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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'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
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?
Or using ftp, irc or usenet. Or not using them at all.
I prefer whole albums myself. Napster never made that easy.
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ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
Its such a shame how we cannot get free music anymore now that Napster is dead. Err, uh. Nevermind.
[FromTheMorning]
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
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)
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.
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.
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
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.
And that was a similar situation, interesting comparison. Bonnie & Clyde, Dillinger, etc. were all worshiped as heros, because the banks of the period appeared to have screwed over the common man, both through the events of the dust bowl (evicting people from their homes), and at the start of the depression, with the stock market collapse. Gangsters were viewed as fighting back for the common man.
Maybe people doing the same thing for groups such as Napster implies that a similar sentiment exists towards the RIAA/MPAA etc. Obviously the "crime" of those media industries is far less (abuse of artists, homogenization of radio, high costs), but a similar, though smaller, backlash is present.
This is why I love bittorrent. It's not one large searchable network but the signal to noise ratio is extremely good. I have never gotten anything that was mislabelled and the actual quality of what you download is really high. And if you go to one of the 'torrent sites' you can search a large number of back-archives of old torrents, effectively creating a lot of searchable mini-torrent networks. Different sites specialise in different thigns: Apps, Movies, Music, Anime, Pr0n, etc. And no, I will not overload my favourite sites by providing links here. Go an google for them.
The other great thing about bittorrent is that there is a lot more 'sharing ethics' in the community. People seed files using their own bandwidth just for the heck of it, they don't just download and disconnect. One 2 GB Anime chunk I finished downloading 10 hours ago is still seeding on my machine because I want to help other people get it. I would have have shared something like that on Napster or Kazaa.
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.
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"?