Slashdot Mirror
Shawn Fanning's New Venture
prostoalex writes "We've read about Justin Frankel, but what are the other heroes of the MP3 revolution up to? News.com.com.com tells the story of Shawn Fanning's new company. SnoCap (which changed its name from Open Copyright Database) is currently developing file-sharing mechanisms that would allow the music industry to earn money."
If people are sharing-files in some form of triangle scheme for sharing profits-- who controls the quality of the music bought? I refuse to pay for music that cannot guarantee high-quality bit-rate. And, what happens when only part of a song is downloaded that was paid for and it becomes impossible to resume the download, because the person(s) whom you were grabbing a copy from disconnect?
Given there is a good freely-available format to rip into (OGG), the only way the publishers are going to get rich(er) is by value-add. That's not a terribly strong argument for a product.
:-) If they'd not been so damn greedy at the start, this state of affairs might have been (well, almost) completely avoided....
The fundamental problem is I want to copy the music once I've paid for it. The music industry doesn't want me to do this - because if I can easily move it around, I can move it to my friends house (for visits, you understand
All I can say is, Good Luck - you're going to need it...
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
"It's a pretty well thought-out idea, but the success of it hinges on everybody in the ecosystem getting involved," said one record label executive familiar with Snocap. "The key to its success is the peer-to-peer companies agreeing to participate. If they do participate, it could be phenomenal."
Might as well complete the quote...
The focus here is getting the peer-to-peer companies to participate. The user is going to take the path of least resistance (and money.) As long as there are free and easy to use peer-to-peer systems, projects like this do not stand a chance.
However, projects like this could easily take over... if and only if they include one vital key. The makers of the peer-to-peer software will make more money. Kazza, emule, and all the others will lay down their arms and gladly go to a pay-type system if they can make more money that way.
The problem with that is... there is not enough money to go around. For peer-to-peer to make more that means the music companies are going to have to take less. (They can't rape the artists any more than they already are.)
AC
Shawn Fanning is no Justin Frankel. He's not even in the same league. Justin Frankel is a hero, Shawn Fanning is just some dope that got lucky.
this is my sig.
Do not consider this a troll... (as I am sure your alarms are going off already) but I do not understand why this kid is getting rich as hell, and the makers of OGG are not.
This kid just has an idea for a peer-to-peer system and he already has a large angel investor... the same angel investor that poured large amounts of money into napster. And the system doesn't even exist yet.
On the otherhand, take OGG -- a kickass music format that we all love and cherish. A few advertising wizards could turn it into the standard music format on the internet. Where are the VCs and angel investors for OGG?
OGG is a proven product that rocks. SnoCap is little more than white text on a blue background.
SnoCap will make money because non-tech people remember that napster exploded with potential. SnoCap will make money because investors see that I-Tunes is working.
OGG will struggle because the non-tech investing community doesn't understand the power of a new and better music format.
The world is twisted.
AC
Snocap has been working on ways to identify songs, as they are traded through a file-swapping network, including using a technique called "audio fingerprinting," which monitors the sonic characteristics of music files.
...
...
...
...
shawn $ fingerprint_id_test test_files.txt
LOADING INPUT TEST FILE: beethoven.mp3
Identifying
100% Match: Beethoven, Ludwig Van, classical
LOADING INPUT TEST FILE: coltrane.mp3
Identifying
100% Match: Coltrane, John, Jazz
LOADING INPUT TEST FILE: chembros.mp3
Identifying
100% Match: Chemical Brothers, electronic
77% Match: Daft Punk, electronic
75% Match: Noise, industrial-moise-recording
LOADING INPUT TEST FILE: britspears.mp3
Identifying
100% Match: Spice girls, teenage pop
100% Match: N'Sync, teenage pop
100% Match: Backstreet Boys, teenage pop
100% Match: Hilary Duff, teenage pop
100% Match: Maris Willson, teenage pop
100% Match: Holly Valance, teenage pop
100% Match: Mandy Moore, teenage pop
100% Match: Vitamin C, teenage pop
100% Match: Christina Aguilera, teenage pop
100% Match: Five, teenage pop
100% Match: Jennifer Lopez, teenage pop
100% Match: Aaliyah, teenage pop
100% Match: Rachel Stevens, teenage pop
100% Match: Pink, teenage pop
*** Endless recursion error. Core dumped ***
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
"Shawn is a smart, articulate guy. That goes a long way," said one source familiar with Fanning's discussions with record labels. "He walks in a world that they desperately want access to."
If I were this group of record companies... I would kill myself and do the world a favor.
Wait...
If I were this group of record companies, I would hire a kid like this in a heartbeat. He is likely to understand the peer-to-peer community much more than the record executives. He's help people do it the free and easy way... and maybe he can transition everybody into a more "legit" method of music transfer.
I don't think the record execs are scared of this guy... I think they are having wet dreams about his re-securing their monolopy on music.
What is this kid likely to do? We'll just have to wait and see. He's probably smart enough that he could sweet talk his way into a lot of vaporware dollars...
AC
Justin recently announced that he has resigned from AOL and Nullsoft:
/home/deadbeef - - - - Shell: /usr/local/bin/tcsh
.plan, but I might find myself updating the .plan of justin@blorp.com.
Trying landoleet.org
Attempting to finger justin@landoleet.org -
Login: justin - - - - - - - - - - Name: Justin
Directory:
Never logged in.
New mail received Thu Oct 9 15:07 2003 (PDT)
- - Unread since Mon Mar 10 12:28 2003 (PST)
Mail forwarded to: justin@blorp.com
Plan:
Jan 22, 2004
Well, it took a bit longer than I (or likely anybody else expected), but after four and a half years, I've resigned from my position at AOL. Yay/sigh/etc.
This will likely be the last time I update this
peace out.
eof
-
End of finger session
Fortunately, this won't really result in a loss of quality with future Winamp versions. their two main coders, "Francis and Christophe," Will be taking over most of the development. From what I've heard, they did most of the work with Winamp 5. And as most of those who've taken the time to really check out Winamp 5... It really whips the llama's ass.
One thing you cannot ignore is that napster brought P2P to the public eye. Sure we'd have P2P networks now, and they probably wouldn't have the RIAA trying to put them down. The reason why is because almost no one would be using them.
I don't like the RIAA tactics, but you have to admit that P2P is forcing them to change their business model. Would iTunes Music Store exist if P2P wasn't so wildly popular? Furthermore would we have access to so many portable music devices if it weren't for the popularity of napster and hence the popularity of digitized music (aka MP3 files)?
Not to mention that P2P gives me hope that one day artists will be able to directly reach their audience without the RIAA.
Fanning was really the first to let the gennie out of the bottle so to speak. You may think Fanning was an idiot for putting out a program designed only to steal music. I think he was pretty smart for putting out a program that finally allowed us to have something to fight the media giants with, and changed the way many people obtain their music. No longer do you have to record crappy quality tracks off the radio, nor do you have to buy 15 songs of crap for $18 to get one song you like.
P2P is a force to be reckoned with and it's because of napster that this is true.
Shawn Fanning is an idiot. This is not a troll. He releases a PTP system that is so inherently unthought out and stupidly illegal and try to make a go of it. He wrote a program in VB that was what it was because he couldn't implement anything more complex. Sure, some of the beauty of Napster was its simplicity. But this is also the reason we are in a jam with PTP systems like we are today. Without Napster we would not have the RIAA court cases. We would have Gnutella systems, Bit Torrent etc free from lawyers and everyone would be happy.
The reason we have distributed systems in the first place is due to the destruction of Napster. If Napster had never existed, I'm inclined to believe P2P would be nowhere near as widespread as it is today, or that it would even exist at all.
That said, I see no need for any software that allows the recording industry to make money. We simply don't need the recording industry anymore. All we really need are artists, and fans. Woe be to the recording industry when the likes of iRate and CDBaby meet. It's clear that we've got the distribution thing covered with the internet. A system like iRate handles the task of getting the artist exposure with fans who will appreciate them, and a store like CDBaby handles the obvious financial needs of the artists. That's really all the current recording industry does now.
So why do we need to include the bastards who sue 12 year olds again?
why would you want to use a P2P client that has DRM, when you can use something like eMule, Kazaa, GNUNet or any other P2P client that doesn't?
Well, for starters I'd pick a P2P client that doesn't include spyware, which lets out Kazaa, at least the original. Not that DRM doesn't contain its own nasty potential for privacy violations, but I'd pick it over Gator.
Then I'd look for the biggest network, because the more people use it, the more stuff you can actually get your hands on. If this guy can make a lot of stuff available, many people might go for it, because dealing with DRM may well be less bad than 200-hour failed downloads from an illegal system. That's why people pay a buck to Apple: "free" but unavailable isn't free.
Still, in the end I dunno what this guy thinks he's going to get. P2P works only because it's free. When you pay for music, you get the privilege of a dedicated fast server with a support staff. Pay music on P2P would be trying to get other people to do the storage and network space. I'm not participating in that.
You know most people here seem to be of the opinion that Napster was an obvious concept and anybody here couldhave come up with it. The Next step in everyone's misguided logid is that Shawn is therefore no smarter than the average slashdot reader..... then jealousy kicks in and people start calling him names for getting all the attention.
Well, at the start of 2002 I ended up out of a job and managed to get a position in Napster, long past the days when they were running the full service. There was the Beta test for the pay service running as well as a few potentially groundbreaking court cases. Turns out I was the last engineer Napster hired.
Anyway, I'd studied the napster setup in great detail and I pretty much had the same opinions - I figured that Shawn was an average geek who had got lucky. I didn't expect he'd much from him, hey, I'd spent 10 years in academia, I'd spent years 'saving the world from killer asteroids' (http://szyzyg.arm.ac.uk/~spm), and....
I'd wrote and released the first mp3 radio software and then watched Justin Frankel and winamp get all the credit for 'inventing' it a year and a half later. I went to napster expecting that Shawn wasn't anything special.
Boy was I wrong, he is a genuinely smart guy, yes he was also lucky - just like I'm a smart guy who wasn't so lucky. I think a lot of technical people underestimate him and sometimes this is working to his advantage.
So, lay off the assumption that luck == stupid - smart people get lucky all the time too.
He wrote a program in VB that was what it was because he couldn't implement anything more complex.
The Napster client was written using C++ using win32 calls. It was never written in VB. Ever. Granted it was more C with classes than C++, but it certainly wasn't VB.
You have to pretty naive to think that without Napster the RIAA would have simply ignored other systems that enable copyright infringement. Especially a system like bittorrent that with a central server component. Remember that Scour (which predated Napster) was sued, Aimster was sued, etc. It is just Napster received far more press than anyone else.
The world is neither black nor white nor good nor evil, only many shades of CowboyNeal.