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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.""
"...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..."
I thought there was a slight issue there.
I decided to look at the article, and somehow, he believes that downloading the music isn't illegal, but burning it to CD is.
And, also from the article, he apparently is doing this because he is on a quest to preserve all of the music of Western civilization in the event that a (presumably Panislamic) terrorist detonates a nuclear weapon in, say, downtown Chicago, precipitating a complete and devastating collapse of the economies of the US and the West, changing the face of the currently free nations in the world forever (and losing all of our music along with it).
Why or how, exactly, one individual person with consumer-grade storage and computing equipment operating out of a residence is the absolute best way to do this is not covered.
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.
**This begins my ever-changing sig
We need a -1 RTFA moderation option!
**This concludes my ever-changing sig
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.
Where does the school board find them and why do they keep sending them to ME?
He will probably never have to deal with the RIAA ever.
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.
Quid festinatio swallonis est aetherfuga inonusti?
Africus aut Europaeus?
From my estimation (and relatively limited library, it seems): 2400 songs = 10 GB
So 900,000 songs would come out to be approximately 3,750 GB... or 3.75 TB of music.
We're not worthy...we're not worthy...
http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:-7B7abphgzIJ: www.macnet2.com/more.php%3Fid%3D536_0_10_0+&hl =en
I remember when legal used to mean lawful, now it means some kind of loophole. - Leo Kessler
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.
From Google Cache ( http://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&q=cache%3Ahttp%3 A%2F%2Fwww.macnet2.com%2Fmore.php%3Fid%3D536_0_10_ 0&btnG=Google+Search&meta= ):
The Music Man - King Of The Pirates Has A Goal - Own It All!
"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."
What do you say to someone who has a digital music collection that exceeds 900,000 songs? This was the question I was pondering during my long drive to interview the man who claims he is on a quest to own a copy of ever song ever recorded. What do you say? I think the only way to begin such an interview would be to ask "why?"...
When I pulled into the driveway of the King of the Pirates, an upper middle class neighborhood of stylish homes and SUV's, Infiniti's, and more Mini-Coopers than necessary, I was surprised by the normalcy of it all. His home was nothing short of spectacular, his wife a mid-30's ex-underwear model (honest!), and his two kids well groomed, apparently intelligent, and very wired. (As in technology-wise, not ADD) This is not the home I would have thought would be the enclave of someone out to pirate the hell out of the music industry. This was going to be very interesting...
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. He was absolutely thrilled to finally be able to talk to someone who was actually interested in what he was doing. Seems that 'the wife' as he calls her, was bored to tears hearing about his latest collections, or the latest Bit Torrent site he found; a treasure trove of hard to find music all ripped at 256-bits. The wife wants to know why he doesn't play more golf, like his friends. "Golf is the most boring game in the world, what I am doing is much more fun."
His Pirate Room - A MacGeek's Heaven on Earth
Doug has devoted one of the extra bedrooms (he has 7 of them) into what could only be described as The War Room. He owns three Power Mac G5's, and just added two iMac G5's. Several external 250GB firewire drives are attached to the iMacs, and sitting in the corner are a stack of at least 6 other external drives, all 300GB, brand new, boxed, and just waiting to go online.
He has two cable modems and one DSL. One cable modem is "for the family", the other dedicated to his quest. The DSL line is a backup and is sometimes used when he had discovered a new site that offers a slew of new torrents he wants to mine. The wife, and the kids are all connected to the Internet through an Airport network, with multiple Airport Express base stations scattered among the house.
All the Macs in his command and control room have JBL Creature speaker systems, some white, some blue, and a burgundy one that I have never seen before. The entire room is lit with indirect 'rope' lights, giving the room a feel of living in the Star Trek universe. There are a couple of rich soft brown leather chairs and one long, very plush, baby-butt soft leather sofa that just screams comfort. I took a seat on the sofa and never felt more pampered or more comfortable. I made a mental note that once our pets' pass on this was going to be the sofa in MY house. For all I cared this interview could go for days, once ensconced in this incredible piece of furniture I didn't want to leave...ever.
The Wife bought us a pot of coffee (Jamaican Blue Mountain), two cups, and cream and a small bowl of 'equal'. With the coffee was a plate of fresh (fresh!) Dunkin Donuts Cinnamon Sticks. The interaction between The Wife and Doug showed that these two were a happy couple. The seemed to really like each other, and that, my friends, is more rare than you might think.
Once I got through ogling the various M
To avoid those nasty RIAA sniffers. He probably is not sharing back. Of course the article is already DOA so I could not say for sure. As long as he is not leaving Madonna or Usher albums on his share directory, he probably has been existing below the radar. Whether or not you believe what he is doing is aboveboard, you have to admire his tenacity. I wonder if he has listened to all 900,000 to see if they all are high quality and they don't have someone shouting "Eat me" dubbed right in the middle of the song.
Have you Meta Moderated t
Ever seen the same song with different file sizes, bit-rate, and versions? He's gonna have tons of dups..
.. 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?
About 4.4 Terrabytes
Average MP3 is about 5MB
900,000 songs * 5MB = 4,500,000 MB
4,500,000 MB / 1024 MB in a gigabyte = 4394.53125 GB
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...........
I read this a few days ago. Quite frankly, not only is his reasoning completely ridiculous, but his methods are also totally suspect. I'm sure his ISPs haven't noticed anything peculiar about 100% downloading, all the time?
Pending a secondary source, I call BS on this one.
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
Because the prison bus ride is definitely more scenic than the prison yard, right?
Some things, money can't buy. But if you want to get busted for copyright infringement on a shoestring budget, only Slashdot will do.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
900,000(songs) / 1000(songs/day) = 900 days > 10 months
note that he "started slowly", which i assume means less than 1000 songs / day
the math does not add up for me. anyone can fix the anomaly?
Did some tart in a lake give him a sword? Help, help! I'm being oppressed!
I Browse at +4 Flamebait
Open Source Sysadmin
900,000 songs * $125,000 per song = (wait for it)
a $112.5 BILLION dollar fine
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!
damn..
"Thanks to the remote control I have the attention span of a gerbil."
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
--
http://www.aikiweb.com - AikiWeb Aikido Information
The problem is not collecting the music. The problem is that his music collection probably looks like this:
Frank Zappa - genre - Sheik Yerbouti - (no year)
BRITNEY SPERS - pop - Oops I did it Again - 1900
Benni Benassi - Satisfaction vs In Da Club - Dance - 2004
etc. It would peeve the hell out of me to see that crap, and I see it all the time, because it seems like people who don't take the time/money to buy music also really don't give two shits about good tagging (or good ripping, but that situation is getting better). So, I find myself doing lots of manual work to fix the meta information, add valid "year" data, add track and disc number data, check off "compilation" for those, fix genres and spelling, etc. Most of the time, if it looks like the song has crap ID3 tags, I don't even bother downloading it, it's not worth the extra work. This is really the extra value you get out of using something like the iTunes Music Store to buy songs (and I do).
Thus, it becomes a rather huge management problem to fix tags and remove duplicates. And the process of removing duplicates is not even very logical, often- If the same exact song is on two separate albums, do you keep both? Without listening to both songs to see if one is ripped better, do you tend to remove the older or newer duplicate? What if the songs are actually the same but one of the titles is completely wrong so you can't tell? Etc. I won't even go into the logic for picking genres... I say Depeche Mode is "Goth/New Wave" and Nine Inch Nails is "Industrial", but nobody else seems to think so, for example. Perhaps the whole idea of "genre" is an archaic holdover from physical music stores, but it can be a useful extra tidbit to help create smart playlists from (in iTunes) as well as help discover new music related to what you already know.
I will shamelessly plug two things here: http://www.musicbrainz.org/ to help you tag music correctly, and the Roku Soundbridge to listen to your collection wirelessly.
He uses Filemaker Pro.
Ok, so this guy claims he only downloads and never, ever shares his music (and hence he's not a pirate). And yet he claims to get a lot of his music from torrents... Unless he's satisfied with very slow download speeds (and being a complete leech!) I think I'm seeing a flaw here.
Since he claims to get a lot of music off of Bittorrent, this guy is definitely giving it to others to get a decent download speed--and at 900000 songs, plenty of others have acquired other music thanks to his "hobby."
That's the nature of the protocol--you can't take without giving back. Even if somehow downloading but not sharing the music were legal, he'd still be breaking the law.
Forget about leeching. I can't believe they didn't ask him how to reconcile his insistence that "I don't distribute the music, I only download it" with the fact that he uses torrents.
900000 songs at an average (pulled out of a hat) of 3m each would take a little over 5 continuous years to listen to, played back to back to back, assuming he didn't attempt to listen to them more than once. (He might, at that; you could listen to several songs at once if you were only trying to pick out those high-pitched squeals they insert, but you wouldn't be able to tell much about the quality of each song, I think.) If you assume about 12 hours out of every day is reserved for sleeping and misc. rather than music listening, he could listen to his entire collection in 10 years if he never repeated. To be frank, this is a little hard to believe, but it is within the realm of possibility.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
Sharing an MP3 music file ... without charge: This is LEGAL unless your doing this as part of a business plan or promotion. You can have a website full of MP3's as long as it is not a business site, you are not selling ad space etc. If you can afford it, have fun.
Yeah, see, that's the part that is simply wrong, at least with regards to US law.
Copyright infringement occurs, per 17 USC 501, whenever someone violates one of the exclusive rights of the copyright holder. Two of those exclusive rights are set out in 17 USC 106.
One of them is the exclusive right to reproduce the work. Another is the exclusive right to distribute the work.
When you download a work, reproduction necessarily occurs. When you provide a work on a server for people to download, distribution occurs.
Thus, sharing anything, if it is copyrighted, and if you are not authorized by the relevant copyright holders to do so, is illegal. There are various exemptions. In the case of ordinary people sharing mp3s in an otherwise infringing manner, even if not for charge, no exemptions apply.
There is, actually, an exemption for sharing certain sound recordings and music via certain media such as analog cassette tapes. But that's not applicable to mp3s via websites and filesharing networks.
If you have a cite to a case or a statute, I'd love to see it. But you pretty certainly don't, at least not one that is valid or that you have read properly. (People invariably seem to misread 17 USC 1008 -- it annoys me. Read 1001, and read RIAA v. Diamond for what 1008 actually means, if you're going to cite it.)
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
What he is trying to do is literally impossible. Furthermore he already has more music in his collection than he could ever listen to in his lifetime. I have been collecting vinyl for some 25 years, and come across his species before. They collect and collect and bag the records up in protective sleeves and lord over their super rare *SEALED* original pressing of "The Skullsnaps", or "24 Karat Black", which has never had a chip of diamond touch it to release the magic contained within. Compare this to the mindset of a deejay, who buys record upon record, and can't wait to play it in public so anyone within earshot can enjoy (or hate, some dj's have a cruel streak).... Just because you are an obsessive collector doesn't mean you can actually enjoy what you collect. Its like the plot from Toy Story 2, where they are collecting rare toys, when they really should be in the loving hands of a child.
I have several chicago blues indie records from the 1940's and 1950's that are one of a kinds
I am not too familiar with copyright law, but my father told me that when you become the owner of a recording that noone else has, you gain the rights to reproduce and sell said recording. There have been several precedents of this. Maybe you should copy your one of a kinds and get it out to some other collectors before something happens and they are lost to the world altogether.
music lover since 1969
There is a horrible song by Styx called "Too Much Time On My Hands"
I wonder if he has that?
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?