The cop outs about "well, that's a policy issue, not my problem" are annoying. On the plus side, his insistence that he can't do anything about it, makes him look like an ineffective schlep, not worth talking to. He's more worried about defending his office, and probably his employees, and his own job. Which is reasonable but not at all admirable, or responsible.
On the other hand, I have to say Tim isn't doing a good job debating him. I realize it was done on the spot; and with a jittery moderator who is (to use the vernacular) a wuss, it probably felt like walking on eggshells. "Let's not talk about that -- its a hot issue." I hate that. 'Let's avoid the issues that need resolution, because if we ignore them they will just simmer down and go away.' But as for Tim vs. Dickinson, Tim should have been more prepared for Dick to come on the heavily defensive. He shouldn't have let Dick turn the tables around with lame attacks like 'hey, you should have brought that up last year. You didn't, so you lose, game over.'
Since I left college a year ago, I've been telling people that my ultimate plan in life is to become a world-traveling techie.
Originally, the idea was that I would find a job with a company that had an overseas office, and at some point transfer there, and work there for a year. During the course of that year, I would save up enough money to move to another country, and try and find a job there before I left.
I realized of course that first, I needed to clear myself of my existing debts (which is currently progressing well), and second, I would probably be limited to developed countries.
I didn't give much regard to 1) language barriers and 2) racial strife. For the former, I figure that English is a well-established language internationally, enough to get by on, and that for where it doesn't, I'll either motivate myself to learn it, or get by on touristese. For the latter, I don't know; but I don't think it would keep me out of many countries.
From my POV, it's too bad GeekCorps is volunteer. I couldn't take that time off (3-4 mos.) from work; it would have to be between jobs. And I think I'd be seriously bored to go back to America with its unexciting two-party politics and its disaffected society of boob-tubers.
(And to my peril, I'm more attracted to iron-curtained political hotspots than well-traveled classical locales. Heck, I can see all I want of London by watching PBS. But Bagdad, that's a real place to discover. Violent overthrows and bombings on the street corner? The occasional repressive military junta? Like I said, American politics is boring me. Having something interesting happening around me is a welcome change to living where I've been lately.)
Call me a cloud-headed adventurist (and I already know I have a death wish, thanks), but honestly, I chose a the technical field because I wanted to be able to do something I enjoyed. In the same sense, I want to find an exciting way to do it.
If GeekCorps lasts, I just might decide to save up some living money and jet off to one of their missions sometime next year. Assuming I haven't already found the ideal path to my quest. --
wholesale distribution of their music by an unauthorized corporate entity is wrong
I just said to another poster that, if I were to look at this situation through the confused, not quite-getting-it eyes of Lars, I might feel much more sympathetic towards Metallica. (But, I'd pity myself for being clueless about what I was dealing with.)
So, once again, this view of things is through the muddy eyes that equate Napster with an underground pressing plant. An operation that deliberately acquires a copy of a particular artist's music product, then deliberately copies it themselves, and then deliberately sells those copies themselves, and pockets a direct profit from each individual sale of a copy. Unfortunately for Metallica's position, Napster does none of these things.
to prohibit a company like Napster from reaping the rewards of Metallica's hard work
It's pretty arbitrary. Again, Lars doesn't get it because he's been encouraged to believe that Napster is simply just like that underground pressing plant. And he's lost as to why it's not a clear-cut case of copyright infringement.
Lars seems to want to think that Napster's profit equals some pre-existing K plus (individual transfers of Metallica songs) x (price per song). Of course, that's not at all true.
If Record Town decided to open up a bunch of Metallica CD's in their store and allow anyone who purchased blank tapes to tape them in the store without paying,...I'm sure the band would take action.
That's an interesting scenario. My question is who would Metallica take action against? The Record Town or the people making the copies?
As a matter of fact, if I walk into Tower Records with a live tape recorder while they are playing the latest Metallica album -- assuming we agree that that would be a copyright violation -- who would be responsible?
They are attacking the corporation facilitating mass copyright violation.
That's the big hole here. "Facilitating".
Let's go back to the Jagermeister analogy I used. I said that if its OK to sue Napster for the phenomena of MP3 trading, it should be OK to sue alcohol companies for incurring headache, dizziness, and nausea. Not to mention various cases of rape and vehicular homicide; and even less to mention loss of money, productivity, reputation, virginity....
There's also the gun companies, which through the sale of their products have "facilitated" murder, armed robbery, assault, and less obvious crimes like treason, insurance fraud, poaching....
And the tobacco companies. Incidentally the list of crimes "facilitated" by the sale of tobacco is pretty low. It pretty much stops at lung cancer and sale of contraband to minors. That's the only industry that's been hit with anything close to the broad arrow of "facilitating".
So... going back to your Record Town scenario, what about the companies who make audiocassette tapes? Or CD-R's? And the tape decks and the CD-R drives? Those companies are also "facilitating" the illegal duplication of music. Shouldn't Metallica sue them, too? Shouldn't they prevent the people who copy Metallica albums from buying cassette tapes? (Uh, somehow?)
One of my points in previous threads was that Napster is just an arbitrary target, and what they thought would be an easy one. There's no evidence to show that Napster has somehow done more damage than audio media sellers or makers of recording devices. There's no reason for anyone to believe that Napster is somehow more responsible for what is going on than the users who are doing the trading. If anyone is "facilitating" the trade of Metallica's music, its the users, and only the users. Without the users doing the trading (far longer than Napster has been around!), there would be no Napster.
No, Napster is a high-profile target, and one that is easy to attack in the popular media, and attacking them is just meant to make a stink. There's no principle involved. Like I said, they just want to pick a fight, and Napster is it. --
That was only part of his beef. The other was that Napster was potentially profiting from this. The bootleggers of old generally were not.
Perhaps, but this would lead me to think that, okay, Lars doesn't mind users of Napster trading the songs off their CDs any more than he would mind kids in the old neighborhood trading copies of his garage tapes.
But, he does, because he just got 600,000 of them banned from Napster for doing it.
Metallica did try to sue Napster, and found out (or decided [or their lawyers did]) that they wouldn't be able to pull it off. So now they are trying to weaken them by handing them big stacks of paper.
But the trading phenomena isn't going to go away. Granted, they don't know that yet. So... if I look at the argument through the confused view of the Internet that Lars has, then maybe I can see some merit to what he's doing. But since I know what is really going to come out of all this, I think I would change tack if I were him.
At the very least, they are being non-hypocritical by *not* going after the individual mp3-traders (ie. the bootleggers in your example), but after the Napster corporation.
How do you conclude that they aren't going after the traders, if they are trying to get them banned? I mean sure, they are basically trying to ping-flood Napster with lots of paper, but... it's not just an attempt to waste Napster Inc.'s resources, but an attempt to wear them down until they become "responsible" and manage to prevent the users from trading their (i.e. Metallica's) music.
But banning users who trade Metallica songs wouldn't affect Napster even if they got say $10/mo. per user with no possibility of re-registering with a new name. The effect is to deter users from trading Metallica songs. The message is if you trade Metallica songs, you'll get banned; if not, you won't. Right now Metallica is just policing Napster's users for them. And it's a waste of their effort, when they could be writing new songs instead. --
we make up superfluous excuses about being pinched by record companies,...
...who, incidentally, were cited by the government for illegally inflating CD prices...
but I suspect we'd still bitch if music was all you can listen for $1.
Music is already all-you-can-listen, for $0. Remember radio?
And according to the RIAA's own ads for the 1999 Grammy Awards, "the music belongs to all of us."
what happens next? we get crappy content....a good portion of people who are motivated by the riches of content making won't produce anymore.
If you ask me, as it stands now, the riches of content making seems to motivate people to make some pretty crappy content. I really think you should look in to that radio thing to see what I mean.
If you're defending the existence of major music companies... personally I think that the music being put out by most of these companies is so bad that, if the popularity of their music coupled with the ease of illicit downloading via Napster is going to demotivate those companies to stop producing the crap they sell, I'm not the least bit upset. --
Well, at least he gave REASONS for his beliefs on this issue. If you did that, instead of just attacking this Lars guy without any apparent justification, then I might take you half as seriously as I took him.
Well, I don't take you seriously, since you didn't do that, either. (Neener neener.)
I'm not here to argue my views on Napster with Lars. For the record, they're rather Stallmanian, and I doubt they would go over well.
But in any case, I'm not going to try and engage in a point/counterpoint with Lars on the issue, because I'm positive he's not around to hear it.
My response was directed at Slashdot readers, not Lars.
You didn't really think Lars was going to magically get a clue, recant, and say "Jeez, we were really acting like a bunch of fuckin' assholes, weren't we?". Did you?
No. But the pulled-out-of-his-ass banter that passed for an interview here wasn't the only way they could have answered this.
You seem to use the term "get a clue" to mean the same as "recant", which isn't necessarily true. They could be perfectly clueful, and still remain on their crusade.
If Lars had said "well, this is the first battle before we tackle the real big problems" such as gnutella networks and Joe's FTP L33ch S1te, that would show cluefulness.
Or, if he had said "well, I guess the real thing we need to attack is the public opinion of album dubbing", that would also show cluefulness.
But he doesn't show anything close to a clue. He basically says "now we're suing Napster, and soon, when those Gnutella and Freenet companies get big enough, we'll sue them too". He doesn't get it, and he's in for a shock if he's involved in this circus long enough to see it that far.
That's my first point. My second point is that he basically puts his own foot in his mouth by trying to defend live concert bootlegging and home recording while attacking MP3 trading. He goes so far as to advocate duplication of unowned albums and then tries to cop out out of the contradiction by saying its a different issue because its done on a smaller scale than Napster. (I don't doubt that the root of that conundrum comes from Lars' having taped friends' records while never having downloaded an MP3 himself).
I point these things out because bad musicians and others like the one that posted the beginning of this thread are going "yeah Lars, rock on! (party time! excellent!)" and declaring their undying support for his cause, when this article should be a reason for them to step back and realize the flaws in those arguments before they bark up the same wrong tree as Metallica. --
Aside from half the questions chosen being pretty piss-poor and redundant (/me watches my karma drop even more), Lars' answers weren't the least bit useful.
If anything, he proved once and for all that Metallica really doesn't know what the fuck is going on. It looks more like a show of the agressive metal theme being played on a corporate stage. Lars would like it to look like its the scruffy, underdog metalheads fighting the evil, thieving corporation. And in reality its the embittered, out of touch, aging superstars against the geeks. It's feels like an orcs vs. kender battle suitable for a D&D tourney.
I don't know how Lars can take this fiasco seriously. I can understand the "I can take a dare" theory of why they went through the trouble of finding all the names. I mean, hiring someone else to find the names for them. But they have less than a passing knowledge of whats going on. It's not anything like the macho aggressiveness of a street fight, of the sort you would expect from a metalhead, but the cowardly scheming of a rich, well-connected bureaucrat (with lots of yes men) trying to... i don't know... trying to stop the X-Men, or something. What I mean is that Metallica isn't getting so much as dirt under their fingernails over this, but that doesn't stop them from parading at the front of the horde when the gauntlets are thrown.
Enough metaphor. I'm not impressed by any of Metallica's arguments. Lars' answers are full of holes, not only exhibiting his almost total lack of knowledge of even the details of the case, but also repeatedly contradicting himself. Sure, Napster trading isn't causing our income to go down, but it's the principle of the thing -- unless the trading is on a smaller scale, like the guy down the street with the Iron Maiden record; that's a different principle I guess.
The bottom line is Metallica wants to pick a fight, and they can't do it with 600,000+ users directly (their current count), and they can't do it with Gnutella or Freenet (which they haven't quite realized yet), so they do it with Napster. They want to blame Napster for what 600,000 other people want to do with their music.
Maybe they should blame Jagermeister for all those mornings they were ill and hung-over, too. --
Yes. He was the one sitting at the table with lots of protest signs saying things like "What evil lurks in the dark labs of MIT?"
I was among the GPF volunteers who were there almost all day. A few of us were in charge of the spacewalk (aka bouncy cage), and had a constant view of Mr. Sundman.
We were afraid for a while that he was some raving net.kook who had managed to get in early and snag the closest table to the door.
I think it took us nine hours to conclude that he wasn't serious. When one of us decided to buy his book and see what it was about, he handed it over with a smile and insisted "It's all true!"
He was kind enough to take over watching the bouncy cage for us when we decided to leave for the evening.
I myself had scored a copy of his book the night before at the swap meet, in exchange for a disco CD.
As it is, universities don't have all that much money, especially for lawyers.
That may or may not be true, especially for Oxford which is arguably one of the most well-known schools in the world, and which probably has world-renowned lawyers teaching at it...
...but, the point is, universities used to have balls. That is to say: integrity, backbone, and expressional priority.
I imagine universities will soon start revoking tenure for professors who embrace MP3, to avoid litigation, under the defense that they are just poor, dejected institutions of knowledge which can't afford to respect or defend unpopular opinions anymore.
Universities used to protect socialists, for heaven's sake. Now they can't even protect parodists. --
Looking at the recent story about Napster losing it's "mere conduit" defense, it seems to me that although Napster's status thereto might be hazy, Slashdot would definitely qualify as a "mere conduit" for the transmission of material.
Otherwise any ISP with a news feed that included alt.binaries.* would be screwed, (and Usenet would also die a stammering death).
(Can I go back to school please? I want to study law now. Someone pay off my old tuition debts, please?) --
You're blaming Napster for either copyright violation, or in aiding copyright violators, because their program makes it easier to find and download illegal Metallica MP3s. Why aren't you also suing or attacking the makers of all the FTP server programs, Web server programs, and IRC programs? The MP3 trade began on personal FTP servers, web pages, and in IRC chatrooms. Certainly there have been many more illegal transfers Metallica songs over FTP alone than have been over Napster. Why sue Napster, a recent development, when those FTP, Web and IRC programs have facilitated the transfer of your MP3s for over three years? --
How can you be so determined to blame Napster for a phenomenon that existed years before it was invented, when you don't actually know the details of how the program works? You only are assuming the blame based on the appearance of what is happening. It seems that to you, the legal matters of whether they are responsible, and the technical matters of what their program actually does, is irrelevant. You (and the labels) just need someone to blame, and you don't care if the person raked over the coals for you is the actual cause of the problem or not. --
If you are interested in reaching an amicable solution with Napster, why did you deliberately print out all the 350,000 names, which you had found with a computer program, onto paper?...instead of giving it to them via computer file, which would be much faster? That makes no sense. It suggests that you are just being difficult and trying to raise a fuss -- not just protecting your music. --
Over at the dropsquad site, I don't see a single toilet, sink, or dishwasher. No empty beer kegs either. IYAM, NU Kennedy Hall's Air Shaft Bombing Crew of the early-to-mid 90's was much more daring. I hear the 1996 post-Crew finale (and well-synchronized) performance of The 1812 Overture on Boom Box and Dropped Beer Bottles was a fitting end to the air shaft bombing years there. SporkBoy probably has earlier memories of those local pioneers of the art.
'They' (NUASBC) don't have pictures, but that doesn't mean anything. It just means 'they' were more interested in not getting caught than they were in becoming cheap-shot net.legends. (Though they tried that too, with alt.theft.sign-stealing and alt.guy.brown.)
PS, air shaft bombing is more community-appreciated than stairwell bombing, because the smell only lasts until the next rainfall or so. And it doesn't stagnate. It does have a better effect for the next day or two, because the outside air really helps the smell travel to those upper floors. But it doesn't stay around for weeks, and no one but maintenace workers are allowed in the air shaft, so no one has to wade through your putrefying geekhaus-site's JPEG fodder.
the fact that VB is easily maintainable and readable
What's this? How do you define "maintainable" -- as meaning "if you leave it alone, it keeps working, as long as you don't upgrade interpreters" ?
In your defense of bad programming languages, do you miss out of hand that VB's parser is mostly brain-dead, allowing for the occasionally undiagnosable mis-read include file?
I do believe this post calls for an Obfuscated VB Contest. Anyone? --
I agree with you that geeks are exploited. Not just by JonKatz and his more egregious colleagues, but by the larger part of society. We're in demand to businesses and others for our domain over modern technology, without which they would be less wealthy and/or nowadays, less intellectual-chic. At the same time, we're constantly disposed of outside of the business world, treated as sub-human and unworthy. Maybe this is why some geeks sleep in their cubes -- at work, they're valuable, at the nightclub, they're trash. YMMV of course, but those whose mileage does vary aren't in the majority, and aren't the somehow the better among us for it.
But I tell ya, feeling exploited as you and I do, I can't help holding onto some feelings of disdain and even a little emotional distress over being treated this way. Every time I read a tech news story full of nonsense, mis-statements, doble talk, and derisions of the "deviant" dig-enerates of the world, I get pretty heated. I could read some other news outlet and pretend that those news outlets "don't matter", but I'd only be kidding myself. (If you don't know what I'm talking about, read the Boston Herald article about the Geek Pride Festival early this month.)
So if JonKatz is going to publish a book decrying the mistreatment, ostracization, segregation, and prejudice brooding against geeks, nerds, freaks, and anyone who shows up to school wearing a black trenchcoat, I'm absolutely thrilled. And if Andover.Net wants to put out a press release about it, that makes me even happier, because I know more people will hear about this book -- not just the relatively tiny sub-set of the population that visits Slashdot. Seeing as you yourself can become so vocal when you feel exploited, I would think you would appreciate it, too.
If you don't like being understood by others, even just a little bit more, I can't help you, 'cause I definitely don't feel that way.
I gotta say, a little geek pride is a damn good thing to have. (To Tim McE.: Thanks.) --
The other half of this story[1] is of course, why this list was made in the first place:
ICANN has received "an overwhelming number" (only 12,000! Hah!/. has more members than that!) of signups for its At Large Membership program, and as a result, the mailing of PINs will be delayed for another two months, even though the confirmation message we all got told us they would be mailed two days after our signup and would arrive within a week later.
In the meantime, they are "verifying" the applications before they send out PINs.
I wonder... do they think their ineptitude has made them a target for spamming, or do they not realize their ineptitude would cause so many people to want to hop on and straighten them out? Inability to deal with politics doesn't seem to be their only problem.
[1] Which my submission of this story pointed out... (grumble) --
Anonymity is a good thing until you use it as a front end for persecution. Then it ain't so good.
Now, I suppose this WAVE thing wouldn't be so bad if you also had anonymous rebuttals. It would be even better if you had secret discussions with the accused students, instead of pulling them out and making examples of them (when they haven't done anything wrong).
And what if I could anonymously turn myself in preemptively, in order to head off later persecution? That would be nice. I could roll the dice and be able to opt-out of the whole being-ostracized shebang.
But I really don't think anonymity is the problem with WA. You're concluding that since we are against WA we are therefore against anonymity. And that conclusion is baseless.
I was persecuted out of my residence hall my second year of college, and to be honest, the anonymity of the reports that led to it didn't really matter. If my accusers had been known to be by name, the only difference is I would have known exactly who to hate, instead of hating them all. (I'm not a better person for hating them, btw, but neither are they for hating me.) But the reasons for my anger for them are the same whether I know who they are or not.
In fact probably both me and them are better off for not knowing, all else being equal.
What I am against is the process, and the atmosphere of bias against me, that led to my being ostracized. And I am kicking myself for not placing any value in the mechanisms. I had been given the same anonymous statement forms that they all had been given; there's no reason to think I couldn't have put in my own, pointing out their prejudices, and my own feelings about their treatment of me. I laughed at the forms, thinking them a joke. When that process was finally used against me, saying the exact things against me that I would have said about them, boy did I realize how wrong I was.
The bottom line however is not that their anonymity led to my ostracization, though it did encourage them. Handing someone a license to have anyone they dont like kicked out is like handing someone a gun, rubber gloves, and ski mask, and telling them they can use it whenever they feel threatened.
These kids need to be taught to be tolerant and accepting, not be taught they can remove undesirables with impunity. --
Slashdot Mirror
The cop outs about "well, that's a policy issue, not my problem" are annoying. On the plus side, his insistence that he can't do anything about it, makes him look like an ineffective schlep, not worth talking to. He's more worried about defending his office, and probably his employees, and his own job. Which is reasonable but not at all admirable, or responsible.
On the other hand, I have to say Tim isn't doing a good job debating him. I realize it was done on the spot; and with a jittery moderator who is (to use the vernacular) a wuss, it probably felt like walking on eggshells. "Let's not talk about that -- its a hot issue." I hate that. 'Let's avoid the issues that need resolution, because if we ignore them they will just simmer down and go away.' But as for Tim vs. Dickinson, Tim should have been more prepared for Dick to come on the heavily defensive. He shouldn't have let Dick turn the tables around with lame attacks like 'hey, you should have brought that up last year. You didn't, so you lose, game over.'
--
Ahem.
Capitalism. Get used to it.
--
Since I left college a year ago, I've been telling people that my ultimate plan in life is to become a world-traveling techie.
Originally, the idea was that I would find a job with a company that had an overseas office, and at some point transfer there, and work there for a year. During the course of that year, I would save up enough money to move to another country, and try and find a job there before I left.
I realized of course that first, I needed to clear myself of my existing debts (which is currently progressing well), and second, I would probably be limited to developed countries.
I didn't give much regard to 1) language barriers and 2) racial strife. For the former, I figure that English is a well-established language internationally, enough to get by on, and that for where it doesn't, I'll either motivate myself to learn it, or get by on touristese. For the latter, I don't know; but I don't think it would keep me out of many countries.
From my POV, it's too bad GeekCorps is volunteer. I couldn't take that time off (3-4 mos.) from work; it would have to be between jobs. And I think I'd be seriously bored to go back to America with its unexciting two-party politics
and its disaffected society of boob-tubers.
(And to my peril, I'm more attracted to iron-curtained political hotspots than well-traveled classical locales. Heck, I can see all I want of London by watching PBS. But Bagdad, that's a real place to discover. Violent overthrows and bombings on the street corner? The occasional repressive military junta? Like I said, American politics is boring me. Having something interesting happening around me is a welcome change to living where I've been lately.)
Call me a cloud-headed adventurist (and I already know I have a death wish, thanks), but honestly, I chose a the technical field because I wanted to be able to do something I enjoyed. In the same sense, I want to find an exciting way to do it.
If GeekCorps lasts, I just might decide to save up some living money and jet off to one of their missions sometime next year. Assuming I haven't already found the ideal path to my quest.
--
wholesale distribution of their music by an unauthorized corporate entity is wrong
...I'm sure the band would take action.
I just said to another poster that, if I were to look at this situation through the confused, not quite-getting-it eyes of Lars, I might feel much more sympathetic towards Metallica. (But, I'd pity myself for being clueless about what I was dealing with.)
So, once again, this view of things is through the muddy eyes that equate Napster with an underground pressing plant. An operation that deliberately acquires a copy of a particular artist's music product, then deliberately copies it themselves, and then deliberately sells those copies themselves, and pockets a direct profit from each individual sale of a copy. Unfortunately for Metallica's position, Napster does none of these things.
to prohibit a company like Napster from reaping the rewards of Metallica's hard work
It's pretty arbitrary. Again, Lars doesn't get it because he's been encouraged to believe that Napster is simply just like that underground pressing plant. And he's lost as to why it's not a clear-cut case of copyright infringement.
Lars seems to want to think that Napster's profit equals some pre-existing K plus (individual transfers of Metallica songs) x (price per song). Of course, that's not at all true.
If Record Town decided to open up a bunch of Metallica CD's in their store and allow anyone who purchased blank tapes to tape them in the store without paying,
That's an interesting scenario. My question is who would Metallica take action against? The Record Town or the people making the copies?
As a matter of fact, if I walk into Tower Records with a live tape recorder while they are playing the latest Metallica album -- assuming we agree that that would be a copyright violation -- who would be responsible?
They are attacking the corporation facilitating mass copyright violation.
That's the big hole here. "Facilitating".
Let's go back to the Jagermeister analogy I used. I said that if its OK to sue Napster for the phenomena of MP3 trading, it should be OK to sue alcohol companies for incurring headache, dizziness, and nausea. Not to mention various cases of rape and vehicular homicide; and even less to mention loss of money, productivity, reputation, virginity....
There's also the gun companies, which through the sale of their products have "facilitated" murder, armed robbery, assault, and less obvious crimes like treason, insurance fraud, poaching....
And the tobacco companies. Incidentally the list of crimes "facilitated" by the sale of tobacco is pretty low. It pretty much stops at lung cancer and sale of contraband to minors. That's the only industry that's been hit with anything close to the broad arrow of "facilitating".
So... going back to your Record Town scenario, what about the companies who make audiocassette tapes? Or CD-R's? And the tape decks and the CD-R drives? Those companies are also "facilitating" the illegal duplication of music. Shouldn't Metallica sue them, too? Shouldn't they prevent the people who copy Metallica albums from buying cassette tapes? (Uh, somehow?)
One of my points in previous threads was that Napster is just an arbitrary target, and what they thought would be an easy one. There's no evidence to show that Napster has somehow done more damage than audio media sellers or makers of recording devices. There's no reason for anyone to believe that Napster is somehow more responsible for what is going on than the users who are doing the trading. If anyone is "facilitating" the trade of Metallica's music, its the users, and only the users. Without the users doing the trading (far longer than Napster has been around!), there would be no Napster.
No, Napster is a high-profile target, and one that is easy to attack in the popular media, and attacking them is just meant to make a stink. There's no principle involved. Like I said, they just want to pick a fight, and Napster is it.
--
That was only part of his beef. The other was that Napster was potentially profiting from this. The bootleggers of old generally were not.
Perhaps, but this would lead me to think that, okay, Lars doesn't mind users of Napster trading the songs off their CDs any more than he would mind kids in the old neighborhood trading copies of his garage tapes.
But, he does, because he just got 600,000 of them banned from Napster for doing it.
Metallica did try to sue Napster, and found out (or decided [or their lawyers did]) that they wouldn't be able to pull it off. So now they are trying to weaken them by handing them big stacks of paper.
But the trading phenomena isn't going to go away. Granted, they don't know that yet. So... if I look at the argument through the confused view of the Internet that Lars has, then maybe I can see some merit to what he's doing. But since I know what is really going to come out of all this, I think I would change tack if I were him.
At the very least, they are being non-hypocritical by *not* going after the individual mp3-traders (ie. the bootleggers in your example), but after the Napster corporation.
How do you conclude that they aren't going after the traders, if they are trying to get them banned? I mean sure, they are basically trying to ping-flood Napster with lots of paper, but... it's not just an attempt to waste Napster Inc.'s resources, but an attempt to wear them down until they become "responsible" and manage to prevent the users from trading their (i.e. Metallica's) music.
But banning users who trade Metallica songs wouldn't affect Napster even if they got say $10/mo. per user with no possibility of re-registering with a new name. The effect is to deter users from trading Metallica songs. The message is if you trade Metallica songs, you'll get banned; if not, you won't. Right now Metallica is just policing Napster's users for them. And it's a waste of their effort, when they could be writing new songs instead.
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Thank you for catching that. I'm glad someone has seen it, and liked it.
(moders: I'd normally reply via email, but he has none.)
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we make up superfluous excuses about being pinched by record companies,...
...a good portion of people who are motivated by the riches of content making won't produce anymore.
...who, incidentally, were cited by the government for illegally inflating CD prices...
but I suspect we'd still bitch if music was all you can listen for $1.
Music is already all-you-can-listen, for $0. Remember radio?
And according to the RIAA's own ads for the 1999 Grammy Awards, "the music belongs to all of us."
what happens next? we get crappy content.
If you ask me, as it stands now, the riches of content making seems to motivate people to make some pretty crappy content. I really think you should look in to that radio thing to see what I mean.
If you're defending the existence of major music companies... personally I think that the music being put out by most of these companies is so bad that, if the popularity of their music coupled with the ease of illicit downloading via Napster is going to demotivate those companies to stop producing the crap they sell, I'm not the least bit upset.
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Well, at least he gave REASONS for his beliefs on this issue. If you did that, instead of just attacking this Lars guy without any apparent justification, then I might take you half as seriously as I took him.
Well, I don't take you seriously, since you didn't do that, either. (Neener neener.)
I'm not here to argue my views on Napster with Lars. For the record, they're rather Stallmanian, and I doubt they would go over well.
But in any case, I'm not going to try and engage in a point/counterpoint with Lars on the issue, because I'm positive he's not around to hear it.
My response was directed at Slashdot readers, not Lars.
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You didn't really think Lars was going to magically get a clue, recant, and say "Jeez, we were really acting like a bunch of fuckin' assholes, weren't we?". Did you?
No. But the pulled-out-of-his-ass banter that passed for an interview here wasn't the only way they could have answered this.
You seem to use the term "get a clue" to mean the same as "recant", which isn't necessarily true. They could be perfectly clueful, and still remain on their crusade.
If Lars had said "well, this is the first battle before we tackle the real big problems" such as gnutella networks and Joe's FTP L33ch S1te, that would show cluefulness.
Or, if he had said "well, I guess the real thing we need to attack is the public opinion of album dubbing", that would also show cluefulness.
But he doesn't show anything close to a clue. He basically says "now we're suing Napster, and soon, when those Gnutella and Freenet companies get big enough, we'll sue them too". He doesn't get it, and he's in for a shock if he's involved in this circus long enough to see it that far.
That's my first point. My second point is that he basically puts his own foot in his mouth by trying to defend live concert bootlegging and home recording while attacking MP3 trading. He goes so far as to advocate duplication of unowned albums and then tries to cop out out of the contradiction by saying its a different issue because its done on a smaller scale than Napster. (I don't doubt that the root of that conundrum comes from Lars' having taped friends' records while never having downloaded an MP3 himself).
I point these things out because bad musicians and others like the one that posted the beginning of this thread are going "yeah Lars, rock on! (party time! excellent!)" and declaring their undying support for his cause, when this article should be a reason for them to step back and realize the flaws in those arguments before they bark up the same wrong tree as Metallica.
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Aside from half the questions chosen being pretty piss-poor and redundant (/me watches my karma drop even more), Lars' answers weren't the least bit useful.
If anything, he proved once and for all that Metallica really doesn't know what the fuck is going on. It looks more like a show of the agressive metal theme being played on a corporate stage. Lars would like it to look like its the scruffy, underdog metalheads fighting the evil, thieving corporation. And in reality its the embittered, out of touch, aging superstars against the geeks. It's feels like an orcs vs. kender battle suitable for a D&D tourney.
I don't know how Lars can take this fiasco seriously. I can understand the "I can take a dare" theory of why they went through the trouble of finding all the names. I mean, hiring someone else to find the names for them. But they have less than a passing knowledge of whats going on. It's not anything like the macho aggressiveness of a street fight, of the sort you would expect from a metalhead, but the cowardly scheming of a rich, well-connected bureaucrat (with lots of yes men) trying to... i don't know... trying to stop the X-Men, or something. What I mean is that Metallica isn't getting so much as dirt under their fingernails over this, but that doesn't stop them from parading at the front of the horde when the gauntlets are thrown.
Enough metaphor. I'm not impressed by any of Metallica's arguments. Lars' answers are full of holes, not only exhibiting his almost total lack of knowledge of even the details of the case, but also repeatedly contradicting himself. Sure, Napster trading isn't causing our income to go down, but it's the principle of the thing -- unless the trading is on a smaller scale, like the guy down the street with the Iron Maiden record; that's a different principle I guess.
The bottom line is Metallica wants to pick a fight, and they can't do it with 600,000+ users directly (their current count), and they can't do it with Gnutella or Freenet (which they haven't quite realized yet), so they do it with Napster. They want to blame Napster for what 600,000 other people want to do with their music.
Maybe they should blame Jagermeister for all those mornings they were ill and hung-over, too.
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Yes. He was the one sitting at the table with lots of protest signs saying things like "What evil lurks in the dark labs of MIT?"
I was among the GPF volunteers who were there almost all day. A few of us were in charge of the spacewalk (aka bouncy cage), and had a constant view of Mr. Sundman.
We were afraid for a while that he was some raving net.kook who had managed to get in early and snag the closest table to the door.
I think it took us nine hours to conclude that he wasn't serious. When one of us decided to buy his book and see what it was about, he handed it over with a smile and insisted "It's all true!"
He was kind enough to take over watching the bouncy cage for us when we decided to leave for the evening.
I myself had scored a copy of his book the night before at the swap meet, in exchange for a disco CD.
(Mmm. That was a good time.)
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As it is, universities don't have all that much money, especially for lawyers.
That may or may not be true, especially for Oxford which is arguably one of the most well-known schools in the world, and which probably has world-renowned lawyers teaching at it...
...but, the point is, universities used to have balls. That is to say: integrity, backbone, and expressional priority.
I imagine universities will soon start revoking tenure for professors who embrace MP3, to avoid litigation, under the defense that they are just poor, dejected institutions of knowledge which can't afford to respect or defend unpopular opinions anymore.
Universities used to protect socialists, for heaven's sake. Now they can't even protect parodists.
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Not to be confused with hacker.
It's a shame we can't seem to get any knowledgeable people working as tech section editors at news outlets. Not even in major tech centers.
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Looking at the recent story about Napster losing it's "mere conduit" defense, it seems to me that although Napster's status thereto might be hazy, Slashdot would definitely qualify as a "mere conduit" for the transmission of material.
Otherwise any ISP with a news feed that included alt.binaries.* would be screwed, (and Usenet would also die a stammering death).
(Can I go back to school please? I want to study law now. Someone pay off my old tuition debts, please?)
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...can I now sue these record companies for "losses" incurred by purchasing their illegally priced CDs?
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You're blaming Napster for either copyright violation, or in aiding copyright violators, because their program makes it easier to find and download illegal Metallica MP3s. Why aren't you also suing or attacking the makers of all the FTP server programs, Web server programs, and IRC programs? The MP3 trade began on personal FTP servers, web pages, and in IRC chatrooms. Certainly there have been many more illegal transfers Metallica songs over FTP alone than have been over Napster. Why sue Napster, a recent development, when those FTP, Web and IRC programs have facilitated the transfer of your MP3s for over three years?
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How can you be so determined to blame Napster for a phenomenon that existed years before it was invented, when you don't actually know the details of how the program works? You only are assuming the blame based on the appearance of what is happening. It seems that to you, the legal matters of whether they are responsible, and the technical matters of what their program actually does, is irrelevant. You (and the labels) just need someone to blame, and you don't care if the person raked over the coals for you is the actual cause of the problem or not.
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If you are interested in reaching an amicable solution with Napster, why did you deliberately print out all the 350,000 names, which you had found with a computer program, onto paper? ...instead of giving it to them via computer file, which would be much faster? That makes no sense. It suggests that you are just being difficult and trying to raise a fuss -- not just protecting your music.
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Over at the dropsquad site, I don't see a single toilet, sink, or dishwasher. No empty beer kegs either. IYAM, NU Kennedy Hall's Air Shaft Bombing Crew of the early-to-mid 90's was much more daring. I hear the 1996 post-Crew finale (and well-synchronized) performance of The 1812 Overture on Boom Box and Dropped Beer Bottles was a fitting end to the air shaft bombing years there. SporkBoy probably has earlier memories of those local pioneers of the art.
'They' (NUASBC) don't have pictures, but that doesn't mean anything. It just means 'they' were more interested in not getting caught than they were in becoming cheap-shot net.legends. (Though they tried that too, with alt.theft.sign-stealing and alt.guy.brown.)
PS, air shaft bombing is more community-appreciated than stairwell bombing, because the smell only lasts until the next rainfall or so. And it doesn't stagnate. It does have a better effect for the next day or two, because the outside air really helps the smell travel to those upper floors. But it doesn't stay around for weeks, and no one but maintenace workers are allowed in the air shaft, so no one has to wade through your putrefying geekhaus-site's JPEG fodder.
Or so I've heard, anyway.
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"Eu sou a lei! Deixes cair tuas armas e preparais para ser julgadas!"
oh, you know...
(what language do they speak in brazil again?)
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the fact that VB is easily maintainable and readable
What's this? How do you define "maintainable" -- as meaning "if you leave it alone, it keeps working, as long as you don't upgrade interpreters" ?
In your defense of bad programming languages, do you miss out of hand that VB's parser is mostly brain-dead, allowing for the occasionally undiagnosable mis-read include file?
I do believe this post calls for an Obfuscated VB Contest. Anyone?
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I agree with you that geeks are exploited. Not just by JonKatz and his more egregious colleagues, but by the larger part of society. We're in demand to businesses and others for our domain over modern technology, without which they would be less wealthy and/or nowadays, less intellectual-chic. At the same time, we're constantly disposed of outside of the business world, treated as sub-human and unworthy. Maybe this is why some geeks sleep in their cubes -- at work, they're valuable, at the nightclub, they're trash. YMMV of course, but those whose mileage does vary aren't in the majority, and aren't the somehow the better among us for it.
But I tell ya, feeling exploited as you and I do, I can't help holding onto some feelings of disdain and even a little emotional distress over being treated this way. Every time I read a tech news story full of nonsense, mis-statements, doble talk, and derisions of the "deviant" dig-enerates of the world, I get pretty heated. I could read some other news outlet and pretend that those news outlets "don't matter", but I'd only be kidding myself. (If you don't know what I'm talking about, read the Boston Herald article about the Geek Pride Festival early this month.)
So if JonKatz is going to publish a book decrying the mistreatment, ostracization, segregation, and prejudice brooding against geeks, nerds, freaks, and anyone who shows up to school wearing a black trenchcoat, I'm absolutely thrilled. And if Andover.Net wants to put out a press release about it, that makes me even happier, because I know more people will hear about this book -- not just the relatively tiny sub-set of the population that visits Slashdot. Seeing as you yourself can become so vocal when you feel exploited, I would think you would appreciate it, too.
If you don't like being understood by others, even just a little bit more, I can't help you, 'cause I definitely don't feel that way.
I gotta say, a little geek pride is a damn good thing to have. (To Tim McE.: Thanks.)
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ICANN has received "an overwhelming number" (only 12,000! Hah! /. has more members than that!) of signups for its At Large Membership program, and as a result, the mailing of PINs will be delayed for another two months, even though the confirmation message we all got told us they would be mailed two days after our signup and would arrive within a week later.
In the meantime, they are "verifying" the applications before they send out PINs.
I wonder... do they think their ineptitude has made them a target for spamming, or do they not realize their ineptitude would cause so many people to want to hop on and straighten them out? Inability to deal with politics doesn't seem to be their only problem.
[1] Which my submission of this story pointed out... (grumble)
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Anonymity is a good thing until you use it as a front end for persecution. Then it ain't so good.
Now, I suppose this WAVE thing wouldn't be so bad if you also had anonymous rebuttals. It would be even better if you had secret discussions with the accused students, instead of pulling them out and making examples of them (when they haven't done anything wrong).
And what if I could anonymously turn myself in preemptively, in order to head off later persecution? That would be nice. I could roll the dice and be able to opt-out of the whole being-ostracized shebang.
But I really don't think anonymity is the problem with WA. You're concluding that since we are against WA we are therefore against anonymity. And that conclusion is baseless.
I was persecuted out of my residence hall my second year of college, and to be honest, the anonymity of the reports that led to it didn't really matter. If my accusers had been known to be by name, the only difference is I would have known exactly who to hate, instead of hating them all. (I'm not a better person for hating them, btw, but neither are they for hating me.) But the reasons for my anger for them are the same whether I know who they are or not.
In fact probably both me and them are better off for not knowing, all else being equal.
What I am against is the process, and the atmosphere of bias against me, that led to my being ostracized. And I am kicking myself for not placing any value in the mechanisms. I had been given the same anonymous statement forms that they all had been given; there's no reason to think I couldn't have put in my own, pointing out their prejudices, and my own feelings about their treatment of me. I laughed at the forms, thinking them a joke. When that process was finally used against me, saying the exact things against me that I would have said about them, boy did I realize how wrong I was.
The bottom line however is not that their anonymity led to my ostracization, though it did encourage them. Handing someone a license to have anyone they dont like kicked out is like handing someone a gun, rubber gloves, and ski mask, and telling them they can use it whenever they feel threatened.
These kids need to be taught to be tolerant and accepting, not be taught they can remove undesirables with impunity.
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