I suppose you are right -- it isn't necesarily stealing, but it's definately subverting the system.
For example, here in the city, at all of the parking meters, you get the first 10 minutes free by turning the dial. Now, if everyone walking down the street were to turn the dials on the parking meters, then no one would have to pay for parking and the city wouldn't make any money, right?
It's called civil disobedience and it lands a lot of people in jail. One woman was arrested for 'interfering' with police when she was caught pumping money into the meters as the cops were making their way down the street writing tickets.
That's the way I see this, Napster, DeCSS and all of the others -- civil disobedience that someone will eventually find a way to punish you for.
Yep. That's just one of the many freedoms that we have in the US. I can set up a shop that sells the same thing you're selling for less right next door and drive you out of business (as long as I can keep myself in business.)
Necessity if the mother of invention: and thus we have the DeCSS source and free EverQuest servers...
Sure, you get new and exciting content (and someone has to pay for the upkeep of the servers and personel to run them,) but how do you feel about paying $40 for the game and an additional $120 for a year's subscription.
Granted, a lot of people will pay much more than $160/year on entertainment (movies, books, cds, etc), but don't you think the original game should be free?
No one seems to care enough about this issue anymore; it's gone on the backburner just as the whole 'Carnivore' scam has.
Napster will lose. There will be no new standards on MP3's to force licenses, etc. It will all be a no-issue and we'll go back to downloading music from newsgroups, ftp and gnutella until someone mainstream finds out about it and decides to sue.
Please no. I don't want to be walking along the 'virtual internet' boulevard and accidentally stumble into the trailer park that is Anglefire, Xoom and Geocities.
Agh! Please no more 3d banner ads or 3d pictures of your Mom's cat!!! ACK!
Oh come on now -- the only way we could ever make an Intel chip blow it's floating point math was with a specially designed program, remember? Didn't AMD write that program? 8^)
If this guy is taken to court on this, then it would further underscore the ridiculous nature of the case itself. Would it be illegal for me to memorize the lyrics?
btw: The site is either/.ed or down. Oh yeah, and you could piss off a lot of people at once if you used Napster to download the DeCSS source!
I think CS668 (further down in the post) has a pretty good sense of what's happening: There are still a whole lot of people out there that are still on 56K connections. Cause and effect: people don't want to waste their time with a 4k/second host when they can download 4 files from a DSL or Cable host at 20k/sec each instead.
"As a consequence, the system has degraded performance, and is more vulnerable to censorship or legal action."
The article notes that if someone (such as the RIAA) were to sue, they wouldn't go after the individual users, but rather the big fishes.
However, if Napster were to be shut down for good, it would inject a surge of "survival instinct" into the whole operation and everyone would start sharing files -- If there's something to rebel against, people will rebel against it.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry: couldn't resist.
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I still hold, though, that the software should be free if the service is going to cost so much monthly.
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For example, here in the city, at all of the parking meters, you get the first 10 minutes free by turning the dial. Now, if everyone walking down the street were to turn the dials on the parking meters, then no one would have to pay for parking and the city wouldn't make any money, right?
It's called civil disobedience and it lands a lot of people in jail. One woman was arrested for 'interfering' with police when she was caught pumping money into the meters as the cops were making their way down the street writing tickets.
That's the way I see this, Napster, DeCSS and all of the others -- civil disobedience that someone will eventually find a way to punish you for.
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Just stimulating conversation -- I wouldn't still be playing Tribes if I had to pay for it.
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Necessity if the mother of invention: and thus we have the DeCSS source and free EverQuest servers...
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No...just stealing a service by running free servers. This would, ultimately, lead to less people paying for the service provided by Verant.
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Granted, a lot of people will pay much more than $160/year on entertainment (movies, books, cds, etc), but don't you think the original game should be free?
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But what if there were free servers? Do you think more people would play, or would they simply want to be where everyone else was playing.?
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Or go to every free web provider you can find and post the DeCSS source. They simply cannot afford to sue everyone!
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And the first 500 guests get a complimentary hand grenade.
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Or perhaps even a mod'ed potato cannon to fire the ball.
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Napster will lose. There will be no new standards on MP3's to force licenses, etc. It will all be a no-issue and we'll go back to downloading music from newsgroups, ftp and gnutella until someone mainstream finds out about it and decides to sue.
*yawn* What an utterly boring cycle.
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ugh. We don't need any 3d rendering or bump mapping of that cave. Of course, this could bring pr0n to a new level!
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No...but I'm sure they can buy one real quick. 8^)
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Agh! Please no more 3d banner ads or 3d pictures of your Mom's cat!!! ACK!
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If you can't beat 'em -- sue em and drive them out of business. So when's Micro$oft going to sue 'linux'? 8^)
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Or here's the assembly source.
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I wonder what the $ENV{HTTP_REFERER} tag looks like?
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Oh come on now -- the only way we could ever make an Intel chip blow it's floating point math was with a specially designed program, remember? Didn't AMD write that program? 8^)
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You know, if this ridiculous 'license' thing takes off, I'm going to copyright my license plates and charge cops every time they run a check on them!
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btw: The site is either /.ed or down. Oh yeah, and you could piss off a lot of people at once if you used Napster to download the DeCSS source!
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"Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor? NO!"
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True. But with the fear of jail time looming over our shoulders, we'll just find a better (read: more anonymous) way to do it. Isn't evolution great?
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I think CS668 (further down in the post) has a pretty good sense of what's happening: There are still a whole lot of people out there that are still on 56K connections. Cause and effect: people don't want to waste their time with a 4k/second host when they can download 4 files from a DSL or Cable host at 20k/sec each instead.
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The article notes that if someone (such as the RIAA) were to sue, they wouldn't go after the individual users, but rather the big fishes.
However, if Napster were to be shut down for good, it would inject a surge of "survival instinct" into the whole operation and everyone would start sharing files -- If there's something to rebel against, people will rebel against it.
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