The Music Man

HellSpam writes "MacNETv2 interviewed a man who is claiming the title of "King of the Pirates". The man has over 900,000 songs, a collection that rivals even the iTunes music store(!). From the article:"I spent the day with a guy who spends every free moment collecting music. So far his music collection rivals Apple's iTunes Music Store, and his goal is to own a copy of every song ever recorded. Can he do it? Maybe, but you know what they say; it's the journey not the destination.""

Comments

Can't be done.

[zerguy]

What is this guy smoking, wanting to own a copy of every song ever recorded? This clearly cannot be done. What if I record a song on my hard drive, then take it out and smash the hard drive to peices? Oops, this guy fails.

Journey?

[dr_dank]

Can he do it? Maybe, but you know what they say; it's the journey not the destination.

Don't worry, I'm sure he's got Journey in there too.

Re:Journey?

[Prince Vegeta SSJ4]

Somewhere on a p2p network.

Typing beside you, here in the dark Feeling your mouse click with mine Softly you IM, you're so sincere How could our love be so blind We sailed on together We drifted apart And here you are on my screen.

So now I come to you, with open ports Nothing to hide, believe what I say So here I am with open ports Hoping you'll see what your share means to me Open ports

And the irony is

[debian4life]

He will probably never have to deal with the RIAA ever.

Re:Disconnect and motivation

[OverlordQ]

"...a man who is claiming the title of 'King of the Pirates'...and his goal is to own a copy of every song ever recorded..."

He can't have his cake and eat it too. He'll have to settle for "King of the Brainwashed Consumer Zombies" or "King of RIAA Lawsuits"

Grand Mariner

[NitsujTPU]

Our man, let's call him Doug, greeted me with a huge hug, a broad smile on his face, drink in hand (Grand Mariner of all things), and invited me in to his den.

Grand Mariner? That must be a pirate's drink, eh Matey?

Occasionally we land-lubbers will drink Grand Marnier though.

Re:Disconnect and motivation

[micromoog]

It's a simple typgraphical error. They misspelled '0wn'.

That has to be...

[modifried]

.. the most confusing slashdotted page I've seen. The article page says, in it's entirety:
"Problem!?"

With both the question mark and exclamation mark, I get to wondering. Is it asking me if there is a problem? Is it telling me there's a problem? Or is this some sort of statement based on quantum theory, and is both asking and telling me there is a problem at the same time?

The RIAA could make a lot of money here....

[charlieb0y]

At $250,000 penalty (I THINK that's the max) per song, the RIAA could make 225 BILLION off this guy alone! I bet they lose that much per year because of him...........

Sure...

[gillbates]

it's the journey not the destination...

Because the prison bus ride is definitely more scenic than the prison yard, right?

• New computer: $799
• Broadband connection: $59
• Lawyer for the RIAA lawsuit: $5,000
• Fines and prison term: 5 years, plus 130 million dollars.
• Getting mentioned on Slashdot as King of the Pirates: Priceless.

Some things, money can't buy. But if you want to get busted for copyright infringement on a shoestring budget, only Slashdot will do.

And just who decided he was King?

[xenocide2]

Did some tart in a lake give him a sword? Help, help! I'm being oppressed!

The RIAA will be raking in the $

[BashDot]

900,000 songs * $125,000 per song = (wait for it)

a $112.5 BILLION dollar fine

The world's worst leech0r

[Aim Here]

What's this guy's soulseek/emule IDs? He's going straight to the top of my ban-list for not sharing!

Non-sharers are killing piracy! Help stamp it out!

Re:Disconnect and motivation

[sulli]

It's a simple typgraphical error.

Indeed.

So I guess he doesn't

[Stone316]

have a bittorrent setup?

damn..

Re:The hard part...

[kaszeta]

The hard part isn't collecting the music. It's giving meaningful meta-data to it. iTMS doesn't just have ~900,000 songs, it has metadata for each one, including album covers.

Who needs meta-data? I was planning on having it select a random track and waiting until it got to the right song...

A Letter to Mr. King of the Pirates

[akiy]

Dear Mr King of the Pirates,

We happen to own a lot of songs that are not in your collection. We would love to send a couple of people over to provide you with the songs that you are missing. Can you please send us your home address and what you look like? We'll be right over.

Sincerely,
The Recording Industry Association of America

Re:Disconnect and motivation

[liquidsin]

He's got the best reasoning ever. How could any patriotic American jury convict this man of a crime if he's doing it to keep the terrorists from destroying the American culture and economy?! He's a good patriot! The RIAA has plugged away at their lawsuits through bad publicity like "RIAA sues grandmother and 12 yr old girl" but would they be so stupid as to sue this guy and invite headlines like "Recording Industry helps terrorists destroy American culture"?

Re:Disconnect and motivation

[Idarubicin]

Recording Industry helps terrorists destroy American culture

I hate to break it to the terrorists, but they're waaaay too late.

Re:Disconnect and motivation

[SnapShot]

It isn't an impossible task, he's just going about it the wrong way. Most MP3's are 3MB or so, right? Why not write a program that randomly generates files in the 2 to 5MB range, throws out the ones that aren't valid MP3, and puts the rest in his library. Not only would you get every song ever recorded but you would get every variation of every song ever recorded (at least in that range). Even better, he would own the copyright on every new song that will ever be generated from this point forward.

It's really pretty simple; here's a code fragment:

for(int i = 0; i < Math.pow(2, 5242880), ++i) {
File f = generateRandomFile(i);
if(isValidMP3(f)) {
saveToLibrary(f))
}
}

No need to thank me, I'm just trying to do a service for the future generations and save this guy the headache of all those lawsuits...

STYX

[kevcol]

There is a horrible song by Styx called "Too Much Time On My Hands"

I wonder if he has that?

Re:I wonder

[XMyth]

I tried to RTFA, am still trying actually. I keep refreshing the page but it keeps telling me it timed out. It's strange. Almost as if everyone from Slashdot who was viewing the article lagged the hosting server so much that it is unable to respond to requests.

Has anyone ever heard of that before?

Re:Disconnect and motivation

[UID1000000]

This is an interesting thought that they want a copy of everything available but there are a few flaws to that idea.

First the most obvious is quality. Let's suppose that Diana Krall's greatest hits and I can only find it at 96Kbps. That's gonna suck. From a quality standpoint the question would be why? They'd have to spend money to remaster it etc.

Secondly is that not everyone with a collection is online all the time or sharing at all of the times. Would the RIAA appeal to the FCC to "intervere" with our PCs and simulataneously access the web?

As for the business method patent that might be a good idea. I don't know why Linus would though... Can the internet surpass something like FlashCopy? It seems that the web would come to a screaming halt if I tried to back up 18 terabytes of a data to the web.

Oh shit, I just blew up the internet.

Re:Disconnect and motivation

[Buran]

Happened a lot with early lunar probes, especially the Soviet ones -- for varying reasons they'd miss the firing that was supposed to drop them into lunar orbit, or on a collision course ... and off they went into the wild black yonder, eventually winding up in solar orbit. Being as the Sun is a star, they got exactly what you said they did!