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New Music Player to Spread Files Wirelessly
PontifexPrimus writes "A new P2P / media player project could allow mobile music devices to automatically transfer media files from other players running the same software. While there seems to be a certain risk (mislabeling files, creating intentionally corrupt songs) there also seems to be a huge potential to this idea (get on the subway to work and when you arrive there your available music has doubled). Of course, this also is a nightmarish scenario for the RIAA-like organizations, especially since such swapping occurs without active user participation, in a drive-by way."
I don't want the thing downloading Backstreet Boys, or even worse... getting Dashboard Confessional from some emo kid.
*shivers* Scary thought.
google.slashdot
And by "Spread Files Wirelessly", they mean viruses wirelessly.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Hopefully it will prompt the user for each full album that could be transfered. Otherwise it's just plain madness.
I've been waiting for this for a long time, but it's not really ready until you can fit tera or petabytes on each device. With update-only rsync, eventually everyone would accumulate every piece of music out there, like a disease.
pwned. I feel like the laughing Quaker/Patriot on Fark photoshop threads. HA! HA!
(mod negative, freedom troll)
This sounds like an element from the plot of Cory Doctrow's Eastern Standard Tribe where all users of a highway system will be able to access each others music as long as they're on the same road at the same time, a real information superhighway.
--
RumorsDaily
If these things were widespread and of sufficient density, they could form their own peer-to-peer grid networks capable of sending any sort of information, untraceably. It would be its own internet, the way the internet was first envisioned. Information would finally be completely free. Stick that in your pipe and smoke it Time Warner/RIAA/NSA!
The flag just makes more sense than the constitution. - Judas Gutenberg
If these become popular it will be a dream come true for the RIAA. Hard, physical proof that someone is a music pirate! "Officer, arrest this man, he's carrying intellectual property theft devices!"
First of all, I don't understand why everybody wants to "hug" his/her mobile phone more and more when they are so harmful. Second, there is no such thing as legal file sharing really. Almost everything is illegal in a file sharing network. Until now they were keeping track of interesting IP and they were tracing the users in order to press charges. Now they will charge you a fine on your next mobile phone bill of every copyrighted piece of data you exchange willingly over the phone. On the other hand, who cares. Everybody is doing it up until now. And everybody is making fun of "getting caught". Until they actually get caught.
Same as regular P2P but that's survived and comes in useful.
Drive-by music. Hmmm ... I like it. I will put an MP3 on my player that consists of only my voice yelling at the listener to "WATCH OUT BEHIND YOU". See how many paranoid people I can freak out. People would be doing that walking the street, in their car, on their bicycle, on the transit system. It would be great
This could be a really good thing for the RIAA, though. If functionality were added so that you could browse what songs others had available, and then download them while simultaneously leting the RIAA know you had acquired in a fashion similar to purchasing ring tones with your phone, They could cut out middlemen such as Napster or iTunes for probably 50% of song purchases. Person A downloads a song from Napster, goes to work, then tells all his friends at the office what a great song it is...pretty soon 1/4 of the people in the building have bought the song, and Napster only got a cut on the first sale. This is the kind of thing that's really killing the RIAA; instead of embracing money-making potential in new technology, they panic and sue.
Unpleasantries.
Only Useful If Paris Hilton is standing next to you with her Camera Phone....
-- I Dont Deserve A Sig I Have Bad Karma
Illegal content? Copyright infringement? All "without user participation," but I would say that since people can download from you on P2P apps, without active participation, you could draw a precedent from that to apply to this: having shared, copyrighted music on a device that allows (forces?) others to download it simply by being in your vicinity is clearly a violation.
Of course, the second this moves from simply audio to pictures and/or video, you could wind up with other illegal content (i.e. child porn) on your player, just by walking by someone with a similiar device who so-happens to be a pervert.
Great idea here, people.
Their business model is sinking lower and lower every day. All the passive media that means songs or movies will end up this way in this new broadband connected world. What we hear or see we can record, replicate and "share". Only user authenticated interactive media like online gamming may benefit.
The whole reason I have never gotten bit by bugs even with an unpatched machine is the fact I know what to avoid.I personally wouldn't want the security of any machines that connect to my music player dependant on sally secretary or timmy teenager having common sense (because if you have spent as much time repairing their machines as I have you know they REALLY don't).
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
This just proves the point that it all comes down to a battle between copyrights and free speech rights. After all this technology could just as easially be used to dissemate political information. At a fundamental level, there is no inherent difference between free speech content and copyright content.
Current P2P is strictly pull. You select what you want, and get it from (wherever). Having random people push random stuff on to my hardware? Not a chance.
Would you allow someone to do this with your PC? Didn't think so. Remember that when you connect your new mp3 player to the USB port.
A potentially good idea, but we all know there is a tiny minority who will screw it up. Badly.
I was going to suggest this thing definately needs some kind of matching software like iRate or pandora, but then I read TFA and see it already does.
Cool. Where can I get one?
455fe10422ca29c4933f95052b792ab2
It says media files, not just music ... which invariably means drive-by porn!
That being said, with all the media fuss over the RIAA suits, I think the creators are TRYING to piss them off.
oh wait.
sulli
RTFJ.
I think this is a great concept, but the P2P part of it may be throwing too much gasoline on the fire. A similar idea from Apple's iTunes might offer a nice alternative. Currently, it is possible for mac users with iTunes to look at and play music from other people's shared libraries. The songs are not really downloaded to the client computer, but rather stream in full quality. This depends on a constant network connection. In the portable realm, therefore, it may not be so feasable while you are moving around from hotspot to hotspot, but I think it would be neat to share a song or two with other people on the bus or in the cafe or wherever, even if just for a short period of time. I'm not saying iTunes sharing is the only way -- indeed if there were a WiFi sharing option on all sorts and brands of portable music players, something compatible, we'd all be able to dynamically share and experience each other's music. You'd be able to broaden the kinds of music you hear, and I believe this could be legal just like iTunes sharing. The portable networking (device-to-device-to-device) may even work without a wifi hotspot, or even more generally, could spread the range of a hotspot. With enough users, each one being a sort of node, a great dynamic network would be formed. Now I'm just dreaming out loud...
I wish there was a mod option for "-1: Incomprehensible". I've read this five or six times and I have no idea what it means.
Yeah, but imagine a beowolf cluster of them!
The CB App. What's your 20?
Why limit this idea to the transfer of music? Why not distribute any information through a chain of WiFi devices and build a whole network? With so many devices already existing it should be possible to build subnets, and hook them up to the Internet. Who cares about 2 cent music articles, other than organizations like the RIAA who see their distribution monopoly threaten? I find the idea of a network independent of any service provider much more attractive.
Dear Santa,
Thank you very much for more music sharing
devices. We can now flip the bird to the RIAA
for being naughty and say "$%!# you!" proudly.
Tiny Tim
How much memory do PDAs have now-a-days? I just checked the specs for the Treo 650 and it said it had 23 MB. That doesn't sound like a lot of space for music files. Any idea on filetypes / memory considerations?
Free speech is the ability to spread your own thoughts and ideas.
Copyright infringement is spreading someone elses against their wishes.
Mmmm.. Donuts
"Of course, this also is a nightmarish scenario for the RIAA-like organizations, especially since such swapping occurs without active user participation, in a drive-by way"
I want one!
Suppose this is a success product, a video version comes out, and a not so techsavvy person, lets call her "Paris" puts a video "Live in Paris (2)" in the open section instead of the blocked session.
In short: I think users should have control over what they put on the device, else it ends up full with crap since it just uploads, or you are spreading your own files unintentionally.
My wife's sketchblog Blob[p]: Gastrono-me
Sure, there is media that is not copyrighted, but sadly far too little. Too little in the sense that I find it depressing that 99.9% of the creativity of a culture is "owned" by soo few, but also too little in the sense that it makes the above argument next to impossible.
PjotrP
"...get on the subway to work and when you arrive there your available music has doubled..."
Unfortunately, half of it is in five second clips of random song fragments.
So what if some idiots would use this to push mislabelled files. So you get a weird sound file once in a while, this is nothing new happened with napster and that didn't stop it.
Plus there is tiny little difference here. The person pushing the weird file will be closeby. 99.99% of the internet assholes are pussies who would never run the risk of an angry person coming over and pushing their face through a wall.
As for virusses. As long as the software is not written by MS it should be fine. Shouldn't be too hard to write a player that does not suffer from bugger overruns and as far as I know MP3 does not allow system calls to be embedded.
It sounds like a nice idea. I doubt it will take off in all but the hippest places for the same reason that I can rarely find anyone with a PSP or DS or even GBA cabel. Not that many people have this kinda gadget and because nobody has it nobody buys it because nobody has it.
It reminds me of the napster days when you could requests a persons share list. I always checked out what other stuff a person had if I found a rare song I had been looking for. You never know, if you both like the same weird stuff you might like the other stuff he/she has.
The RIAA will do a nutter of course but screw them.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
This is exactly the sort of thing I dreamed up in an earlier response to an *AA post (too lazy to go and link to it :)
:)
The beauty of this sort of system is that, designed well, you'd be able to program your device to "listen out" for things you're currently interested in (this would rely on files being tagged with a bit more meta data than we get in current IDV3 tags etc.) With some sort of AI algorithm processing the tags you could also optionally allow the "pickup new music" function to take you off into new avenues of sonic exploration (Hmm... think I'll set the "weirdness factor" to 3 today). Hell I never knew how much I liked Bulgarian throat singing until I heard some on a radio station whilst cooking my tea
One thing's for sure though you'd soon find more good music than you'd probably have time to listen to - unless in the future you can get paid for being a "music filter" for a third paty (when most manufacturing ia automated new jobs will come into being...) And with digital transmission of the data the days of artificially induced shortages are over (ooh look, limited edition of 100 copies on BLUE VINYL !!!!)
So you make available what you please and passing people pick up what they please from you. Everyone gets to hear more music.
And what of the poor musicians I hear you say. In the future more bands will make more money than they do today from live performances, personal appearances, writing bespoke music for social events etc. etc. In an interconnected world there is now more opportunity for musicians/sound sculptors to both create works and to get paid for it. Admittedly there'll probably be less battery farmed, multi millionaire musicians producing trite pap (a la Britney Crap etc.) but there'll be more musicians earning a living.
Meanwhile the cavemen at the *AA etc. still just simply don't get it and are attempting to keep things going using their 1920s business paradigm.
Ho hum. Bring it on.
Sky subscribers are morons. They pay to be advertised at !
this is the year the ipod will move away from the dock for downloading files. you want a song? hit up iTMS using the built-in airport card and buy it anywhere there's a wireless signal. then with a little homebrew fun, share with your friends, willy-nilly.
this is going to be a HUGE year for filesharing.
I propose some simple method of authorizing users. Maybe you could exchange keys with people by pressing some button while shaking their hands. Even with just the people I trust enough to exchange the keys to my mp3s that way I'd be able to build a fairly sizeable collection. Now, moving on to friends of friends etc. I'd have all music in the world within a few years - and the popular stuff within days. That is, if I cared for illegal file sharing.
Any sufficiently advanced libertarian utopia is indistinguishable from government.
Who has the patents on the rest of the technology? Who controlls cellular bandwidth?
Corporations like Sony, Motorolla, Nokia, Apple, etc etc.
What are they gonna do? make devices that allow people to trade freely without their intervention or are they gonna try and make some money out of this?
Anyone who has the capacity to make something like this on a large scale is not going to let unfettered P2P happen. Mobile players, moblie phones etc are very closed proprietary devices, DRM has got to be eaiser to implement on these and harder to get around than just about anything else.
Then I suppose you haven't much more than basic "least common denominator" understanding of english
Perhaps you can restrict xfer by license, by format, by genre, otherwise you'd end up with a lot of crap you don't want or stuff that would be illegal; which no-one wants, right?
But imagine what a cool marketing tool it would be for a group to be able flag a song for distribution - that would allow free and unlimited distribution of a song - an mp3 that includes, say, a URL to buy the album, etc. Just think how fast something like that would get around. And of course, that would certainly disturb the RIAA, since I (as a music producer) don't need the current music industry for distribution or marketing at all...
Isnt' that the RIAA's worst nightmare?
Thinking outside my Head
Previously, the courts have erred on the side of caution in these cases. People were able to get off from charges that they downloaded illegal material because it was not possible to prove that /they/ downloaded the material to their computer. The case in question involved certain spy/malware being installed on the computer during the time of the download.
While people are normally held responsible for action commited using their property without their knowledge (e.g. an unsecured gun in a home that is used by a child to kill someone), the courts do not consider it (for now) an act of criminal negligence to have a knowingly unsecured router/PC/phone/PDA, etc.
Have you listened to all of the schlock out there? Well you will if the device doesn't ask permission before transferring other users shares. If these things get sufficiently popular, how long will it be before unsigned bands start a guerrilla advertising campaign by riding trains at rush hour? I'll pass.
As for me, I find good music by using my social network as a filter, from sources I trust. Even semi-legal outlets like allofmp3.com allow me to discover music on the cheap.
Easy to avoid if the OS just is seperated from this application. There are enough base applications which run on multiple OSes without security risks. So I agree, virusses are not a big issue.
My wife's sketchblog Blob[p]: Gastrono-me
http://www.thewebcomiclist.com/latest/ doesn't exist
Yes, some people work for free, because they want something other than money (eg: fame, appreciation, creative satisfaction). So long as they don't ONLY work for free, they still get to eat.
I had this idea 2 years ago during a brainstorming session for an Innovation and Concept module at University, it's like they're spying on meeee
:op ) and means you'll probably strike up conversations with complete strangers about music, which is always a joy on a long journey.
Anyway, although I chose another idea from that brainstorming session to follow through with and fully develop, my inital few ideas on this concept centered on you setting up a list of albums or tracks that you are interested in, then when you get onto a bus or train where there are similar devices, music would transfer automatically from one person's player to the other, a bit like a virus would hop from one human being to another. I called it Personal Peer to Peer ( I call the copyright on that name BTW, it's here in B&W(!))
There was also the possibility of tagging extra albums or tracks to recommend to anyone downloading tracks from your player. Say for example you like, um- Snow Patrol and you had their last album on your player. You'd be able to recommend their first two (relatively unknown but pretty great) albums to someone downloading Final Straw from your player, and they may choose to take you up on your recommendation.
The ways in which this type of sharing could change the model of music sharing and distribution (again!) are enormous and how this idea plays out is dependant on how it's harnessed, if it catches on at all.
In the first scenario, no-one pays for the music that is bounced from person to person, and everyone's happy except the music industry. What happens then? Offering music for file swapping like this is illegal copyright infringement, but in this case it's out there on the street where everyone can see you. Imagine cops taking subway rides and arresting people swapping copyrighted material because they can see them offering illegal music downloads on the mini P2P network in the carriage. It's not that different than them arresting someone for selling bootleg CDs on the street, which happens often enough. It probably wouldnt happen, but then the all poweful RIAA have sued 12 year old girls. Just think about it anyway.
In the second scenario, instead of distributing full free copies of the a whole album off your player for free, what if the files that are sent have a limited (say 2 weeks?) initial licence that can be made a full licence by actually *paying* for & unlocking the album. This way, you can try a recommended album on your player for free for a while by having it sent on a Personal P2P network, and if you like it, buy the damn thing. This distribution method appeals to me because it puts the person back into personal recommendations ( I call copyright on that as well
If PP2P takes off, then it'll probably be the illegal kind, but then we've seen this kind of thing happen on t'inernet in the last 5 years, only to see commerical services pop up.
I can imagine the scene in the future- people meeting in music speakeasys to swap files & socialise while the cops/feds drive around sniffing out their puny network signals. Stranger things have happened.
When the posters fear their moderators, there is tyranny; when the moderators fears the posters, there is liberty.
I can already share music wirelessly... it's called a SPEAKER :)
Indeed... so because viruses exist for a new file-o-sphere, no one's going to be able to write antivirus protection files? Puhhhhhhtever.
...just run an unsecured FTP server that allows anonymous uploads. You put up your favourite music files, and pretty soon you'll have a very nice collection of illegal porn, warez and viruses.
Already read this on digg.
Make Millions of dollars sharing information. Call 1-800-sir-spama to get into this multi-level advertising oppostunity.
Do you want to get paid to attend parties, movies, and rock concerts? Maybe you are into exercise? How about making money on your way to work? If you sign up today, those hours of congested traffic and annoying public transportation experience start making you money.
All you need to do is download our "music" everyday from our service onto your AD-pod and it will do the rest. It will share all of the its content with anyone who passes by, making you money in return.
Our technology works by attaching ads to snippets of popular music and sharing those ads with those around you. Our ads give full credit to the artists and records label and get our messgaes out to the masses.
Sign up today
Gator/Claria is Spyware.
Cant imagine that the *AA would sit by and allow this logical progression to occur.
.. hint hint..
If you can control what sort of stuff comes across to your device, such 'similar music' or have an actual 'wish list' this might be a cool thing.
We need a wireless adaptor for ipods
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I think it would be cool if it was a wireless Usenet. Usenet uses a flood algorithm. In the olde days you could sent mail thru it.
You've made the top 100 list of "most fucktarded Slashdot comments ever."
If you live in an area that has free wireless, i would imagine you could mount your drive at home, and have virtually unlmited space on your PDA.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I understand English, but I don't understand "double entendre" in this sense. Mainly because it's not a double entendre. Maybe it's comprehensible, but it'd help if it was funny or accurate, too.
Unless they automatically copy every new file they encouter to themselves (meaning they'd have to be HUGE) I bet routing would be a problem. "User Error 719: No Route to Host/File Not Found. Please walk to nearest Starbucks and Hang out with more People."
I'm fairly sure any kind of ad-hoc mesh network with any type of standard routing protocol would be brought to its knees by the frequency of connection change.
The snow doesn't give a soft white damn whom it touches. -- ee cummings
There is a good argument for P2P systems in general in that there are MANY uses for them other than stealing music - and yet many P2P systems have been taken down by hoards of ravening *AA lawyers. But it's quite a bit harder to come up with ways in which this device could be used legally. It's a music player - so people aren't likely to be using it for copying photos they've taken or software they've written - such as is the case with P2P on the Internet. How many people do you think you'll just naturally happen to bump into who:
a) Have a compatible player...and...
b) Have OpenSourced music on offer...and...
c) Actually want to recommend it to you.
I would be quite utterly amazed if I got one interesting and legal track in a year of use.
Furthermore, if the owners of these machines don't actively send the files, it's likely that there is a good case for suing the manufacturers for causing copyrights to be breached.
They are gonna get their asses sued unless they weigh this thing down with so much in the way of DRM that it'll be useless in practice.
The article links to the manufacturer says that this is for sending "Recommendations" - so perhaps it is intended that one only ships a short recommendation in the form of a brief clip.
Another possibility is that you'd have to be signed up to a music service based on the 'subscription' model...in that case, this is music you could just have easily downloaded for yourself - so the 'recommendation' thing would really be the only reason to use it.
www.sjbaker.org
Add FreeNet ( or something like it ) to the mix, and we would have a secure data distribution system. Each little device stores what it can, and spreads to everyone else.
How about adding distributed processing too? A huge GRID network...
---- Booth was a patriot ----
If this ever really launched, I give the advertising industry one month to catch up and start spamming the players with lots and lots and lots of ads.
You say you got a real solution
Well, you know
We'd all love to see the plan
(The Beatles)
A similar idea plays a role in Cory Doctorow's novel, Eastern Standard Tribe.
That's what I meant by my original post too. Too bad some people really just don't get it. The level of education and learning about things like sentence structure, spelling and general literature is astoundingly frightening! Mercutio was fond of them, but the OP certainly doesn't have a grasp on it, that's for sure.
The question is, will the RIAA:
a) kill the project?
b) use the project as an excuse to buy laws forcing users to be responsible for their machines?
Imagine some kind and generous soul buying these, and then leaving them in public places. Subway stations, parks, coffee houses, etc. Presuming you could hide them or otherwise make them conspicuous, you could have a repository of music from anyone nearby. Over time it would update and grow, reflecting a gestalt of what music is popular in that particular neighborhood/location. Would be kind of cool, actually.
I HAVE CUBIC WISDOM THAT TRANSCENDS AND CONTRADICTS ONE DAY GODS
This AC is right, your choice in music says nothing about your intellect (or morals, or political affiliations, or favorite text editor...) is just your taste in music. I don't delude myself, many of the songs I listen to have stupid lyrics but I like the melody and that's what matters to me. I usually can't pay attention to lyrics while coding (or reading, browsing, writting emails...) anyway. Mhmm I have the sudden need to link http://www.ocremix.org/
But... the future refused to change.
Automatically downloading sounds which fit my "profile"? A 12 years old girl has "gimme-that-song-i-want-to-hear-it-all-day-long" profile, but it's hard to imagine, that a computer will ever understand what i like about Pantera, Berlioz and Aphex Twin at the same time. I'm afraid it can easily be misused to create a synchronized group of consumers.
I think there are also quite a few issues regarding incomplete transfers... portable devices on the move will be continuously connecting and disconnecting with other portable devices on the move. The connect / disconnect cycle will be a lot shorter for them than for traditional P2P devices.
There are definitely ways to deal with such issues; in fact there are multiple incompatible ways. I suspect that the exact way it's handled could make or break the concept.
...does a pretty damned good job of it.
So does Amazon, though I once clarified to them my disapproval of the last Dead Can Dance album and immediately started receiving recommendations for Bruce Springsteen records.
too worried about possible problems. For all we know it may be possible to write little script bots which only accept predefined artists or types of media files. For example, if the hard drives were big enough, it could be possible to update your 'want' list to a season of Scrubs. In that case, on your way home from work you may just stumble across some people which combined have all the eps you want. OR, you might be on the lookout for a certain album, can't find it in the shops, ebay, emule, or as a torrent, and just happen to pick it up as that hot chick whizzes past you in the huge shopping complex in the city. Who knows, you might even be able to send and receive a digital e-card at the same time.
If the above is possible, W00t!!
Creative people work because they need to, not because they're paid. Getting rich should be a side effect, not an end in itself.
The flag just makes more sense than the constitution. - Judas Gutenberg
Of course, this also is a nightmarish scenario for anyone who doesn't want hundreds of pictures of goatse.cx man passively downloaded onto their phone or laptop
There I fixed it.
Meetings and events often end with a series of group photos, with everyone passing their cameras out to front so that they can have a photo in their camera too. Most of these devices use the same storage format. If they were capable of wireless communication one camera would do the trick. Could extend to group holidays, press events. It's a small convenience, but as they say, it's the little things that create business opportunities by making life irritating.
I believe that Microsoft owns the patents on "drive-by downloads" as part of Internet Exploder. IE has been facilitating uninitiated covert downloads for about a decade now. Frankly, this is just a blatant rip-off of Microsoft technology.
then you are given a song every day by someone on the subway that has an attractive theme but words you dont understand that say 'yvan eht nioj'!
This will be a spam magnet.
You like Brittney Spears? Some statistics made up by somebody you don't know show that 95% of Brittney Spears fans think that Krissy's Kissing Balm is the wettest and wildest! If you don't believe me, just listen to the jingle!
The Diamond age, and all of its ads, is coming.
How many of those comics would be happy if you decided to host add-free versions of their content?
There are plenty of people who are good sound engineers but cannot produce excellent melodies or lyrics themselves.
This is most like the homebrew game development scene. Who's in short supply? Certainly not programmers. There are thousands of would-be Carmacks out there making their own engines. What do they do with them? They use them to implement Arkanoid for the ten-thousandth time because talented writers, artists and musicians are vastly less common than competent programmers.
Content is harder to produce than to package. There will always be someone who'd "love to be in your band, but I can't sing or play an instrument." If independent groups find they need sound engineers, all they'll have to do is start giving the engineer genuine credit for their contribution. Ditto for any other job they need done.
"I'm Ian, the lead guitarist, here's Mike on keyboards, Laney on vocals, and John's on the computers."
Hell, this is already essentially there. They call themselves "DJs", they mix and engineer music both on the fly and in their home studios, and they get the credit. Fatboy Slim and Moby are both big deals. A lot of rappers are really mostly sound engineers... they write their rhymes but can't sing, so they do their own mixing to add in samples of someone else singing.
A system like this seems well suited for exchanges of small files.
Each player could transmit the owners profile and compare received profiles to see if they're a good fit. If both players get matches they alert the owners to chat, exchange pictures etc. This could be handy in many different settings.
You never know what you can find when out shopping.
If you're on the road and it's a REALLY good match it hooks into the auto-pilot and ya make a U turn....
...music players have no way of running executables you copy into them.
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
Sometimes (but not always) I feel that new music is hardly worth producing en masse. If you said I could have all of the music in the world for free, and no one would produce music ever again, it might be a worthwhile tradeoff. In fact if you said I could have everything made before 2000 for free, and all music made since then would vanish I might still take it. There is so much media out there, I would never be able to get through it all, and a lot of the good stuff is made before 2000. I think I'd be happy to live my life watching old movies, listening to old music, but experiencing it all freely.
That is a crock and you know it! All the moooosick in the world is controlled by less than five men, CEO's of monopoly capitalist entities grown fat from exploiting helpless artists. Sure ...SOME...artists appear rich. Many new artists will never make it in the door. Many are and were like Billy Holliday in the 1950's, who had to bed attrociousely ugly and diseased putrid excuses for people just to get a bad contract that exploited her. Others had their music stolen. Many early R&B stars sold songs for less than a hundred dollars to large studios that went on to make millions from them. Record Labels make huge money from the poor excuses for music that gets itself sold today. They do not take any chances with their investments, so the product they put out to the public through the limited number of performers they use is bland. The public knows this and are not buying. The idea that fall-off in sales is all 'piracy' is a big lie reminiscent of Adolf Hitler's 'big lie'. Like Hitler, they accuse small players of damaging them. They are just like Hitler when he invaded Czechoslovakia before the Great Patriotic War while he accused the Czech people of conspiring to invade Germany as if they had the remotest capability. What Hitler really wanted was the uranium known to be in the Sudeten mountains of northwest Czechoslovakia so he could make weapons. What the industry wants is control of all the hardware that any citizen might use by selling this big lie to bought an bribed politicians of both parties. The Democratic party is no angel here. It was Senator Al Gore, a democrat, that gave us the DMCA, and Senator Orrin Hatch, a radical Mormon republican with another agenda to push, who wants to finish off our constitutional rights by pushing the hidden agenda of this Big Lie campaign to its logical end. I do not like music, any music, and especially modern trashy noise that blares from seemingly everywhere. Maybe if the 'labels' have their way and everything is locked up and people's electronics all came with slots for coins, bills and credit cards, then people will soon get tired of simply giving their money to these parasites and stop buying altogether. Until then don't you dare prattle that drivel about the artists' starving if people share their music.
When I was a kid people shared music locally
all the time. They copied cassettes, one at a time. The music industry did not fade away and die like they said in courts at the time would happen. They actually prospered as others wanted to buy the crap when they heard bits and pieces of the crap and happened to like it. Do not ask me why. I have always hated it. And now I am about to be joined by millions of others who will also come to hate it and the putrid avaricious parasites that misappropriated the word 'piracy'. Piracy means in the nautical sense to pillage and rob and plunder at sea. Well these media moguls ARE pirates in the classical sense only they have come onto the land now. If beggaring old widows and making twelve year olds into homeless waifs supporting themselves by prostitution on the streets of our nation in order to pay unconscionable legalized extortion to a small cabal of thugs cruising the legal seas of a world make friendly to them through bribery and unequal treaties is not the classical version of piracy, then nothing is. These corporate monsters are exploiting totally without morals or consciounse, and predating on children and old people. It is little wonder that Muslims hate them so as they fit the definition of Satan found within their holy book. How many of our politicians and monopolists fit the phrase in the Koran that states..."Woe unto hypocrites and defamers and those with more money than they could ever spend and use up all the hours of their days counting it.." The Christian Bible says dire things about those who would sow the wind and what they would inherit! People used not to be too much interested in music. They used to read. You know...books. Be a lot quieter place if 'musik' went seriousely out of fashion. Be nice to warm ones hands on a winter night as thousands of people throw all their DRM CDs on huge bonfires at the foot of stakes on which hand effigies of one social parasite or another....
The ideal situation is that I could give the player a list of SHA hashes (from my eMule client or something) of files that I would like to upload.
Then I could go about my daily business and my player would pick up the files on the fly.
Hi, I am Lars Erik Holmquist, leader of the Future Applications Lab in Sweden that did the Push!Music project. It has been interesting to read all the comments here and there are even some new ideas we would like to follow up on.
But just to clarify:
1. This is a research prototype, not a product. We have tested it in small-scale user studies but have at this point no plans to commercialize the technology.
2. The purpose is NOT to spread music or other content illegally. There are a number of systems that allow you to pay for songs you have downloaded via filesharing and even give compensation to the person you got it from, for instance Shawn Fanning's Snocap. There are also several ways you can subscribe to "all-you-can-eat" downloads, for instance the current incarnation of Fanning's previous venture Napster. When a payment model is in place, Push!Music will simply help people find more music, which can only be good for the artists.
3. When we do our current user tests, we are careful to stay strictly within the limits of Swedish law: we only use music that the users have paid for, and we limit copying to within a small circle of friends.
4. Many have brought up issues like viruses, spam and unwanted songs, advertising, the problem of correctly predicting what someone will like, etc. Of course there are potential problems with new ideas but that is no reason to not explore them! We are building and testing prototypes to find out more about both problems and unexpected opportunities.
5. Several mentioned using the concept for other media, and we are already looking into this, for instance digital photos. This might also be easier for copyright reasons, since people would then mainly share material they have created themselves.
Thanks for your interest, and if you want to know more I suggest you read some of the papers on the web site. There is an additional paper coming up at the Intelligent User Interfaces conference that will talk more about the problem of matching songs to users.