filesharers are willing to find lawyers, get arrested, go to trial, and, if necessary, appeal all the way the Supreme Court, I am inclined to think they're still unprincipled thieves.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Shoplifting, copyright infringement, counterfeiting...they're all forms of theft to me.
But, what's the difference between making illegal copies of a dollar bill and making illegal copies of a CD? None that I can see. So, let's call filesharing counterfeiting. Happy now?
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
--Oh come on, everybody knows that Scott Evil (aka "Lyle" - see http://us.imdb.com/Title?0317740 ) was the REAL author of Napster!!
.
== WolfriderV6 == I'm willing to admit that *I just might* be wrong... Are you??