You're completely twisting things around in the wrong way... Metallica's legal argument is not that 300,000+ people have pirated copies of their songs, because that would be too hard to prove. Instead it's 300,000+ people are providing those songs to anyone free for the asking without verifying that they have the right to listen to it. It's a small nuance, but a world of difference. They weren't trying to get them banned from the service for possessing illegal MP3's, because that would be really tedious. Instead they're trying to get them banned on the premise that they're making those recordings available.
By hiring someone who disclaims any right to be able to listen to their music to obtain copies of their music from a percentage of those 300,000 people, Metallica is simply stating that if they can do it, so can any one else in the world and therefore it should be stopped.
I personally trhink that each artist should file suit agianst Napster, one at a time, to keep them in legal quagmire for years and years and years... they'll eventually lose funding from spending their money on defending themselves, and no one's going to want to invest in them because an IPO would be an impossibility.
Well then, LET HIM decide to distribute his music over the internet. It's his property, it should be his choice. labels may screw artists over, but napster really has no answer to the question of how will they get paid? Labels have money and can pay artists... And i know plenty of friends of mine that release their own music on the internet. By their own free will.
People that trade artists music freely across the internet are essentially saying that the music is worthless... They're also stating that no matter how much they like a given song, they have absolutely zero respect for any artist whose work their giving away for free. It might not be as explictitly stated as that, but you're cutting them off from one of their only revenue sources and hiding behind the idea that the labels are the bad guys and you're trying to help them.
Music (in general) is so much more than just "data" and should never be treated under the mantra of "information wants to be free". Everyone who thinks that, in my eyes, are all the most shortsighted individuals.
We're not talking about a general purpose search engine that just accidentally happens to stumble across mp3's, or other copyrighted stuff. For one, most well behaved search engines acknowledge robots.txt, and keep away from areas that a site owner doesn't want them in. For two, imagine a search engine that only searched for warez versions of programs under the guise that "you have a right to use this program wherever you go" but with absolutely no verification scheme... That's software piracy. If it's okay, how come no mainstream company has dared let people "back up" their Oracle 8, Netscape Application Server, Windows 2000, Windows 95, etc, CD's so that people can restore their software configurations from where ever they might happen to be? Because they know it's wrong and they'll get sued and even possibly wind up in jail. Why is it different if it's music?
If Napster was providing a service like "Beam-It" it could at least try to incorporate some form of digital signature scheme, where people would first have to "prove" that they have the right to listen to a certain CD. Or maybe Napster could just take a deep breath, step forward and say "yes, music is being traded freely thanks to our servers. You can shut us down, if you'd like, but the trading will probably continute. Or maybe we can try to figure out a way to do this that pays everone involved." Doesn't sound to me like Napster's trying to do any of that... They're just wiggling they tounge at the recording industry.
I take offense when an industry that has dragged its feet protecting its own product wants to determine how file formats are found rather than going after the actual infringers.
No one around here seems to be able to figure out who should be responsible for Napster and it's users actions. When someone sues napster, people flip and say it should be the users responsibility. When it's rumored that someones going after the users, everyone cries about how a band is suing their fans. Besides that, it's also been often stated that since it's so easy to make a new identiy on napster, going after the users would be pointless, since there are so many sources of throwaway email addresses. That means in my eyes that Napster should be held accountable since they've created the servers and the software people are using in such a fashion that it encourages piracy and makes it difficult to go after the actual infringers...
As far as the artists that like napster goes... Since the amount of artists that like napster is without doubt much smaller than the ones that don't like it, why don't they make it an "opt in" sort of deal? Artists could even upload the songs at the bitrates that they wanted to be made avaiable to their fans. Napster could even store the music on their servers, or let users continue to shoulder the burden for them of having enough bandwidth to distrute the MP3's...
But if an artist doesn't mind their music being distributed for free on the internet, why wouldn't they just set up their own web site which did that... Complete with links to places for people to buy their CD's, t-shirts, and get news about them... Some of them do, actually... Which again, alleviates any need for Napster...
There are so many faults as to the way that Napster operates, it's honestly getting suprising that so many people here continue to jump to their defense.
Right now they're not making money, no. But they are collecting money from venture capitalists... That can only mean that they've laid out a plan where they believe they can make money and go for an IPO..... My guess is that they'll integrate advertising into their client. Since it's a proprietary client, no one around here will be able to strip out the ads that pop up. Napster was once an innocent college kids project (i hear), but now it's big business. Just as big as the rest of the music industry.
A - there is nothing artificial about wanting to profit from your work. You work, you expect to get paid. If your company told you that they took a loss last month and couldn't pay you anymore, would you stand for it? no.
Likewise, in your argument about scientific professors, i think that issue is moot, in that the scientific community, at least the academic one, is much less "for profit" than anything else. They share information freely because they can garner insights from one another and reformulate their opinions as a result. In the same breath though, it is them (the scientists) that have decided to distribute their work freely to one another. They didn't do their work with the expectation of getting paid for it, get paid for it for a while, and then get turned around and told that they should have to expectation of getting paid, because if they really liked to research they'ed donate their time and do it for free.
B & C - The attack on Napster in no way prevent you from going out and starting your own band. You can even hear a lick you like and rework it some to create your own song... This isn't about trying to squelch creativity, it's about making sure the people that have dedicated themselves to this "creativity" get paid for their efforts. If their efforts aren't rewarded, that could stand to quell them from creating further, and could evn prevent other people from following their paths.
The IP existed to encourage people to innovate doesn't really hold much sway in this argument. I don't think anyone is trying to patent recordings or anything. I just don't think that artists are trying to protect their work as inventions but rather as products. it's a world of difference... a patent protects a process, no one's trying to patent the concept of music. A copyright protects a finished piece of work. They're just saying that the recordings are owned by the artists and it's up to them to decide how they want to distribute it and how they want to get paid for it... Since there isn't really any system in place for them to get paid by selling their tracks on the internet, they're still huddled with the record companies so as to be sure they receive something from their efforts. Which brings us to Napster and what it's doing is tightening the bond with the artists and labels, since now the labels can say "see, at least we pay you a little bit anyhow".
As far as the bad music goes... go look for better music, then... don't complain that about the fact that you're dumb enough to buy the shitty CD's that the promote. It's kind of like seatbelt laws... Think for yourself and explore the music world... Contrary to posters sentiments around here, it is not infact illegal to listen to the radio, tape what you hear on the radio, go to a friends house and hear a cd, go to a club and see a band, or anything else... It's not a tired argument. It's the truth.
It's hilarious yet infuriating... Here's the slashdot crowd jumping to defend a company who:
uses proprietary (MusicShare) technology which to transfer files compressed with a patented algorithm with no respect to the copyright owner,
and at the same time, they demand that other companies open the source code to their key products, adopt open standards, cry foul when a company extends any of those standards and jumps to attack any company which happens to "accidentally" use GPLed in a proprietary product, hence disrespecting the copyright owner.
Why is that? Because they give them what they want for free.
This sets no precedent whatsoever. If napster was a file sharing service which just happened to transfer MP3 files, it wouldn't have jumped into the spotlight. Instead Napster is an MP3 sharing service. the vast majority of files it transfers are illegal. If "information wants to be free" is really true, how come no one is posting Windows 2000 CD images on their websites? What about publishing Linux distributions without even a word mentioning the source? Because that information is owned by someone else. Why does everyone treat music as being something different. If you want to share your musical tastes with your friends, invite them over to your house, go to see a show, encourage them to get the CD or whatever.
What's it going to take for people to realize that Napster is actively sapping revenue's from artists? They're taking what artists sell and giving it away for free. That's what Microsoft did to netscape and that was wrong. And Napster is far from altruistic... They're a company. They're making money off the artists involved. How else would they come up with $2 million to fund Limp Bizkits tour? Why shouldn't the artists have a crack at some of that money?
Microsoft is indeed bundling a low-end video editting application in Windows ME, so far as all the reviews I've read of the beta releases say. But it's important to remember that Apple controls only 5% tops of the new computer market, whereas Microsoft controls 90%+ of the new computer market.
Besides that if you're going to blast apple for what they're doing, why don't you blast all those pesky linux companies for including such things as: compilers, browsers, email clients, back up utilities, various window managers, web servers, proxy servers, various networking protocols, relational databases, etc, with all of their OS distributions?:) A lot of the sentiment around here goes that GUI's shouldn't be part of the OS, but where's the redhat distribution of Linux which is just a kernel with a few commands to allow for the installation of other products?
It's one thing if a monopoly of 90% market share does something rather than a competitor with less than 5% of the market doing something similar.
Go away troll... Yes, one could say that Apple has a "monoploy" on PowerPC based desktops... But that's not due to strict contracts with Motorolla and IBM... it's due to lack of interest and incentive by other third parties that could make them. Over at OpenPPC.org, you can find all specs you'd ever want to know in order to make a PowerPC based machine, but it's been almost a year and still no one's stepped forward and started building them.
As far as competetion with Adobe goes... There isn't any. It would be a different story if Apple was bundling FinalCut Pro with every mac it sold and hence attempting to "cut off the air supply" of a competitor, but that's not what they're doing. They're giving away free consumer level software that's obviously limited in functionality so as to drive interest in digital video products...
Adobe's probably really happy because the more consumers play with iMovie, the more that will want companion products such as ATM, more fonts, and PhotoDeluxe. Maybe 5% of those people will get really into it... Maybe they'll upgrade to Final Cut Pro, since it's from apple and they think they'll be comfortable with it. Others may upgrade to Premiere. Either way, those people will be in the market for adobe's products, such as Photoshop, Illustrator, and After Effects.
So basically, what Apple's doing is seeding interest into the market. That's quite different than another company's full fledged and documented (read the emails introduced into evidence) to drive a potential competitor not only out of their market, but out of business.
If Microsoft's patent was valid (I'm not going to argue about this) then they would have every right to enforce their patent against a GPL'ed package. The GPL specifically reads that if you aren't legally allowed to use and redistribute a patent used in your software, then your software can't be GPLed. RMS is quite specific about that.
If GPL'ed software was exempt from patents, why was PGPi developed overseas rather than here? Part of it was crypto export limits, but the other part is that they couldn't implement the RSA patent here. GPG doesn't include RSA. There's no GPL'ed quicktime player for linux because of patents... If GPLing a piece of software no one would ever complain about Starwars trailers using the Sorenson codec again.
Maybe what you meant is that you can just release the code on the internet and watch it proliferate, but that's a completely different story. It;'s a way for you to show your disgust with them, perhaps, but none of the US based distro's will touch your software with a 10 foot pole. I
This isn't just a patent on Packaging, as/. would have everyone believe. Well, maybe it is, because I'm not familiar with Debian packages, but from what I know of RPM's they're not at all what was described in the patent.
For anyone here who's used it (admit it:), what that patent describes is Windows 98's "Critical Notification Update" utility, a program that checks the versions of your software, compares it against what's on Microsofts server, asks if you want to download it, and then if you say so, downloads and installs the appropriate updates.
I'm now reading the FAQ's at Debian's website, and again, this seems to be nothing like what Microsoft patented. Not like Microsoft's patent is an "innovation" worth of a patent (being that software is now commonly distributed via the internet, updates would be too, one would reason), but it's really fanning the flames by saying it's just a package management sytem... Perhaps there could be a little rudimentary fact checking around here?
While i've been playing with MySQL in order to learn SQL, I still just don't have enough trust in it to actually think to one day use it or recommend it's use in any critical environmnet where it could actually effect outcomes or incomes.
What's the ad say? 96% of the top 50 e-commerce sites use Oracle? That's 46 of them. There must be a reason for it... I'll trust their decisions and not try to reinvent the wheel. If it's not broke, don't fix it.
Yes, MySQL has a blazingly fast engine, but at the expense of so many other features.
I and my friend Ringo both have purchased a copy of John Lennon's "Double Fantasy". We both hate Yoko Ono's crap on there. I tell him I am making a CD that cuts her stuff out. He says, "great make one for me, too." I make a copy for him. Is this illegal? If it is it is technology illegal, but does not violate the spirit of the law.
I'm not a lawyer, but my thought would be that's permissible because you're distributing it to someone who you know has the CD. On the other hand, if you put an ad in the paper saying you had this new mix available for anyone who wanted it, so long as they said they had the CD, and you sent it to them without verifying, then you'd be in violation.
What is the point of 1,000,000 people sitting there ripping, and compressing the same songs to MP3? There's services like Beam-it that at least attempted to verify you had a legitmate copy of the CD... Apparently it's security wasn't all that, because they got in hot water for it.
But onto other things... There's plenty of things out there that people all do repetitively... It's not like it's the end of the world that Person A rips the same cd that People AAAAC,AAAAD,AAAAE through ZZZZZ have already ripped. I think people should start concerning themselves with more important issues than this, myself.
While I'm not a big fan of yours, I'm glad to see that finally an artist such as yourself is finally taking a stand for their rights regarding the distribution of their music. I hope more artists step in and request themselves also removed from napster to the point where there really isn't any music left there... There really is no benefit in my eyes that Napster can serve that a band couldn't receive by distributing songs from their own websites... At the very least bands could choose which songs they wanted to distribute, and have a reasonable way to gauge interest in their music.
Anyways, to the question. Have you recieved lots of support from fellow musicians for your decision, and if so, do you think that by your doing what you're doing, many other artists will take the same steps? Were they already contemplating it but afraid to step forward, or were they just being blissfully ignorant of the rampant theft of their work that was occuring on Napster?
PS Slashdotters, if you haven't i strongly encourage you to all go read their interview here!
If you're going to use PGP to distribute your one time pad, you might as well just use PGP to exchange all your messages. Afterall, any system is only as strong as it's weakest link, so no matter how random the pad is, once it's figured out that's what you're doing, attacks would turn to PGP... Note that 4096 bit RSA is plenty strong in theory right now, but if you're confident enought to use it to distribute your keys, you might as well use it to distribute your messages as well.
So far as using a book as your key... I'd think that wouldn't be the wisest decision... A book is hardly random data. Not that I could break your code, or write a program that could, but i'm sure if it was at all important enough that someone with the resources wanted to figure out what you were talking about, they could.
Windows 3.11 was replaced in 1995, as was DOS 6.22... Asking for someone to support a 5 or 6 year old product is asking a bit. I mean, Microsoft has released upgrades since then for less than the full price, which are compatible with nearly 99% of the commonly used programs for the previous platforms. What would the first response be if i emailed Redhat or Oracle and said "hi. I'm using a Redhat distro with a 1.1 kernel... I'm having problems getting Oracle to run properly." the first response i would get from them is "upgrade your machine and then try again. We don't support installing our software on anything but what's described in the docs".
I guess my point is, is that Microsoft is financially motivated to keep it's customers. Hence Windows 95 being able to run most Windows 3.1 programs and NT being able to run most 3.5 programs. It results in possibly a shoddier product because of all the legacy support, but it's what they need to do in order to keep their customers. An opensouce project on the other hand, one day the lead developer could say "you know... we've been doing this all wrong. It should be done this way, so from this point forward that's what we're doing and we're also taking out support for the otherway". Unless you have a programmer on staff, it's going to cost a lot of money for you to continue using their product while staying compatible with your older files.
This response may be too little too late, being that the story is gone from the main page... But i just figured i'd try to wrap this up...
They're not saying that any of those 330,000 people have illegal copies of their music, as far as i know. What they are saying is those 330,000 people are offering their music for download to people who don't have a right to listen to the CD. That's easy enough to prove. The lawyers can just sell their Metallica CD's at a used record store and then go download the songs. They would then have copies of the songs and no right to listen to them.
And you can back up your data. But you can't share your backups with other people. It'd be one thing if you had your files backed up on your hard drive, got tricked into installing Back Orrifice (supposing it was a windows machine) and then some script kiddie stole the files from you. But it's another thing to store those files in a folder that you've designated as being accessible to any of the millions of users of Napster.
Well, one would reason that if a product is being actively used and bought by a companies customers, they're simply not going to drop development plans and support for it. They might sell the product to another company with more ambitious plans. They might release a new product that is intended to replace the previous one (like they're doing with InDesign and Pagemaker), but if they do that, they're likely to create a way to support the older files created by the soon to be dropped version, lest customers look elsewhere for a solution.
For more specialized vertical market applications, I can definetly understand the desire for source code (if you hired a consultant to build an accounting application on Oracle8, these days it wouldn't be too unreasonable to demand on having the source code to their databases and procedures once they're done. You might have to pay more for it, but at least you're assured that if the consultant ever goes away, you're not completely screwed. With Oracle however, you can be farely certain that they're going to be around for the long haul and therefore having the souce as a sort insurance isn't nearly as valuable to you. And even less so to them, because if they give you full rights to the source, what's to stop you from redistributing it and cutting them out of revenues they would have earned otherwise.
So I guess it's kind of a tricky call as to when source code availabilty is really all that it seems. It's probably something that should be evaluated on a case-by-case basis, as to whether it really will be as valuable as one would hope it should be, rather than just saying it's better because the source is available. If you're reasonably certain that your vendors are going to stay in business and the products you're using are popular and generating revenues as opposed to losses for them, in general you can feel relatively certain that the prodcut will continue in advancement and support.
There is some truth to the recent commentaries as of recent.
For one, yes, it's highly doubtful that Linux, Apache, Sendmail, gcc, or any other opensource product will ever go way. Actually, it's just one step from impossible. But that doesn't mean that they will necessarily continue to prosper. What happens when developers decide to start working on other projects? What happens when Linus decides he's through with being the center of Linux development? No on really knows what will happen.
I also think that while open source is great for individuals and businesses looking to use low-cost software. But I fail to see how software companies can stand to generate anything but neglible revenues by opensourcing their products. How would Apple continue to differentiate themselves if their GUI was integrated into every other operating system? They couldn't really. They have nifty hardware designs, but those are just complementary to the software inside them.
Another argument that gets brought up is that of buying a car with a sealed hood. Personally, I WISH that there were cars that were manufactured with completely sealed hhoods, that ran fo 50,000 miles, and were recycleable. I hate the idea of car maintenance. But the opensource idealogy is that if you're using an open source product, then even if the original developer ceases to work on it, one can just bring in a programmer of their own to continue developement. What if one was using an opensource video edittor that almost had all the features of Adobe Premiere, and therefore had all their media assets tied up in it's file formats, had numerous plug ins and extensions written specifically for it, and then they found that the developer had been hired to do something else full time and couldn't dedicate the time to continue work on his or her project? Yes, the company could hire a full-time programmer for $60,000+ per year to continue work, but in hindsite if they'ed just bought 10 licenses for Premiere for $400 a piece, plus $200/year for upgrades, they'ed save money in the long term.
Another advantage to closed source/proprietary companies is that they are indeed competing with one another. Without a profit motive, there really is no long term guarentees that open source projects will continue with their advancement. It's assumed right now, but since the developers are working out of their own good will, rather than ultimately trying to make a buck, again, it's not guarenteed that a project will continue at any given instance, regardless of the number of users. Proprietary software houses, will on the other hand, in all likely hood continue producing a package and support for it if they see that there is demand for it, and money behind that.
Let me just state that i'm not against opensource or free software as a development model. It has created some neat projects. But I don't really think that there's really all that much of a future for it as a business model. How can you sell something that's free? I'm continually baffled at Redhat's position in the market. But companies (VA Linux and Cobalt spring to mind as two) that use opensource projects to add value to their products stand a great likely hood for success, in my eyes.
1 - Lot's of people that they've done nothing wrong when in fact, in the eyes of the law, they have. Not that I'm defending them here, but it is completely plausible that one could err and still believe they did what was right.
2 - I think that Microsoft did indeed help the industry. They provided a low-cost common platform for people to develop applications for. Sure they bought it from QDOS or whatever, but if they hadn't would the people who had QDOS had thought to call IBM up and say "hey... i've got this operating system?" Doubtfully. It's not like Microsoft made it so that the Unixes broke apart in every direction in the publics perspective.
3 - People DO love him. Microsoft, up until the past few weeks, was one of the surest picks for year over year growth, profits, etc... Look at where $1000 invested in Microsoft 15 years ago would be today. Compare that with Apple, Novell, IBM, etc... For that reason, investment managers do love the company and him, since upuntil recently he ran it.
4 - No argument from me here:) All they seem to do is sit back and wait for a good idea to spring out of silicon valley, buy the company or destroy the company, and reimplement that technology in windows or office.
There's a difference between digital and analog audio extraction.
Most of the extraction programs I've seen out there are indeed analog programs, capturing the signal that travels to the computers sound card. Digital extraction programs don't do that. They read the CD bit for bit (as if it were an ISO, Joliet, HFS, or any other file system) and write that same exact data to the computers hard drive. They don't need a hookup to the sound card in order to get their data.
If your theory about data loss of digital copies was true, then no data would be safe. But things like checksums and digital signatures exist to be sure that failed copies are dealt with appropriately. If you copied a file to your floppy drive, hard drive, or tape drive, then if even one bit changed, the checksums would be different and you'd know you didn't make an exact copy.
No, they aren't going to search the houses of 335,000 people. They don't need to.
Metallica, their lawyer, or anyone else who wants to just has to find some random stranger on the street, ask them if they own any metallica CDs, if they say no, have them sign an affadavit that says so, sit them in front of a computer running Napster, type in Metallica for them, and have them download every song they find.
If you were one of the people who had Metallica songs in your directory and it was downloaded, congratulations! You've just distributed copyrighted material to someone who has no legitamate right to have it. The recipient may have done wrong as well, but the law comes down much harder on the person doing the distribution than the one on the receiving end.
If you'd read it as well, you'd see that the reason they don't permit the duplication of digital files on computers is because there isn't a tax in place on computer CD-R's like there is on Audio-only CD-R's. Therefore, what I was saying is still valid. If Turtle Beach has paid a licensing fee/tax then they would indeed be able to sell their hardware.
From your link: The bottom line: the only digital copying of music that is allowed is
with digital recorders that are covered by and comply with the
Audio Home Recording Act.
Is the turtle beach instrument a device that complies with the audio home recording act?
PS: The only time they ever mentioned MP3 on that page was in connection to downloading songs from the internet.
I understand... But from an outsiders perspective where all we hear is free source code and not the ethics behind Free Software versus Open Source... It's refreshing to hear his viewpoints on freedom having read so many of ESR's commentaries...
I just think that RMS makes a whole lot more sense than ESR, where rather than trying to hide the truth about certain issues, RMS is quite blunt about what he wants and expects and what the repercussions might be.
Come on... There's a huge world of difference in converting content to MP3 format and listening to it around your home and actively sharing all those MP3's with the rest of the world. One of those scenarios should fall under fairuse, the other piracy. The RIAA would have completely left MP3 as a file format alone if it hadn't been for the rampant trading of MP3's...
This is different, I would hope.
I wonder if Turtle Beach is paying royalties to the RIAA as specified, or just waiting and seeing what their reaction will be?
Slashdot Mirror
You're completely twisting things around in the wrong way... Metallica's legal argument is not that 300,000+ people have pirated copies of their songs, because that would be too hard to prove. Instead it's 300,000+ people are providing those songs to anyone free for the asking without verifying that they have the right to listen to it. It's a small nuance, but a world of difference. They weren't trying to get them banned from the service for possessing illegal MP3's, because that would be really tedious. Instead they're trying to get them banned on the premise that they're making those recordings available.
By hiring someone who disclaims any right to be able to listen to their music to obtain copies of their music from a percentage of those 300,000 people, Metallica is simply stating that if they can do it, so can any one else in the world and therefore it should be stopped.
I personally trhink that each artist should file suit agianst Napster, one at a time, to keep them in legal quagmire for years and years and years... they'll eventually lose funding from spending their money on defending themselves, and no one's going to want to invest in them because an IPO would be an impossibility.
Well then, LET HIM decide to distribute his music over the internet. It's his property, it should be his choice. labels may screw artists over, but napster really has no answer to the question of how will they get paid? Labels have money and can pay artists... And i know plenty of friends of mine that release their own music on the internet. By their own free will.
People that trade artists music freely across the internet are essentially saying that the music is worthless... They're also stating that no matter how much they like a given song, they have absolutely zero respect for any artist whose work their giving away for free. It might not be as explictitly stated as that, but you're cutting them off from one of their only revenue sources and hiding behind the idea that the labels are the bad guys and you're trying to help them.
Music (in general) is so much more than just "data" and should never be treated under the mantra of "information wants to be free". Everyone who thinks that, in my eyes, are all the most shortsighted individuals.
We're not talking about a general purpose search engine that just accidentally happens to stumble across mp3's, or other copyrighted stuff. For one, most well behaved search engines acknowledge robots.txt, and keep away from areas that a site owner doesn't want them in. For two, imagine a search engine that only searched for warez versions of programs under the guise that "you have a right to use this program wherever you go" but with absolutely no verification scheme... That's software piracy. If it's okay, how come no mainstream company has dared let people "back up" their Oracle 8, Netscape Application Server, Windows 2000, Windows 95, etc, CD's so that people can restore their software configurations from where ever they might happen to be? Because they know it's wrong and they'll get sued and even possibly wind up in jail. Why is it different if it's music?
If Napster was providing a service like "Beam-It" it could at least try to incorporate some form of digital signature scheme, where people would first have to "prove" that they have the right to listen to a certain CD. Or maybe Napster could just take a deep breath, step forward and say "yes, music is being traded freely thanks to our servers. You can shut us down, if you'd like, but the trading will probably continute. Or maybe we can try to figure out a way to do this that pays everone involved." Doesn't sound to me like Napster's trying to do any of that... They're just wiggling they tounge at the recording industry.
I take offense when an industry that has dragged its feet protecting its own product wants to determine how file formats are found rather than going after the actual infringers.
No one around here seems to be able to figure out who should be responsible for Napster and it's users actions. When someone sues napster, people flip and say it should be the users responsibility. When it's rumored that someones going after the users, everyone cries about how a band is suing their fans. Besides that, it's also been often stated that since it's so easy to make a new identiy on napster, going after the users would be pointless, since there are so many sources of throwaway email addresses. That means in my eyes that Napster should be held accountable since they've created the servers and the software people are using in such a fashion that it encourages piracy and makes it difficult to go after the actual infringers...
As far as the artists that like napster goes... Since the amount of artists that like napster is without doubt much smaller than the ones that don't like it, why don't they make it an "opt in" sort of deal? Artists could even upload the songs at the bitrates that they wanted to be made avaiable to their fans. Napster could even store the music on their servers, or let users continue to shoulder the burden for them of having enough bandwidth to distrute the MP3's...
But if an artist doesn't mind their music being distributed for free on the internet, why wouldn't they just set up their own web site which did that... Complete with links to places for people to buy their CD's, t-shirts, and get news about them... Some of them do, actually... Which again, alleviates any need for Napster...
There are so many faults as to the way that Napster operates, it's honestly getting suprising that so many people here continue to jump to their defense.
Right now they're not making money, no. But they are collecting money from venture capitalists... That can only mean that they've laid out a plan where they believe they can make money and go for an IPO..... My guess is that they'll integrate advertising into their client. Since it's a proprietary client, no one around here will be able to strip out the ads that pop up. Napster was once an innocent college kids project (i hear), but now it's big business. Just as big as the rest of the music industry.
A - there is nothing artificial about wanting to profit from your work. You work, you expect to get paid. If your company told you that they took a loss last month and couldn't pay you anymore, would you stand for it? no.
Likewise, in your argument about scientific professors, i think that issue is moot, in that the scientific community, at least the academic one, is much less "for profit" than anything else. They share information freely because they can garner insights from one another and reformulate their opinions as a result. In the same breath though, it is them (the scientists) that have decided to distribute their work freely to one another. They didn't do their work with the expectation of getting paid for it, get paid for it for a while, and then get turned around and told that they should have to expectation of getting paid, because if they really liked to research they'ed donate their time and do it for free.
B & C - The attack on Napster in no way prevent you from going out and starting your own band. You can even hear a lick you like and rework it some to create your own song... This isn't about trying to squelch creativity, it's about making sure the people that have dedicated themselves to this "creativity" get paid for their efforts. If their efforts aren't rewarded, that could stand to quell them from creating further, and could evn prevent other people from following their paths.
The IP existed to encourage people to innovate doesn't really hold much sway in this argument. I don't think anyone is trying to patent recordings or anything. I just don't think that artists are trying to protect their work as inventions but rather as products. it's a world of difference... a patent protects a process, no one's trying to patent the concept of music. A copyright protects a finished piece of work. They're just saying that the recordings are owned by the artists and it's up to them to decide how they want to distribute it and how they want to get paid for it... Since there isn't really any system in place for them to get paid by selling their tracks on the internet, they're still huddled with the record companies so as to be sure they receive something from their efforts. Which brings us to Napster and what it's doing is tightening the bond with the artists and labels, since now the labels can say "see, at least we pay you a little bit anyhow".
As far as the bad music goes... go look for better music, then... don't complain that about the fact that you're dumb enough to buy the shitty CD's that the promote. It's kind of like seatbelt laws... Think for yourself and explore the music world... Contrary to posters sentiments around here, it is not infact illegal to listen to the radio, tape what you hear on the radio, go to a friends house and hear a cd, go to a club and see a band, or anything else... It's not a tired argument. It's the truth.
It's hilarious yet infuriating... Here's the slashdot crowd jumping to defend a company who:
uses proprietary (MusicShare) technology which to transfer files compressed with a patented algorithm with no respect to the copyright owner,
and at the same time, they demand that other companies open the source code to their key products, adopt open standards, cry foul when a company extends any of those standards and jumps to attack any company which happens to "accidentally" use GPLed in a proprietary product, hence disrespecting the copyright owner.
Why is that? Because they give them what they want for free.
What clever kids we have around here.
This sets no precedent whatsoever. If napster was a file sharing service which just happened to transfer MP3 files, it wouldn't have jumped into the spotlight. Instead Napster is an MP3 sharing service. the vast majority of files it transfers are illegal. If "information wants to be free" is really true, how come no one is posting Windows 2000 CD images on their websites? What about publishing Linux distributions without even a word mentioning the source? Because that information is owned by someone else. Why does everyone treat music as being something different. If you want to share your musical tastes with your friends, invite them over to your house, go to see a show, encourage them to get the CD or whatever.
What's it going to take for people to realize that Napster is actively sapping revenue's from artists? They're taking what artists sell and giving it away for free. That's what Microsoft did to netscape and that was wrong. And Napster is far from altruistic... They're a company. They're making money off the artists involved. How else would they come up with $2 million to fund Limp Bizkits tour? Why shouldn't the artists have a crack at some of that money?
Microsoft is indeed bundling a low-end video editting application in Windows ME, so far as all the reviews I've read of the beta releases say. But it's important to remember that Apple controls only 5% tops of the new computer market, whereas Microsoft controls 90%+ of the new computer market.
:) A lot of the sentiment around here goes that GUI's shouldn't be part of the OS, but where's the redhat distribution of Linux which is just a kernel with a few commands to allow for the installation of other products?
Besides that if you're going to blast apple for what they're doing, why don't you blast all those pesky linux companies for including such things as: compilers, browsers, email clients, back up utilities, various window managers, web servers, proxy servers, various networking protocols, relational databases, etc, with all of their OS distributions?
It's one thing if a monopoly of 90% market share does something rather than a competitor with less than 5% of the market doing something similar.
Go away troll... Yes, one could say that Apple has a "monoploy" on PowerPC based desktops... But that's not due to strict contracts with Motorolla and IBM... it's due to lack of interest and incentive by other third parties that could make them. Over at OpenPPC.org, you can find all specs you'd ever want to know in order to make a PowerPC based machine, but it's been almost a year and still no one's stepped forward and started building them.
As far as competetion with Adobe goes... There isn't any. It would be a different story if Apple was bundling FinalCut Pro with every mac it sold and hence attempting to "cut off the air supply" of a competitor, but that's not what they're doing. They're giving away free consumer level software that's obviously limited in functionality so as to drive interest in digital video products...
Adobe's probably really happy because the more consumers play with iMovie, the more that will want companion products such as ATM, more fonts, and PhotoDeluxe. Maybe 5% of those people will get really into it... Maybe they'll upgrade to Final Cut Pro, since it's from apple and they think they'll be comfortable with it. Others may upgrade to Premiere. Either way, those people will be in the market for adobe's products, such as Photoshop, Illustrator, and After Effects.
So basically, what Apple's doing is seeding interest into the market. That's quite different than another company's full fledged and documented (read the emails introduced into evidence) to drive a potential competitor not only out of their market, but out of business.
What in the world are you talking about?
If Microsoft's patent was valid (I'm not going to argue about this) then they would have every right to enforce their patent against a GPL'ed package. The GPL specifically reads that if you aren't legally allowed to use and redistribute a patent used in your software, then your software can't be GPLed. RMS is quite specific about that.
If GPL'ed software was exempt from patents, why was PGPi developed overseas rather than here? Part of it was crypto export limits, but the other part is that they couldn't implement the RSA patent here. GPG doesn't include RSA. There's no GPL'ed quicktime player for linux because of patents... If GPLing a piece of software no one would ever complain about Starwars trailers using the Sorenson codec again.
Maybe what you meant is that you can just release the code on the internet and watch it proliferate, but that's a completely different story. It;'s a way for you to show your disgust with them, perhaps, but none of the US based distro's will touch your software with a 10 foot pole. I
This isn't just a patent on Packaging, as /. would have everyone believe. Well, maybe it is, because I'm not familiar with Debian packages, but from what I know of RPM's they're not at all what was described in the patent.
:), what that patent describes is Windows 98's "Critical Notification Update" utility, a program that checks the versions of your software, compares it against what's on Microsofts server, asks if you want to download it, and then if you say so, downloads and installs the appropriate updates.
For anyone here who's used it (admit it
I'm now reading the FAQ's at Debian's website, and again, this seems to be nothing like what Microsoft patented. Not like Microsoft's patent is an "innovation" worth of a patent (being that software is now commonly distributed via the internet, updates would be too, one would reason), but it's really fanning the flames by saying it's just a package management sytem... Perhaps there could be a little rudimentary fact checking around here?
While i've been playing with MySQL in order to learn SQL, I still just don't have enough trust in it to actually think to one day use it or recommend it's use in any critical environmnet where it could actually effect outcomes or incomes.
What's the ad say? 96% of the top 50 e-commerce sites use Oracle? That's 46 of them. There must be a reason for it... I'll trust their decisions and not try to reinvent the wheel. If it's not broke, don't fix it.
Yes, MySQL has a blazingly fast engine, but at the expense of so many other features.
I and my friend Ringo both have purchased a copy of John Lennon's "Double Fantasy". We both hate Yoko Ono's crap on there. I tell him I am making a CD that cuts her stuff out. He says, "great make one for me, too." I make a copy for him. Is this illegal? If it is it is technology illegal, but does not violate the spirit of the law.
I'm not a lawyer, but my thought would be that's permissible because you're distributing it to someone who you know has the CD. On the other hand, if you put an ad in the paper saying you had this new mix available for anyone who wanted it, so long as they said they had the CD, and you sent it to them without verifying, then you'd be in violation.
What is the point of 1,000,000 people sitting there ripping, and compressing the same songs to MP3?
There's services like Beam-it that at least attempted to verify you had a legitmate copy of the CD... Apparently it's security wasn't all that, because they got in hot water for it.
But onto other things... There's plenty of things out there that people all do repetitively... It's not like it's the end of the world that Person A rips the same cd that People AAAAC,AAAAD,AAAAE through ZZZZZ have already ripped. I think people should start concerning themselves with more important issues than this, myself.
While I'm not a big fan of yours, I'm glad to see that finally an artist such as yourself is finally taking a stand for their rights regarding the distribution of their music. I hope more artists step in and request themselves also removed from napster to the point where there really isn't any music left there... There really is no benefit in my eyes that Napster can serve that a band couldn't receive by distributing songs from their own websites... At the very least bands could choose which songs they wanted to distribute, and have a reasonable way to gauge interest in their music.
Anyways, to the question. Have you recieved lots of support from fellow musicians for your decision, and if so, do you think that by your doing what you're doing, many other artists will take the same steps? Were they already contemplating it but afraid to step forward, or were they just being blissfully ignorant of the rampant theft of their work that was occuring on Napster?
PS Slashdotters, if you haven't i strongly encourage you to all go read their interview here!
If you're going to use PGP to distribute your one time pad, you might as well just use PGP to exchange all your messages. Afterall, any system is only as strong as it's weakest link, so no matter how random the pad is, once it's figured out that's what you're doing, attacks would turn to PGP... Note that 4096 bit RSA is plenty strong in theory right now, but if you're confident enought to use it to distribute your keys, you might as well use it to distribute your messages as well.
So far as using a book as your key... I'd think that wouldn't be the wisest decision... A book is hardly random data. Not that I could break your code, or write a program that could, but i'm sure if it was at all important enough that someone with the resources wanted to figure out what you were talking about, they could.
Windows 3.11 was replaced in 1995, as was DOS 6.22... Asking for someone to support a 5 or 6 year old product is asking a bit. I mean, Microsoft has released upgrades since then for less than the full price, which are compatible with nearly 99% of the commonly used programs for the previous platforms. What would the first response be if i emailed Redhat or Oracle and said "hi. I'm using a Redhat distro with a 1.1 kernel... I'm having problems getting Oracle to run properly." the first response i would get from them is "upgrade your machine and then try again. We don't support installing our software on anything but what's described in the docs".
I guess my point is, is that Microsoft is financially motivated to keep it's customers. Hence Windows 95 being able to run most Windows 3.1 programs and NT being able to run most 3.5 programs. It results in possibly a shoddier product because of all the legacy support, but it's what they need to do in order to keep their customers. An opensouce project on the other hand, one day the lead developer could say "you know... we've been doing this all wrong. It should be done this way, so from this point forward that's what we're doing and we're also taking out support for the otherway". Unless you have a programmer on staff, it's going to cost a lot of money for you to continue using their product while staying compatible with your older files.
This response may be too little too late, being that the story is gone from the main page... But i just figured i'd try to wrap this up...
They're not saying that any of those 330,000 people have illegal copies of their music, as far as i know. What they are saying is those 330,000 people are offering their music for download to people who don't have a right to listen to the CD. That's easy enough to prove. The lawyers can just sell their Metallica CD's at a used record store and then go download the songs. They would then have copies of the songs and no right to listen to them.
And you can back up your data. But you can't share your backups with other people. It'd be one thing if you had your files backed up on your hard drive, got tricked into installing Back Orrifice (supposing it was a windows machine) and then some script kiddie stole the files from you. But it's another thing to store those files in a folder that you've designated as being accessible to any of the millions of users of Napster.
That's the difference.
Well, one would reason that if a product is being actively used and bought by a companies customers, they're simply not going to drop development plans and support for it. They might sell the product to another company with more ambitious plans. They might release a new product that is intended to replace the previous one (like they're doing with InDesign and Pagemaker), but if they do that, they're likely to create a way to support the older files created by the soon to be dropped version, lest customers look elsewhere for a solution.
For more specialized vertical market applications, I can definetly understand the desire for source code (if you hired a consultant to build an accounting application on Oracle8, these days it wouldn't be too unreasonable to demand on having the source code to their databases and procedures once they're done. You might have to pay more for it, but at least you're assured that if the consultant ever goes away, you're not completely screwed. With Oracle however, you can be farely certain that they're going to be around for the long haul and therefore having the souce as a sort insurance isn't nearly as valuable to you. And even less so to them, because if they give you full rights to the source, what's to stop you from redistributing it and cutting them out of revenues they would have earned otherwise.
So I guess it's kind of a tricky call as to when source code availabilty is really all that it seems. It's probably something that should be evaluated on a case-by-case basis, as to whether it really will be as valuable as one would hope it should be, rather than just saying it's better because the source is available. If you're reasonably certain that your vendors are going to stay in business and the products you're using are popular and generating revenues as opposed to losses for them, in general you can feel relatively certain that the prodcut will continue in advancement and support.
There is some truth to the recent commentaries as of recent.
For one, yes, it's highly doubtful that Linux, Apache, Sendmail, gcc, or any other opensource product will ever go way. Actually, it's just one step from impossible. But that doesn't mean that they will necessarily continue to prosper. What happens when developers decide to start working on other projects? What happens when Linus decides he's through with being the center of Linux development? No on really knows what will happen.
I also think that while open source is great for individuals and businesses looking to use low-cost software. But I fail to see how software companies can stand to generate anything but neglible revenues by opensourcing their products. How would Apple continue to differentiate themselves if their GUI was integrated into every other operating system? They couldn't really. They have nifty hardware designs, but those are just complementary to the software inside them.
Another argument that gets brought up is that of buying a car with a sealed hood. Personally, I WISH that there were cars that were manufactured with completely sealed hhoods, that ran fo 50,000 miles, and were recycleable. I hate the idea of car maintenance. But the opensource idealogy is that if you're using an open source product, then even if the original developer ceases to work on it, one can just bring in a programmer of their own to continue developement. What if one was using an opensource video edittor that almost had all the features of Adobe Premiere, and therefore had all their media assets tied up in it's file formats, had numerous plug ins and extensions written specifically for it, and then they found that the developer had been hired to do something else full time and couldn't dedicate the time to continue work on his or her project? Yes, the company could hire a full-time programmer for $60,000+ per year to continue work, but in hindsite if they'ed just bought 10 licenses for Premiere for $400 a piece, plus $200/year for upgrades, they'ed save money in the long term.
Another advantage to closed source/proprietary companies is that they are indeed competing with one another. Without a profit motive, there really is no long term guarentees that open source projects will continue with their advancement. It's assumed right now, but since the developers are working out of their own good will, rather than ultimately trying to make a buck, again, it's not guarenteed that a project will continue at any given instance, regardless of the number of users. Proprietary software houses, will on the other hand, in all likely hood continue producing a package and support for it if they see that there is demand for it, and money behind that.
Let me just state that i'm not against opensource or free software as a development model. It has created some neat projects. But I don't really think that there's really all that much of a future for it as a business model. How can you sell something that's free? I'm continually baffled at Redhat's position in the market. But companies (VA Linux and Cobalt spring to mind as two) that use opensource projects to add value to their products stand a great likely hood for success, in my eyes.
Okay... I've typed enough for now.
1 - Lot's of people that they've done nothing wrong when in fact, in the eyes of the law, they have. Not that I'm defending them here, but it is completely plausible that one could err and still believe they did what was right.
:) All they seem to do is sit back and wait for a good idea to spring out of silicon valley, buy the company or destroy the company, and reimplement that technology in windows or office.
2 - I think that Microsoft did indeed help the industry. They provided a low-cost common platform for people to develop applications for. Sure they bought it from QDOS or whatever, but if they hadn't would the people who had QDOS had thought to call IBM up and say "hey... i've got this operating system?" Doubtfully. It's not like Microsoft made it so that the Unixes broke apart in every direction in the publics perspective.
3 - People DO love him. Microsoft, up until the past few weeks, was one of the surest picks for year over year growth, profits, etc... Look at where $1000 invested in Microsoft 15 years ago would be today. Compare that with Apple, Novell, IBM, etc... For that reason, investment managers do love the company and him, since upuntil recently he ran it.
4 - No argument from me here
There's a difference between digital and analog audio extraction.
Most of the extraction programs I've seen out there are indeed analog programs, capturing the signal that travels to the computers sound card. Digital extraction programs don't do that. They read the CD bit for bit (as if it were an ISO, Joliet, HFS, or any other file system) and write that same exact data to the computers hard drive. They don't need a hookup to the sound card in order to get their data.
If your theory about data loss of digital copies was true, then no data would be safe. But things like checksums and digital signatures exist to be sure that failed copies are dealt with appropriately. If you copied a file to your floppy drive, hard drive, or tape drive, then if even one bit changed, the checksums would be different and you'd know you didn't make an exact copy.
No, they aren't going to search the houses of 335,000 people. They don't need to.
Metallica, their lawyer, or anyone else who wants to just has to find some random stranger on the street, ask them if they own any metallica CDs, if they say no, have them sign an affadavit that says so, sit them in front of a computer running Napster, type in Metallica for them, and have them download every song they find.
If you were one of the people who had Metallica songs in your directory and it was downloaded, congratulations! You've just distributed copyrighted material to someone who has no legitamate right to have it. The recipient may have done wrong as well, but the law comes down much harder on the person doing the distribution than the one on the receiving end.
If you'd read it as well, you'd see that the reason they don't permit the duplication of digital files on computers is because there isn't a tax in place on computer CD-R's like there is on Audio-only CD-R's. Therefore, what I was saying is still valid. If Turtle Beach has paid a licensing fee/tax then they would indeed be able to sell their hardware.
From your link:
The bottom line: the only digital copying of music that is allowed is
with digital recorders that are covered by and comply with the
Audio Home Recording Act.
Is the turtle beach instrument a device that complies with the audio home recording act?
PS: The only time they ever mentioned MP3 on that page was in connection to downloading songs from the internet.
I understand... But from an outsiders perspective where all we hear is free source code and not the ethics behind Free Software versus Open Source... It's refreshing to hear his viewpoints on freedom having read so many of ESR's commentaries...
I just think that RMS makes a whole lot more sense than ESR, where rather than trying to hide the truth about certain issues, RMS is quite blunt about what he wants and expects and what the repercussions might be.
Come on... There's a huge world of difference in converting content to MP3 format and listening to it around your home and actively sharing all those MP3's with the rest of the world. One of those scenarios should fall under fairuse, the other piracy. The RIAA would have completely left MP3 as a file format alone if it hadn't been for the rampant trading of MP3's...
This is different, I would hope.
I wonder if Turtle Beach is paying royalties to the RIAA as specified, or just waiting and seeing what their reaction will be?