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Napster: the Day the Music Was Set Free
theodp writes "Before iTunes, Netflix, MySpace, Facebook, and the Kindle, 17-year-old Shawn Fanning and 18-year-old Sean Parker gave the world Napster. And it was very good. The Observer's Tom Lamont reports on VH1's soon-to-premiere Downloaded, a documentary that tells the story of the rise and fall of the file-sharing software that started the digital music revolution, and shares remembrances of how Napster rocked his world. 'I was 17,' writes Lamont, 'and the owner of an irregular music collection that numbered about 20 albums, most of them a real shame (OMC's How Bizarre, the Grease 2 soundtrack). One day I had unsupervised access to the family PC and, for reasons forgotten, an urge to hear the campy orchestral number from the film Austin Powers. I was a model Napster user: internet-equipped, impatient and mostly ignorant of the ethical and legal particulars of peer-to-peer file-sharing. I installed the software, searched Napster's vast list of MP3 files, and soon had Soul Bossa Nova plinking kilobyte by kilobyte on to my hard drive.' Sound familiar?"
Clearly proofreading very wasn't very good.
Audiogalaxy
Now acquired by Dropbox :(
... and you're a monster. A Monster I say! All talented musicians, movie makers and other artists are starving now because of the likes of you!
May you rot in the hell that you created where the only music that sells is for 12 your old teen girls and their computer-illiterate mommies.
nc
At the height of napster the RIAA had worked with them to setup a deal to make 5 cents from every download...
They would now have made TRILLIONS of dollars using zero of their own resources.
Instead they've worked hard to piss of every one of their customers in countless ways. Many of whom will never ever pay them again... And it's cost them billions so far and trillions into the future...
Lets all give them a big round of HA HA! WHAT A BUNCH OF MORONS! They deserve it.
I remember using Napster on dial-up (don't think broadband was available or at least not affordable or common). It basically took the same amount of time to download a song as it was long, i.e. 4 minutes to download a 4-minute song.
That is really the bigger story. Even now, instead of making money hand over fist printing digital money the riaa would rather create artificial barriers and ridiculous price points for online distribution. If Apple had not dragged them kicking and screaming into the mp3 drm-less world they would have probably broken their cartel by now.
DRM Free PS4 / XBOX 720 / WiiU games.
Mod me down RIAA owned slashdot mods, I'm working on the Jailbreaks right now.
Yeah I know I'll have to buy the White album again
Why?
People shared files long before Napster came on the scene.
Among other means of sharing, we had BBS's, FTP sites, and Usenet.
If we could not download music, and had no money to buy, we would gather, have some cheep bear, some tabacco, and sing some songs, and have some good time together.
Now, we all sit isolated with our computer and praise the "geniOus" in others.
Keep up the good work guys.
I used to use Napster and subsequently Audiogalaxy back over 28.8k dial-up and it took around 20 minutes to download an MP3 (always at 128Kbps bitrate). These days, I can get a 1080p Blu-Ray rip in that same 20 minutes. It was always a joy seeing a new track had been completed.
The thing I loved about Napster was that there was loads of cover songs and live performances on there and it was so easy to use.
Then when it all came tumbling down thanks to Metallica et al, seeing all the replacements pop up all over the place. Kazaa, Limewire etc all full of viruses and dodgy bitrate files.
These days, it's not worth the hassle to go pirate music anymore so I just pay for Spotify Premium. It is probably closest in functionality to Napster and has a great selection of mainstream and random tracks.
Backup not found: (A)bort (R)etry (P)anic
Except for me its started running MS Personal Page server in 97 on dial up and WarFTP before Napster because popular.
As for buying my entertainment well I sure as hell do but i buy it at pawnshops. Yah I paid retail for 100's of DVD/Cd's I bought and got ripped off on price but then I said fuck it and for the last 6 years I've been hitting pawn shops and getting my dvd's for $2-4 and buy 5 get on free. I have around 700 dvd's/600 cd's
Fuck the artist and movies studios. Its about ME saving money.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
You misunderstand the nature of the purchases you have made. You don't own any music. Unless you wrote it yourself, in which case you didn't pay for it.
Why?
Men In Black reference?
Or maybe just "real life"; the White Album has been re-released a few times, and the "true fans" (or whatever) can be relied upon to go and buy the latest and greatest... (sound familiar?)
Nope .. not at all .. I have paid for every bit of music that I own, starting with LPs & singles, cassette tapes, CDs and even downloads. (Yeah I know I'll have to buy the White album again)
And I prefer music organized in an album .. with a theme .. and good liner notes .. and artwork!
Now get off MY lawn
People like you are more annoying than thieves because you love to march around, pound your chest and for no reason at all constantly have to announce to everyone how you dont steal. Youre as bad as people who do bad things and then find jesus because all they do is march around and shove stuff down the throats of anyone within earshot when in reality no one ever asked or even cares.
Because really now, what exactly was the point of coming and proving how righteous you are to a bunch of strangers? Is your ego so huge and your self esteem so low that you feel the need to just blindly push your self righteous bullshit on us?
ugh, forgot to provide link: http://themusicsalon.blogspot.com.au/2012/03/now-i-have-to-buy-white-album-again.html
Why -- if you have the vinyl, you probably have a truer copy than anything digital
you can get today. I really don't believe that re-releases are remastered. It doesn't
make sense for the industry to do that and then release it on sub-par media (yes iTunes
@128k is sub-par.)
Why?
Men In Black reference?
It was purely a MIB reference. Although I am interested in the latest anniversary release of Lawrence of Arabia.
On the the other hand .. Han shot first!
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Own? Guess again.
You paid for a medium and format specific license.
Why -- if you have the vinyl, you probably have a truer copy than anything digital
you can get today. I really don't believe that re-releases are remastered. It doesn't
make sense for the industry to do that and then release it on sub-par media (yes iTunes
@128k is sub-par.)
Whoosh .. you need to keep up with your pop culture references
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
Own? Guess again.
You paid for a medium and format specific license.
And I can take that medium and format specific license and along with the medium itself legally sell it.
Are you also going say that I don't own the books I bought either?
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Maybe you were quoting Latter-Day Saints Church founder Joseph Smith's translation instead of the King James version?
Want to screw with the USPTO? Nominate Fanning and Parker for a National Medal of Technology and Innovation, "the highest honor awarded by the president of the United States to America's leading innovators." Funny thing is, they probably deserve it!
And before that we had the video cassette. For videos we had VHS.
Also : music is NOT set free. The last time music was free was before copyright.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
I'm pretty sure in that case, you at least own the physical equipment used to perform, record and produce that music... and that stuff doesn't exactly come free. So in a way... actually, you did kind of pay for it. Just not directly.
The thing I remember most about Napster was it didn't have download resuming. I almost can't believe there was a time when EVERYTHING didn't let you pause and resume downloads but I think even at that time you still needed GetRight or Gozilla to resume browser downloads.
Waiting 20 minutes for a song you really like on dial-up and seeing the other user cancel it at 99%, sound familiar?
Napster did not turn anybody into anything. They already were a bunch of right wing zealots. Just ask the late Zappa. He was not very happy with them. That was in 1977.
I am sure there are other even earlier examples that shows similar things.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
On top of all that, he also is direcly funding the RIAA and MPAA finances so they can bribe more politicians and harm the free internet, yeah people like him are clearly guilty of funding terrorism.
What I liked best about the early Napster is that collectors shared a trove of unreleased and rare material. Demos, live cuts, b-sides, non-album tracks - almost anything I could think of, I'd type it in and download it. I got digital versions of stuff that would have taken me man-years to digitize from the originals I had (LPs, cassettes, etc), and stuff that would have cost bazillions to buy from dealers. Remember, back then in the late 90s, the current practice of adding rare tracks like b-sides to CD releases of LP records (which were usually about 40 minutes long, giving plenty of room for extra tracks on the CD) was just beginning, so a lot of this material was very, very rare. As Napster got more popular, all this stuff faded away quickly to be replaced by stuff you could buy in stores on CD. I've always thought that was one of the greatest tragedies of file sharing.
Subtle difference. You own books. You own CDs. You don't own the music. This is important because it's root to one of the valid reasons for violating copyright: If you owned the music, you wouldn't need permission to read the CD, create an MP3 and use it with a player of your choice.
Subtle difference. You own books. You own CDs. You don't own the music.
Yeah like when I say I own my car that I really mean that I own the rights to the designs by Honda.
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Napster was the first and last chance that the music industry was GIVEN to embrace digital distribution, they instead chose to embrace the legal system. The result was that Napster (Not a P2P service but a centralized & controllable service) was shut down.
Who'd have thought that the largest market demand possible would cause someone to develop a product?
Then came P2P, which they are suing the operators of Search engines / Indexers.
The came distributed P2P so they are suing the users.
Next comes anonymous & encrypted P2P
Figures they'd think napster was the beginning. there were many ways to download music long before napster. napster was simply the first to get caught with legal troubles.
Before iTunes, Netflix, MySpace, Facebook, and the Kindle, 17-year-old Shawn Fanning and 18-year-old Sean Parker gave the world Napster.
And what relevance do any of those besides iTunes have when it comes to purchasing and listening to music?
The music industry has a long history of getting in the way of progress. Napster was neither the first nor the last thing that upset the RIAA.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_Taping_Is_Killing_Music
If you're compiling a collection of 'zealot moments.' I'd suggest the Betamax case in the US (In which Sony attempted to ban the VCR) and it's UK equivilent with the Amstrad dual-cassette deck. But if you're looking for age, the oldest I can think of would be in 1905-06, when one of the artist associations of the day called for a ban on a new-fangled technology, the player piano, arguing that it would end creativity in the music industry: People would just listen to the same rolls over and over until the end of time.
But still enough of a hypocrite to actively participate in something yourself that you apparently *DID* know was wrong? Hmmm. Okay... good to know.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Obvious troll is obvious.
The RIAA was hell bent on stamping their boots on the downed throats of men everywhere with campaigns like 'Home taping is killing music'
We also had them ruining future formats like DAT tape and DVD Audio thanks to obscene amounts of DRM the general public are indifferent. Who's to blame? the RIAA.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0t0fZeySNck
4.2s to find it and get it started.
No, I won't git offa yer Napster lawn.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
I'd suggest the Betamax case in the US (In which Sony attempted to ban the VCR)
Rewrite history much, sony created betamax and they were sued by the movie studios, the result being a finding that Sony (and other manufacturers) weren't liable for contributory infringement, since the devices had a significant non-infringing use. This is pretty far from the evil Sony trying to ban the VCR
I used to get them from DCC bots on IRC back in the early days. It was so well managed there was even a search script that worked across all the bots.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
> Subtle difference. You own books. You own CDs. You don't own the music.
Just using the term "music" is far too vague. In this context, if you own the CD you legally own a physical copy of a recording of a copyrighted performance. You don't own the copyright or publishing rights.
So if "music" in this context means the recording, then yes, you own the music. If "music" means the performance or the published songs, then no, you don't own the music. But even so, you may have the right to copy it in certain circumstances under fair use rules, which can be very complex. It's not so cut and dried as you imply.
Same with books. Books are physical copies of abstract literary works. You may or may not have the right to copy it if the copyright/publishing rights to the work are owned by someone else. You may own the books without owning the "work" itself.
Yes, there were indeed ways to download music long before Napster. There were ways to "copyright infringe" music before computers. Let me break it down for you...
Before Napster, there were FTP sites you could browse. Today, you can google $SOME_ARTIST, $SOME_SONG, and "Parent Directory" and usually find what you want...but that was far from the norm in the days of AltaVista. Usenet browsing is similarly possible if you're able and willing to dig.
Before using the internet, we used our 4x CD burners to copy CDs onto blanks. Before that, we used dual-deck cassette recorders, and before that...reel-to-reel, I guess. The point is that being able to retain and listen to permanent copies of songs users hadn't paid for indeed did not start with Napster.
What set Napster apart from the others was the fact that it was widespread, easy for novices, didn't suffer generational losses, or for the individual who wanted the song to know the person who had it. The fact that it was very easy for others to use it meant that they could share their collections, and it didn't take too long for the total breadth of music available on Napster to widely eclipse any existing distribution mechanism in existence at that time.
Is your ego so huge and your self esteem so low that you feel the need to just blindly push your self righteous bullshit on us?
Nah it was because the article was subtitled from the get-off-my-lawn dept..
Oh and btw you seem to be a little humor impaired today. I bet you even took that "Yeah I know I'll have to buy the White album again" comment seriously.
Sheesh .. kids today. Now get off my lawn.
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On top of all that, he also is direcly funding the RIAA and MPAA finances so they can bribe more politicians and harm the free internet, yeah people like him are clearly guilty of funding terrorism.
You are making a big assumption that I buy/bought my my music in the US. You do know that there are other places in the world don't you?
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Mine was Meatloaf - Paradise By The Dashboard Light... nothing will top that download.
Remastered is just code for "we fucked the dynamic range to make it louder"
... still waiting for this free-as-in-beer free beer I keep hearing about.
In the place I worked then ( a startup, later acquired by BMC of Austin, Texas and then vanished into nothingness ), music at the workplace was unheard of. So we put money together for a pair of speakers and a sound card, hooked those up to an old PC - and there we went. Each had his say for an entire day: classics, French chansons, hard rock, mainstream - Napster had it all. Those were the days !
I suppose these jokers have never heard of IRC or what went on there before Napster.
Other than that, it sounds about the same. At my first office job, I had about 1000 songs in my napster collection. Nobody knew what was happening in those days. My bosses knew I used napster at work. People were more concerned with the bandwidth (rightfully so).
Before (and during) napster, I spent a good chunk of my spending money on music up until the lawsuits came. I stopped buying music not because I could pirate it, but because war was declared against me and mine.
Sony didn't try to ban the VCR. Sony invented the VCR.
They turned into "the bad guys" when they became a movie/music company later. At the time, it was Sony vs. the TV networks.
Hilariously, they were the same company that tried to prevent the rise in the CD-R by refusing to allow any of their DVD/CD players to play burned media until well after it was a common practice. This seriously impacted their audio equipment sales and policies like this probably resulted in the company being so financially screwed today. So, Sony has been on both sides. They succeeded by being on the side of piracy(by fighting the networks copyright) and failed by trying to fight it later(as part of the RIAA/MPAA).
If you bought music from musicians that are signed to a MAFIAA record label it doesn't matter what country you bought the music in. The chance that the MAFIAA isn't getting a cut of the regional licensing deal is practically zero.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
You can haul as many strangers around in your Honda as you want and charge them as much money as you can convince them to pay for the privilege. You can't legally charge anyone to listen to your CD and you certainly can't play it for a crowd of strangers even if they don't pay you a dime.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Napster totally sucked unless all you wanted to do was generate a high file count in your MP3 collection. You might as well just record the radio in that case. The rips were awful quality, the labels were often wrong, and the version of the song you got was often not the one you wanted.
The one exception might be that you could find rare live versions or alternate versions of a track in some cases that were previously harder to find. If that had been Napster's focus — sharing music that wasn't available on CD — then it would have had a reason to exist.
I think iTunes is better in every way. Yes, you have to pay, but it is a small amount and you get exactly what you wanted, you never have to pay again as you download for life to whatever devices you want, and in many cases today, almost all of what you pay goes directly to the artist. If you don't like a song enough to pay for it on iTunes, then listen to it on the radio or as part of a monthly subscription service of some kind. If you like a song enough to pay for it on iTunes, you'll have it forever.
No way — the most annoying person is the one like you whose guilt causes them to lambaste the innocent.
Sorry the guy reminded you that there are artists in your music collection who are going without health care because you decided they should work for you for free.
Do you have any idea how little money the RIAA has? No, you don't.
But not geared towards the unwashed masses.
iTunes is 256 kbit/s AAC — when you factor in that iTunes doesn't skip, doesn't get scratched, today's iTunes music is higher-quality than CD. People make the mistake of assuming laboratory conditions. Instead, go into someone's home and take a CD off the shelf and it will be covered in scratches, the CD player will be making up bits to fill in the gaps, and it will likely skip at least once per hour.
And you may not know this, but it is Apple that generates the ISO MPEG-4 AAC audio file from their own master archive, which includes many songs and albums in lossless 24-bit 96kHz or even 192kHz audio — the actual audio from the studio masters. The actual mix that the producer made. Going forward, Apple will at some point release iPods, iPhones, and iPads that have 24-bit audio support (Macs have all supported 24-bit audio for many years now) and they will start releasing music in the actual studio master format, so you hear exactly what the producer made. There are frequencies in 96/192kHz audio that you hear with your internal organs, not your ears.
Vinyl is not a truer copy, unless you're listening to something that was recorded onto vinyl, which stopped in the 1950's. Since then, music has been recorded onto analog tape, digital tape, digital hard disks, and digital solid-state hard disks. For more than 10 years now, the typical studio master has a much, much larger soundscape than even CD can reproduce. Putting that soundscape on vinyl gives you an even smaller picture of it. And most vinyl recordings have too long of a running time, which reduces the audio quality considerably. And vinyl always has scratches, clicks and pops, that are not part of the original recording. It's not really the vinyl that people are nostalgic for, it's the old amps, which were made not to be accurate, but to be musical. We see some of this coming back with Beats headphones, which were not made to be accurate, but rather to be musical.
The only CDs on my shelf that have any scratches are bargain-bin used discs, and even those I avoid the obviously damaged ones. All the CDs I bought new are in mint condition, because I know how to take care of them. Sucks that other people don't.
"Error correction DOES NOT WORK THAT WAY!! Good night!"
Do you know the term "high fidelity?" It might be from before your time. It means "highly accurate."
Yeah. Citation needed. I can't wait for The Beatles "The Liver Album"
> Remastered is just code for "we fucked the dynamic range to make it louder"
That is not true of the “Mastered for iTunes” masters and remasters. The primary instruction from Apple in the Mastered for iTunes documentation is not to crush the dynamic range, because that can be done by Apple when they generate the AAC (or other future format) consumer audio file, or by the listener on the playback device via SoundCheck — but the dynamic range cannot be put back by Apple or the listener if it is fucked in the original master. A full dynamic range is the single most important reason to do a Mastered for iTunes remaster.
Apple's master library supports up to 32-bit 192kHz audio, which has a much larger soundscape than CD, and they look at it as an important cultural resource because in 10 or 20 years, iTunes may be the only one who has some of those masters, because of the temporary nature of many music artists, their record companies, most music retailers, and so on. So Apple basically pleads with audio producers to give them a timeless master: the highest-quality recording you have, with the full dynamic range of the recording intact. One that they can use today to generate AAC, but also use in a few years to generate a 24-bit 96kHz version for the consumer.
Essentially, Apple is asking music producers NOT to master their stuff. They're saying “give us what you were listening to in the studio and we'll give as much of that to the consumer as we can today, and even more tomorrow.” The post-processing of the mix gets done by Apple, same as with YouTube you can upload a 4K and they will make every kind of tiny, low-bandwidth version.
On CD, if you crush the dynamic range, you should louder than the next CD. But with an iPod with SoundCheck turned on, everything is the same loudness, and a crushed dynamic range comes through simply as a crushed dynamic range. So we are moving out of the loudness-above-all era of music. It will take some time because it is expensive to remaster and nobody in music has any money, but at least there is a way forward articulated by Apple via Mastered for iTunes.
Thanks AC, I was wondering how you really felt.
In iTunes, what you are buying is essentially a lifetime proof-of-purchase. The tracks in iTunes that you have not bought show a price next to them, and the tracks that you have bought show a download button. You can also see all your purchases as a list and download any of them again. They download in the highest quality available today, even if you bought them at a lower quality.
It makes no sense today to buy a song unless you get that kind of proof-of-purchase. Just possessing a copy of the track is not nearly as valuable because you are responsible for storing it, backing it up, not losing it in a house fire, and for upgrading it to a higher-fidelity version in the future, which will likely cost you money. You may also be responsible in some cases for proving that you actually paid for that track. Apple takes care of all of this for you when you buy from iTunes. That is what makes iTunes music worth collecting, if there are songs that you like so much that you want to have them available for life. If you don't like a song that much, enjoy it in another more-temporary context like radio or subscription.
You can't legally charge anyone to listen to your CD
Maybe you can't charge people to listen to it, but you can legally charge people to rent the CD from you. Once those people rent it, they can choose to listen to it if they want. The "license" printed on most media these days that implies you cannot rent it is not legally binding.
and you certainly can't play it for a crowd of strangers even if they don't pay you a dime.
I wish you'd tell that to all the idiots who drive by my house with their stereo cranked to "any occupants of this car will be deaf by next year". Also, if I grab random people off the street and ask them if the want to come to my house to listen to the latest insert artist name here CD, it's perfectly legal. Even though once I get enough people, they are a crowd, and they are strangers, it's not a public performance.
Wow. Frank Zappa is a “right-wing zealot” because he expected a listener to chip in along with the other listeners to cover the cost of the writing and production and performance of the music? That is amazing!
If you go to a pot luck dinner empty-handed and somebody calls you on it, I guess they are also a “right-wing zealot?”
If you get a drink at a bar and the bartender expects a tip — fucking “right-wing zealot!”
It's good to know there are people like you out there, working tirelessly every day of their lives for free. You are working for free, right? If not, you're a “right-wing zealot.”
Before Napster is was the new hotness to be on Undernet or EFNet in #mp3jukebox or other similar channels. Everyone was advertising and it was one song at a time dls for a long while. It was branded like a "currently playing" radio station that you could request the downloads for. You'd then enter the queue and sometimes wait for hours / days to get a dcc sent to you. The !list username command was pretty awesome and showed some pretty hilarious collections of music that people were offering.
I know you meant well, but your post is fact-free.
Nobody tried to ban the player piano — the issue was that the player piano makers did not want to pay artists for the scrolls. They expected to make money off the music without kicking anything back to the people who made it. Many songwriters had the equivalent of a platinum album on piano roll and were fucking homeless.
Sony did not try to ban the VCR. They tried to stop the manufacture of VHS VCR's because they were too much of a copy of Sony's Betamax VCR's. Has nothing to do with content except that having 2 kinds of videocassette (or 2 kinds of anything, such as next-generation DVD) is really, really bad for consumer sales and fucks up the whole market for everybody. That is why content creators are RABID supporters of ISO MPEG media standards. Every time there are 2 formats, consumer content sales crash and it hurts everybody.
DAT and MP3/MP4 are the best examples of Sony fucking it up.
In order to “protect content” they ruined DAT by disallowing digital-to-digital copies, which were necessary since DAT tape is fragile, and therefore a DAT recording would break and be gone forever because it was unprotected by backups. Considering that most DAT users were musicians and audio producers, they destroyed a lot of content, not protected it.
And they pushed their crazy “protected” ATRAC format and Mini-Disc instead of MP3/MP4. Brutal mistake when consumers were already buying “unprotected” CD audio.
No need to worry about Sony since they are going out of business any moment now.
No, they DID NOT.
Sony did nothing to try to stop VHS. In fact, they were one of the collaborators on the original VHS standard but dropped out to pursue Betamax technology.
Maybe you can't charge people to listen to it, but you can legally charge people to rent the CD from you.
Not in the USA.
See 17 U.S.C. Â109(b)(1)(A)
Also, if I grab random people off the street and ask them if the want to come to my house to listen to the latest insert artist name here CD, it's perfectly legal. Even though once I get enough people, they are a crowd, and they are strangers, it's not a public performance.
The operative term here is "my house." Do it basically anywhere besides that and it is a public performance.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Napster was the future, 12 years ego.
If we had sane copyright durations (aka 28 years with possibility for an extension) then the music industry should have been forced to adopt the new technology and make music available more convenient, faster and cheaper. No, copyright is not to ensure a business practices through technological innovations and no, not to ensure profits.
If anything copyright durations should been shortened with each new technology, because the time-to-market gets faster and the costs are lower.
How many jobs does this insane copyright durations costs? How many new distribution technologies are killed because of lobbying of one stakeholder? How many innovations are not invented because of the not available public domain and not available fair use?
http://www.mueller-public.de - My site http://www.anr-institute.com/ - Advanced Natural Research Institute
Don't know how it will play on home video, but I saw the latest Lawrence last fall in the theatre. Looked pretty damned good to me. They had some before any cleanup, after the cleanup ~20 years ago, and current cleanup comparisons. Was pretty impressive.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
And you appear to be proud that you paid for the right to listen to the same song at least four... wait, five times. Good for you!
No, that's not true. No one can own a work of music itself (if it were possible, we wouldn't need copyrights to simulate it). But a copy of a work -- i.e. a tangible object in which a instance of the work is fixed -- is easily ownable. And that's usually how it is done. When you buy a wax cylinder, or 8 track, or minidisc or whatever, there's no license. You just own it. And you can do whatever you want with it, so long as it's not illegal. Copyright doesn't give the copyright holder a right to prohibit others from private performances of musical works or sound recordings. Thus, listening to them is not only legal, it is something that the copyright holder cannot license you to do, because he has no pertinent rights to license to begin with.
This idea that licensing is normal is the fault of the software industry, which traditionally has been unusual in doing this (even though it is not necessary for most users) and it is alarming that the practice is spreading.
-- 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.
Why is it that I was downloading stuff illegally since the early/mid-1990s, and I hardly remember Napster (which came out in 1999)? That's because there have always been many older and geekier alternatives, which history tends to overlook in favor of things that became popular with the bulk of the Windows (l)users. Dial-up BBS and IRC Fserv file trading predate Napster by about a decade! (Usenet binaries might have been viable even earlier, but that's before my time.)
Anyone else remember the various #WaReZ and #RiPz channels on IRC? (And of course there was plenty of porn as well.) You'd type a special command advertised by the bots in such a channel, and an FServ would open a private DCC CHAT with you, where you could use shell-like commands like "ls", "cd", "get", "who", etc. Most had a "download ratio" like 2:1, which means you had to DCC SEND the FServ something he doesn't have (but is in the category he's interested in) in order to download. People also ran home FTP servers (or hacked FTP servers hijacked from corporate networks) for pirated materials, usually also with file size ratios to encourage uploading, though you'd still most often find out about those through IRC. People just starting out trading would often upload fakes when the op was not watching...
Those were the days...
Then there was iMesh, which came out about the same time as Napster, and then Gnutella, eDonkey, and other alternatives quickly followed. Then, in the summer of 2001, Bram Cohen released BitTorrent, and that's what I've been mainly using ever since.
8-)
--libman
Not the GP, but my CD collection went up from a handful to 220ish CD's during the Napster era.
Through napster I discovered music and artists I didn't even knew existed. I would then go to the local Circuit City and would buy their CDs (sometimes their whole discography) since I had got a taste and I liked it. I wanted more and I wanted it all at the highest quality.
When Napster was shut down I refused to send a penny to the RIAA and its labels. A Nine Inch Nails album - Ghosts (which Trent released as an independent an sold directly through his website) was the first CD I bought after all those years.
After that I bought a few CDs (less than 10 though) thanks to the guidance from RIAARadar (a website that has sadly gone silent).
I bought a lifetime membership to Magnatune. I have gotten my money's worth in album downloads from that site.
I pitched in a donation to Musopen (many CDs worth) during their Kickstarter a few years ago to help them record and release free open music. The recording was done, the donors were given the first downloads and it has been great.
So I have been willing to put money in the proverbial guitar case, but to this day I still refuse to hand money to the RIAA. When given the opportunity I will gleefully hand my entertainment dollars to their competition instead.
I now own about 230 physical CDs and I will likely own no more than that for the foreseeable future.
I'll continue to pump my (now more numerous) entertainment dollars to other non-RIAA recipients at every opportunity. Not (just) out of spite for what they've done to the music scene and to stifle the growth of consumer friendly distribution channels, but to cast my votes, my dollars to a better alternatives.
Georgia Tech, the leader in Chia(tm) technology.
Napster was radio without commercials.
I got to listen to a bunch of bands then went and bought thier music. I was buying about a disc a week.
Then they went after napster. Metallica was the poster child, even though they actually embraced "record and share our stuff" .
So I quit buying compact disks.I wasn't the only one.
fast forward to the dying industry today. //waves to the net police
If you would of embraced the idea that people hearing music and actually would d/l songs inexpensively way back then, you'd be in a much better marketing position today.
I don't d/l your music, but I do find other artists that aren't with you - patchouli.net for one. I also hit pawn shops and resale places - 50 cents or less a disc.
Your loss for being an idiot.
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
Really? I own upwards of 800 CDs now, the vast majority of them used when I bought them.
Over the few years I've been able to fill my iTunes collection to about 12,000 songs buying bargain bin albums for $1-$2 each.
Say what you will about online distribution, iTunes, and torrents - I am grateful that they have put so many cheap used CDs on the shelves!
You can of course play dumb and pretend not to understand the contrast between "you own CDs" and "you don't own the music". Keep talking. I'll keep laughing.
I had it backwards. I recalled Sony was involved, but put them on the wrong side.
I was slightly wrong about the betamax case: I remembered Sony was involved, but mistakenly placed them on the wrong side.
not to crush the dynamic range, because that can be done by Apple when they generate the AAC (or other future format) consumer audio file
This is just from my limited experience with audio editors, but I don't think you can crush the dynamic range well unless you have the original tracks for each instrument separated. Once they've been mixed together, it just doesn't work.
That would be more convincing if it weren't for the fact that profits tanked very quickly after Napster was taken out.
Pure gold.
Cars can speed over the limit. This is illegal. Yet this hasn't made you decide that cars must be taken off the road...
You misunderstand the nature of music. Nobody owns it.
Some people like to think that they do, but they're merely enforcing an artificial monopoly, but the music lives anyway.
I have music in my head. You can't hear it, but you can watch as I dance to it if you like.
Do you have any idea how much money the organisations represented by the RIAA generate through exploitation of artists and customers?
Hiding behind an industry organisation merely gives us a single label to describe the whole bunch of them.
I stopped buying any music.
I only pay for concerts. Music industry Fuuuuu.
Oh, and I never ever listened to metallica again.
And they pushed their crazy âoeprotectedâ ATRAC format and Mini-Disc instead of MP3/MP4.
Sony have done a lot of crazy stupid evil crap, but this isn't one of them. MiniDisc predated MP3, and they certainly didn't have the decoding hardware to deal with MP3.
Of course things changed, and then Sony pushed ATRAC3 later with special copy protection and encoding programs that only ran on Win98 SE or something.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Which fuckwads modded this as a troll? Remember, there is no "-1 for disagreeing with teenage slashdot groupthink" mod.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
that was more reliant on Usenet at that time? I only used Napster for stuff that was hard to find that some bloke in the UK might have, like a Crass album. For me, I suppose, Napster was the preamble to nzb indexing.
Never used Napster but I was pissed when mp3.com was shut down. I used it to explore new genre and listen to independent musicians. When it was shut down, access to tons of independent music was lost. (Fortunately, I have never trusted "the cloud" and have my own backup. But I still miss the ease of sampling new genre and musicians.)
The music was set free by the mp3 file size combined with dcc fserves on IRC, Napster just jumped on that bandwagon and leeched off the existing system.
Some of us were around before Napster showed up and pretended to be doing something new. You could've implemented Napster as a set of polished mIRC scripts, which is what it essentially was (and wasn't nearly as capable as existing options).
The one thing Napster did was make it quicker for 'anybody' to get music without having to learn anything about the underlying tech or infrastructure. The music had already been set free by the time they showed up, and the number of people in that sharing scene was growing exponentially regardless of Napster. They did such a good job of believing their own bullshit, they managed to get others to believe it, and hit a critical mass and finding music simply became most convenient by using their app. That's why they are remembered. Marketing, PR, and wasting a LOT of investment money, all for the sake of being lazy about downloading music for free.
Gnutella and to a limited extend WASTE did a better job of furthering the spread of music once Napster began to fizzle, as they weren't subject to a single point of control that could be dismantled. These days, even I use Spotify, but it sometimes feels like a step back, as does all this 'cloud' stuff. Storage is so insanely cheap that we don't actually 'need' cloud storage, but like Napster, it all plays to the laziest common denominator.
This is my sig. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
I've been a pirate of sorts since the 70's when I would go to the local record shop and buy all their blank cassette tapes, the guy would say "Why do you buy so many cassettes?" and I would say "Because my friends buy so many records"
The single greatest thing I got from Napster was my musical taste changing, it was like being set free, I could grab an album (or even better just the song I wanted) and if it sucked delete it, and if it was good it could change my entire outlook sometimes.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Back when everyone had 56k, our school had a full T1. Every computer in the lab had napster installed. We would stay late every day downloading and burning. We actually started a computer club just to make it seem legit (we also LAN partied starcraft with a single cd). Our IT guy at the time was kinda my mentor. While the other kids were downloading music, he was teaching my how to download movies from FTP servers on irc trackers. You might have to wait in queue for the FTP server, but once it was your turn, you'd DL an entire movie in minutes. Those were the good 'ol days.
One thing that many analysts miss is that the music industry was already in a decline during the 90s. Sales of new music were dropping but the effect was masked by all the sales of CDs to people who were replacing their vinyl. By 2000 most of the replacement that was going to happen had already happened, and that was one reason that sales numbers began to drop. It's true that hardly anything runs up the kinds of mass sales numbers that top releases once did. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_best-selling_albums and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_best-selling_singles ) But that says more about the fragmentation of the music market (there is no longer ANYTHING that everybody or nearly everybody listens to) than about decline of the overall business. Nowadays the sales are spread across more titles than was once the case; just look at how little intersection there is between the various Billboard charts.
Nope .. not at all .. I have paid for every bit of music that I own,
You don't own any music. You never have. Read the fine print.
The best thing about Napster was getting almost any music you could think of in a moment, for free.
The second best thing, a close second, was surfing other peoples' collections. For a few months in 2001, almost every week, I discovered new bands and unknown albums and singles of bands I knew already. I would browse the collections of people who were sharing stuff I liked, and sometimes just download everything -- everything I didn't already have. Since I was on a T1, that could take just a few seconds in some cases. I would have a week of new music to discover, from the collections of people around the country and possibly the world, in an instant.
I wish there had been some way to pay for Napster rather than having it shut down. Both iTunes and the new-style (free, illegal, Torrent-based) file-sharing services pale in comparison, both in user experience and in sense of community (or lack thereof) -- Napster had community, even though I never once made any contact with another user I didn't know, except by downloading and sharing music with them. I'll always be a Napster kid.
The paper is written in an engaging, journalistic style (I was a mainstream tech writer before becoming a lawyer), but may still be a challenging read. Nonetheless, I recommend it to any Slashdotter interested in a deeper perspective on how intellectual-property controversies work.
Freely downloadable from the Richmond Journal of Law & Technology at: http://jolt.richmond.edu/v16i1/article1.pdf
I believe it was quite a bit earlier than the fifties that artists recorded directly to platter (not vinyl, the vinly is cast from the original mold that was recorded on to). But when talking about an album that was recorded on analog tape, the vinyl will indeed be higher fidelity than the CD, for a couple of reasons. One is that when you mix analog and digital, you get the disadvantages of both and the advantages of neither; you get the sound of the AC in the background (although that noise isn't tech, but it does drown out the tape hiss) as well as digital aliasing.
OTOH, if you take The Cars Candy-O the CD will be superior to the vinyl; the vinyl will have noise and aliasing, while the CD will have no noise. The vinyl may even have other artifacts if they used a cheaper plastic to press it. Almost no music recorded after about 1980 was recorded in analog, so the "vinyl is better" only applies to earlier works.
CDs also have the misfortune of being poorly remastered; take Boston's first album, for example. Terrible job of remastering, the loss of dynamics and frequency response in the CD is appalling. Lack of dynamics is especially stupid, since CDs have a greater dynamic range than LPs. But that's the fault of today's audio "engineers". If the CD you mastered has fewer dynamics than the original master, YOU SUCK as and engineer and really should get a different career.
by bit torrent and the pirate bay
Sounds like an RIAA/MPAA flak. Let's not dignify his post any further by arguing with it.