The info at that link suggests that the C++ implementation is not available except to developers:
Don't think about installing Whiterose yet, unless you are interrested in developing it. If so mail <agl@linuxpower.org>.
The bit about working against only particular versions of the Java-based node is worrying, as it suggests that non-Java implementations will always be trailing the Java one as some kind of "master reference". There needs to be an implementation-independent Freenet spec available so that development of non-Java versions can proceed without reference to the Java one, otherwise tail-chasing is going to make the job of alternative developers a never-ending and thankless one, subservient to the whims of the Java-based developers.
... by the Bar Soc. That's the only way the message will be learned by those that need to learn it.
The lack of accountability for being dumb is just appalling in the legal profession. All that seems to matter is that you adhere to the standard legal procedures, a triumph of form over content, and as long as you do that then any bollocks you say or do in the application domain is just fine.
"The Letter" refers to Digital Video Disk, whereas it was made clear a million times while DVD was being popularized that DVD stands for Digital Versatile Disk.
Doesn't this squash their first-round application on a technicality? (I bet the law firm made the cockup.)
News is the right forum for this kind of thing. Periodically send the code out in a shell archive to a binaries newsgroup, and the lawyers won't have any fixed point at which to aim their actions.
What you didn't mention though was how the court would view an attempted action where the number of restrained defendents would have to be in the millions to achieve the desired effect. Isn't the law sensible enough to note that, on this basis alone, the action is pointless?
The relevant software has almost certainly already been released as a shell archive in one of the binary newsgroups on Internet news. This offers an interesting little technicality: currently the list of defendents is biased, unfair and discriminatory by virtue of being incomplete by several dozen million names (all those potentially in possession of the software). Quite apart from such failings, the prosecution is utterly misrepresenting the extent and scope of its case; if the true scope were to become clear, the case would almost certainly collapse instantly.
Furthermore, to present a non-discriminatory action, the real list of applicable defendents would have to be read out in full (that's the procedural step that would make a restraining order apply to the people in question). And if the complete list were to be read out in court, it would take years to do so, so this is going nowhere fast.
The hearing will be at 'the Superior Court of Santa Clara County, State of California, on December 29, 1999, at 8:30 a.m.'
It is impossible for the hearing to go ahead with fair consideration and representation on this date, on account of all the defendents being fully occupied getting ready to prevent the collapse of western civilization through the millennium bug. And no geeks ever get up before midday anyway.
Is it perhaps a law of nature that, when otherwise rational individuals aggregate into corporations, all pretence to sanity and logic disappears and the result is the collective equivalent of a blithering idiot?
We've had so many examples of this happening in the last few days that it seems quite possible.
Or is it merely that corporations work in an environment where lawyers lay the ground rules, and the utter cluelessness of many in the legal profession and amorality of the rest tars everyone in the company with the brush of insanity?
After a zillion years of installing RedHat without a hitch, out comes 6.1 and promptly gives me an X11 fault immediately at the start of an install, on a system that has been running older RedHats happily for ages. To a beginner, that Red Screen of Death ("Change signal timing") would be utterly meaningless, and terminal.
With that kind of "improvement", newcomers are going to think that Linux is difficult to install and promptly go back to M$ in droves. For goodness sake, make the RH installer drop back to text mode automatically if X11 fails!!!!
Write a type assitant!
on
RMS The Coder
·
· Score: 2
Why don't you code a domain-aware, learning type assistant hooked into the eval dispatcher? It wouldn't be able to do strict checking a la ML (nor would you want it to), but when fed off a list of heuristics I bet that it could be made to catch a large variety of type-related mistakes that human programmers habitually make.
The natural power of a programming language
on
RMS The Coder
·
· Score: 2
All programming languages are equally powerful in a Turing sense, since you can implement an interpreter for anything you like within almost any of them, more or less. However, that doesn't mean that they are all equally powerful in practice, because many languages expressly forbid you from doing things that you might wish to do. RMS was referring to the "natural" power of a language when talking about LISP, which could be defined as the set of everything you can do natively within the normal constraints of a language, ie. without creating a nested interpreter and without bypassing the goals of its designers.
LISP is incredibly powerful using that definition, because it is simultaneously an extremely high level language while giving you access to both very low-level data and very high level abstractions, all handled together uniformly at will. And of course, code is just data, adding yet more flexibility. You just can't beat it in the power area.
However, for most people it's the wrong language to use -- horses for courses. While scalpels and atomic bombs are very effective in their respective areas of application, most cutting and demolition uses alternative solutions, and you don't give these nor any other extreme power tool to your kids as toys.
Tucked away behind the scenes though, LISP is the ideal extension language, offering the inherent power that is needed for an unknowable future. Guile will serve us well there.
This is a very good thing that Sun are doing, at least as far as customers are concerned, because it allows people to squeeze much more out of the Sparc than is possible under Solaris.
Three years ago, we grabbed a surplus SparcServer 20, junked Solaris and installed RedHat Linux for Sparc, just for the fun of it. Although we were expecting good things, we were astounded at the magnitude of the improvement: under Linux, most O/S-limited operations ran at about four times their speed under Solaris. Since then, both Sparc Linux and Solaris will have improved considerably I expect, but I bet that there is still an efficiency advantage with Linux, and this ought to translate into older Sun kit being given a new lease of life.
And of course, anything that promotes the use of Sun hardware has to be to the company's advantage.
Ridiculous patents, ludicrous lawsuits, pathetic domain challanges, unhelpful licenses, inappropriate trademark infringement claims, prosecutions for mere linking. The whole scene is getting ridiculous, and lots of different parties are being blamed for this nonsense. But I feel that people are missing the point.
In every single instance, the legal profession is first asked for advice, and subsequently it is the legal profession that implements the action. In each of these cases, they gave the wrong advice and implemented the wrong action. This seems to be happening with ever increasing frequency. Why might this be?
Well, I can think of only two possible explanations. The first one is that lawyers are totally clueless. Now, despite every indication that this is the case, I think it is unlikely, merely because the educational requirements are likely to weed out the total morons. The alternative explanation is that lawyers are totally amoral and self-serving, that they see the Internet as a fantastic opportunity for creating new work for themselves, and that they do so with complete disregard for commonsense despite being intelligent enough to know exactly the nature of what they are doing.
What an idiotic suggestion that religious leaders be asked for advice on this topic. They don't have the foggiest idea about the possibilities of this technology, nor on the impact that it could have on anything, not even on religion, because they are exactly like everyone else, ie. not clairvoyant. At best they'd be guessing, which doesn't give them any kind of privileged say whatsoever.
The only people that have any special platform in this subject area are the domain specialists. The rest of us are just handwaving. We should all have a say of course, but not from any privileged position.
I didn't say it should forbid anything, but only that it should promote as a guideline in its preamble the same commonsense as is already shown by the community, ie. to discourage unnecessary forking.
And in the real world of open-source development, developers cooperate on projects, not fight about how to implement things. They're outstandingly professional about this (despite being largely amateur-based), in thousands of projects around the world. It's almost unheard of that such community groups get undermined by parallel forked developments, thank goodness. But that'd down to people being sensible, not down to the GPL itself promoting cooperative behaviour.
You write: If the new features in the forked version are better than the original, there's nothing preventing the author of the original version from stealing those changes an integrating them back into his version.
You're over-simplifying things. For trivial changes, yes you're right, but for non-trivial ones it's as likely as not to be impossible to integrate the changes back into the original tree. For example, some idiot could reformat the entire package to his preferred style when he grabs it to make changes and then publish "his own improved" version. And even if such pathological modification hasn't happened, why is the onus of back-integration on the original author? His time is better spent on continued development rather than on tracking code forks.
The GPL is generally good, in my estimation, except in the single area of code forking guidelines: namely, it doesn't provide any. At the very least, it should state somewhere that public forking is discouraged when the software is still in active consensual development by the primary author or group.
Currently it's only because of the goodwill and commonsense of the community that we don't have a forking nightmare on our hands. The GPL ought to enshrine that commonsense in its preamble.
You're right about the lawsuit being a useful stick for the RIAA regardless of whether they have any chance of winning in court. However, there is a counterpoint to that argument.
Napster is a corporation that is not only easy to sue but may even be lucrative to sue. It is a sitting duck in corporate waters.
To avoid that particular stick you must either not be a sitting duck or else not swim in coporate waters. If you can avoid both, all the better.
The above metaphor maps directly to a solution that we know well: the RIAA could do nothing against open-sourced napster-type systems distributed through newsgroups and mirrored on thousands of servers across the world. There need be no identifiable people nor companies to sue, no money to make, no injunctions to serve. They would be entirely powerless to do anything about it.
Napster is comparatively vulnerable because its source is fixed, closed, and corporate, but we're already nearing a less vulnerable solution in gnapster, and much better total solutions could easily be devised. Let's get to it.
The article wasn't anti-MP3. It was anti the MP3 sites becoming every bit as bad as the studios that they're trying to replace.
The moral of the story is that we don't need yet another raft of blood-sucking middlemen. Musicians can have their own presence online without needing any of that old nightmare, without signing away any of their profits, and without being told how to arrange their own promotion. All they need to do is show a little business initiative and go it alone.
You're right though that people won't pay for the music itself -- that's the nature of the beast, and you can either moan about it or ride the wave. In practice what this means is merchandising, ie. offering your fans more than just plain pressed CDs of the music: lots of additional material to go with it, and of course the traditional t-shirts, caps and mugs. And that is something that fans definitely are willing to pay for -- it's a multi-billion dollar industry.
It only seems funny to "give away your primary product" and make money on ancillaries because we've been brainwashed into thinking of music as property. It isn't. Music is a shared experience, shared between the composer and musicians and each listener separately and all the fans collectively. It's a real oddball of a phenomenom, and it fits perfectly in the new environment of online freedom. It is very different from a washing machine.
No, that's precisely where the rot sets in, when websites want a cut of the action. That's the problem with MP3.COM. That's the old system of signing your profits away. You don't need it.
Instead, just treat the website as a fixed business expense, just like the coffee and milk. You don't give Nescafe and the milkman a cut of your business, and nor should you give a website owner any. Or perhaps a better analogy is that you don't provide AT&T or BT with a share of your business just because they provide you with a phone line.
Make it so also with websites. And these days, that will be a minimal expense or even free, at least initially when you start with a small web presence.
You write: The problem with this is that a band can have a website all they want, but without marketing, no one's going to know about them. Hell, I have a hard enough time finding music I like as it is.
That's a very good point you make, but it needs closer examination.
For a start, "without marketing" almost seems to lead us back to the bad old mega-studio system, but it doesn't have to: they don't have a monopoly on marketing, and in any event, the mechanisms of marketing are totally different in this new online environment. Secondly, "marketing" to whom -- is it the same ol' kind of audience as before, or is a new audience being formed, one to whom old-style marketing may no longer be quite so relevant? And finally, the whole idea of "market" may be slightly off the mark here, because we're certainly not talking about business as normal.
Well I think your second sentence itself hints at what the main problem is, and therefore at the solution. It's not that "marketing" as such is needed. The problem is that the new audience simply isn't being offered a means by which it can find the online music that it wants. The closest thing we have so far are well-known sites like MP3.COM, but relying on such single points with vested interests just takes us back to the bad old days.
And then there's Napster. Looking beyond the specifics to the wider implications, there is a general solution ready for the making in this area: a distributed, investment-free, unsponsored mechanism for distributing information about music available online.
If that were available, you would know where to find the music you want, and the indies wouldn't need a traditional marketing machine behind them, and new musicians would have the same audience as everyone else.
All we have to do is create such a system, and heck, that's merely programming. In fact, it may already be being built as we speak. And then, bye bye for good to the old blood-sucking marketing collosus, it'll be totally obsolete.
Practicing medicine is, for the most part, not on a par with either of the two things being discussed. Medicine is largely a scientific discipline, whereas law is almost entirely handwaving, and replicating music involves no relevant mental activity whatsoever.
But since you mention medicine, it might as well be said that the medical establishment uses fairly similar tactics to hold on to its own power base, limiting what pharmaceutical chemists can prescribe over the counter despite the fact that more than a few GPs are old dodderers that are well out of touch with modern medicine compared to a well-trained specialist in Boots. And also let's not forget the power they have to marginalize alternative practitioners even in areas where "scientific" medicine has nothing better to offer. The picture is not as black and white as one might think.
"Practicing law without a license" comes from exactly the same stable as "replicating music without a license". They're both empty handwaving, the product of institutions of yesteryear desperately trying not to lose their power base in an environment where it is the individual that has been empowered by technology rather than they.
But you can't run away from the changing environment, you just have to make sure that it doesn't screw you in future. There's one very good general principle you can apply to avoid getting screwed, and that is: "Avoid the Middleman".
The way you can achieve that in this context is reasonably straighforward. Set up your own website with an Internet provider that provides download stats. (You get that for free with typical "shell account" providers anyway.) You're buying a networking service here, as opposed to introducing a middleman into your own line of business as would be the case if you hooked up with MP3.COM.
Then develop your online identity and communicate with your fans through all the usual mechanisms: website promotion, search-engine priming, newsgroups, IRC channels, etc. And create merchandise for your growing fandom to buy online. Note that this has to include more than just plain CDs, because the reality of the new online environment is that payment per copy doesn't work: your fans may like you, but they won't pay for replication that they know they can do themselves for virtually nothing. But merchandising gives you a chance to capitalize on the exposure that your free downloads give you. Offer posters and t-shirts and you're into a different ballgame!
Payment per copy is the old distribution system, developed at a time when only multi-million dollar plants could stamp out recordings. The new environment recognizes that electronic duplication and distribution over the net costs virtually nothing, so demanding payment per copy isn't going to work. People aren't stupid.
If you're a musician, I think you'd be better off creating your own website, developing a recognized online identity for your band, and using a system of patronage by your fans, ie. marketing stuff for them to order online (not just your music in CD form). You'd be your own master too, and that's worth a lot in its own right.
This kind of report doesn't surprise me in the slightest. It was obvious that things were going in the wrong direction with MP3.COM as soon as details of their contractual arrangements emerged, because instead of merely offering a distribution system for bands, they were putting themselves on the same throne and in the same position of strength as the big studios.
The revolutionary thing about Internet distribution of music isn't that there are new institutions to replace the old. It is that there are no cartels nor power brokers at all, so that each band can reach out to its audience on an equal footing, without spending much money, and without signing rights away to anyone.
As has been pointed out, it verges on the trivial nowadays for a band to set up its own website and marketing machinery, and if they don't have the tech ability or desire to do it then there are countless others that will be glad to help for a very small fee.
You don't need MP3.COM guys! Go it alone, and be your own masters.
Slashdot Mirror
The info at that link suggests that the C++ implementation is not available except to developers:
Don't think about installing Whiterose yet, unless you are interrested in developing it. If so mail <agl@linuxpower.org>.
The bit about working against only particular versions of the Java-based node is worrying, as it suggests that non-Java implementations will always be trailing the Java one as some kind of "master reference". There needs to be an implementation-independent Freenet spec available so that development of non-Java versions can proceed without reference to the Java one, otherwise tail-chasing is going to make the job of alternative developers a never-ending and thankless one, subservient to the whims of the Java-based developers.
... by the Bar Soc. That's the only way the message will be learned by those that need to learn it.
The lack of accountability for being dumb is just appalling in the legal profession. All that seems to matter is that you adhere to the standard legal procedures, a triumph of form over content, and as long as you do that then any bollocks you say or do in the application domain is just fine.
"The Letter" refers to Digital Video Disk, whereas it was made clear a million times while DVD was being popularized that DVD stands for Digital Versatile Disk.
Doesn't this squash their first-round application on a technicality? (I bet the law firm made the cockup.)
News is the right forum for this kind of thing. Periodically send the code out in a shell archive to a binaries newsgroup, and the lawyers won't have any fixed point at which to aim their actions.
A good set of facts, thanks.
What you didn't mention though was how the court would view an attempted action where the number of restrained defendents would have to be in the millions to achieve the desired effect. Isn't the law sensible enough to note that, on this basis alone, the action is pointless?
The relevant software has almost certainly already been released as a shell archive in one of the binary newsgroups on Internet news. This offers an interesting little technicality: currently the list of defendents is biased, unfair and discriminatory by virtue of being incomplete by several dozen million names (all those potentially in possession of the software). Quite apart from such failings, the prosecution is utterly misrepresenting the extent and scope of its case; if the true scope were to become clear, the case would almost certainly collapse instantly.
Furthermore, to present a non-discriminatory action, the real list of applicable defendents would have to be read out in full (that's the procedural step that would make a restraining order apply to the people in question). And if the complete list were to be read out in court, it would take years to do so, so this is going nowhere fast.
How hilarious.
The hearing will be at 'the Superior Court of Santa Clara County, State of California, on December 29, 1999, at 8:30 a.m.'
It is impossible for the hearing to go ahead with fair consideration and representation on this date, on account of all the defendents being fully occupied getting ready to prevent the collapse of western civilization through the millennium bug. And no geeks ever get up before midday anyway.
Is it perhaps a law of nature that, when otherwise rational individuals aggregate into corporations, all pretence to sanity and logic disappears and the result is the collective equivalent of a blithering idiot?
We've had so many examples of this happening in the last few days that it seems quite possible.
Or is it merely that corporations work in an environment where lawyers lay the ground rules, and the utter cluelessness of many in the legal profession and amorality of the rest tars everyone in the company with the brush of insanity?
After a zillion years of installing RedHat without a hitch, out comes 6.1 and promptly gives me an X11 fault immediately at the start of an install, on a system that has been running older RedHats happily for ages. To a beginner, that Red Screen of Death ("Change signal timing") would be utterly meaningless, and terminal.
With that kind of "improvement", newcomers are going to think that Linux is difficult to install and promptly go back to M$ in droves. For goodness sake, make the RH installer drop back to text mode automatically if X11 fails!!!!
Why don't you code a domain-aware, learning type assistant hooked into the eval dispatcher? It wouldn't be able to do strict checking a la ML (nor would you want it to), but when fed off a list of heuristics I bet that it could be made to catch a large variety of type-related mistakes that human programmers habitually make.
All programming languages are equally powerful in a Turing sense, since you can implement an interpreter for anything you like within almost any of them, more or less. However, that doesn't mean that they are all equally powerful in practice, because many languages expressly forbid you from doing things that you might wish to do. RMS was referring to the "natural" power of a language when talking about LISP, which could be defined as the set of everything you can do natively within the normal constraints of a language, ie. without creating a nested interpreter and without bypassing the goals of its designers.
LISP is incredibly powerful using that definition, because it is simultaneously an extremely high level language while giving you access to both very low-level data and very high level abstractions, all handled together uniformly at will. And of course, code is just data, adding yet more flexibility. You just can't beat it in the power area.
However, for most people it's the wrong language to use -- horses for courses. While scalpels and atomic bombs are very effective in their respective areas of application, most cutting and demolition uses alternative solutions, and you don't give these nor any other extreme power tool to your kids as toys.
Tucked away behind the scenes though, LISP is the ideal extension language, offering the inherent power that is needed for an unknowable future. Guile will serve us well there.
This is a very good thing that Sun are doing, at least as far as customers are concerned, because it allows people to squeeze much more out of the Sparc than is possible under Solaris.
Three years ago, we grabbed a surplus SparcServer 20, junked Solaris and installed RedHat Linux for Sparc, just for the fun of it. Although we were expecting good things, we were astounded at the magnitude of the improvement: under Linux, most O/S-limited operations ran at about four times their speed under Solaris. Since then, both Sparc Linux and Solaris will have improved considerably I expect, but I bet that there is still an efficiency advantage with Linux, and this ought to translate into older Sun kit being given a new lease of life.
And of course, anything that promotes the use of Sun hardware has to be to the company's advantage.
Ridiculous patents, ludicrous lawsuits, pathetic domain challanges, unhelpful licenses, inappropriate trademark infringement claims, prosecutions for mere linking. The whole scene is getting ridiculous, and lots of different parties are being blamed for this nonsense. But I feel that people are missing the point.
In every single instance, the legal profession is first asked for advice, and subsequently it is the legal profession that implements the action. In each of these cases, they gave the wrong advice and implemented the wrong action. This seems to be happening with ever increasing frequency. Why might this be?
Well, I can think of only two possible explanations. The first one is that lawyers are totally clueless. Now, despite every indication that this is the case, I think it is unlikely, merely because the educational requirements are likely to weed out the total morons. The alternative explanation is that lawyers are totally amoral and self-serving, that they see the Internet as a fantastic opportunity for creating new work for themselves, and that they do so with complete disregard for commonsense despite being intelligent enough to know exactly the nature of what they are doing.
Are there any other possible explanations?
What an idiotic suggestion that religious leaders be asked for advice on this topic. They don't have the foggiest idea about the possibilities of this technology, nor on the impact that it could have on anything, not even on religion, because they are exactly like everyone else, ie. not clairvoyant. At best they'd be guessing, which doesn't give them any kind of privileged say whatsoever.
The only people that have any special platform in this subject area are the domain specialists. The rest of us are just handwaving. We should all have a say of course, but not from any privileged position.
I didn't say it should forbid anything, but only that it should promote as a guideline in its preamble the same commonsense as is already shown by the community, ie. to discourage unnecessary forking.
And in the real world of open-source development, developers cooperate on projects, not fight about how to implement things. They're outstandingly professional about this (despite being largely amateur-based), in thousands of projects around the world. It's almost unheard of that such community groups get undermined by parallel forked developments, thank goodness. But that'd down to people being sensible, not down to the GPL itself promoting cooperative behaviour.
You write: If the new features in the forked version are better than the original, there's nothing preventing the author of the original version from stealing those changes an integrating them back into his version.
You're over-simplifying things. For trivial changes, yes you're right, but for non-trivial ones it's as likely as not to be impossible to integrate the changes back into the original tree. For example, some idiot could reformat the entire package to his preferred style when he grabs it to make changes and then publish "his own improved" version. And even if such pathological modification hasn't happened, why is the onus of back-integration on the original author? His time is better spent on continued development rather than on tracking code forks.
The GPL is generally good, in my estimation, except in the single area of code forking guidelines: namely, it doesn't provide any. At the very least, it should state somewhere that public forking is discouraged when the software is still in active consensual development by the primary author or group.
Currently it's only because of the goodwill and commonsense of the community that we don't have a forking nightmare on our hands. The GPL ought to enshrine that commonsense in its preamble.
You're right about the lawsuit being a useful stick for the RIAA regardless of whether they have any chance of winning in court. However, there is a counterpoint to that argument.
Napster is a corporation that is not only easy to sue but may even be lucrative to sue. It is a sitting duck in corporate waters.
To avoid that particular stick you must either not be a sitting duck or else not swim in coporate waters. If you can avoid both, all the better.
The above metaphor maps directly to a solution that we know well: the RIAA could do nothing against open-sourced napster-type systems distributed through newsgroups and mirrored on thousands of servers across the world. There need be no identifiable people nor companies to sue, no money to make, no injunctions to serve. They would be entirely powerless to do anything about it.
Napster is comparatively vulnerable because its source is fixed, closed, and corporate, but we're already nearing a less vulnerable solution in gnapster, and much better total solutions could easily be devised. Let's get to it.
The article wasn't anti-MP3. It was anti the MP3 sites becoming every bit as bad as the studios that they're trying to replace.
The moral of the story is that we don't need yet another raft of blood-sucking middlemen. Musicians can have their own presence online without needing any of that old nightmare, without signing away any of their profits, and without being told how to arrange their own promotion. All they need to do is show a little business initiative and go it alone.
You're right though that people won't pay for the music itself -- that's the nature of the beast, and you can either moan about it or ride the wave. In practice what this means is merchandising, ie. offering your fans more than just plain pressed CDs of the music: lots of additional material to go with it, and of course the traditional t-shirts, caps and mugs. And that is something that fans definitely are willing to pay for -- it's a multi-billion dollar industry.
It only seems funny to "give away your primary product" and make money on ancillaries because we've been brainwashed into thinking of music as property. It isn't. Music is a shared experience, shared between the composer and musicians and each listener separately and all the fans collectively. It's a real oddball of a phenomenom, and it fits perfectly in the new environment of online freedom. It is very different from a washing machine.
No, that's precisely where the rot sets in, when websites want a cut of the action. That's the problem with MP3.COM. That's the old system of signing your profits away. You don't need it.
Instead, just treat the website as a fixed business expense, just like the coffee and milk. You don't give Nescafe and the milkman a cut of your business, and nor should you give a website owner any. Or perhaps a better analogy is that you don't provide AT&T or BT with a share of your business just because they provide you with a phone line.
Make it so also with websites. And these days, that will be a minimal expense or even free, at least initially when you start with a small web presence.
You write: The problem with this is that a band can have a website all they want, but without marketing, no one's going to know about them. Hell, I have a hard enough time finding music I like as it is.
That's a very good point you make, but it needs closer examination.
For a start, "without marketing" almost seems to lead us back to the bad old mega-studio system, but it doesn't have to: they don't have a monopoly on marketing, and in any event, the mechanisms of marketing are totally different in this new online environment. Secondly, "marketing" to whom -- is it the same ol' kind of audience as before, or is a new audience being formed, one to whom old-style marketing may no longer be quite so relevant? And finally, the whole idea of "market" may be slightly off the mark here, because we're certainly not talking about business as normal.
Well I think your second sentence itself hints at what the main problem is, and therefore at the solution. It's not that "marketing" as such is needed. The problem is that the new audience simply isn't being offered a means by which it can find the online music that it wants. The closest thing we have so far are well-known sites like MP3.COM, but relying on such single points with vested interests just takes us back to the bad old days.
And then there's Napster. Looking beyond the specifics to the wider implications, there is a general solution ready for the making in this area: a distributed, investment-free, unsponsored mechanism for distributing information about music available online.
If that were available, you would know where to find the music you want, and the indies wouldn't need a traditional marketing machine behind them, and new musicians would have the same audience as everyone else.
All we have to do is create such a system, and heck, that's merely programming. In fact, it may already be being built as we speak. And then, bye bye for good to the old blood-sucking marketing collosus, it'll be totally obsolete.
Practicing medicine is, for the most part, not on a par with either of the two things being discussed. Medicine is largely a scientific discipline, whereas law is almost entirely handwaving, and replicating music involves no relevant mental activity whatsoever.
But since you mention medicine, it might as well be said that the medical establishment uses fairly similar tactics to hold on to its own power base, limiting what pharmaceutical chemists can prescribe over the counter despite the fact that more than a few GPs are old dodderers that are well out of touch with modern medicine compared to a well-trained specialist in Boots. And also let's not forget the power they have to marginalize alternative practitioners even in areas where "scientific" medicine has nothing better to offer. The picture is not as black and white as one might think.
Ha!
"Practicing law without a license" comes from exactly the same stable as "replicating music without a license". They're both empty handwaving, the product of institutions of yesteryear desperately trying not to lose their power base in an environment where it is the individual that has been empowered by technology rather than they.
Yes, that does sound bleak.
But you can't run away from the changing environment, you just have to make sure that it doesn't screw you in future. There's one very good general principle you can apply to avoid getting screwed, and that is: "Avoid the Middleman".
The way you can achieve that in this context is reasonably straighforward. Set up your own website with an Internet provider that provides download stats. (You get that for free with typical "shell account" providers anyway.) You're buying a networking service here, as opposed to introducing a middleman into your own line of business as would be the case if you hooked up with MP3.COM.
Then develop your online identity and communicate with your fans through all the usual mechanisms: website promotion, search-engine priming, newsgroups, IRC channels, etc. And create merchandise for your growing fandom to buy online. Note that this has to include more than just plain CDs, because the reality of the new online environment is that payment per copy doesn't work: your fans may like you, but they won't pay for replication that they know they can do themselves for virtually nothing. But merchandising gives you a chance to capitalize on the exposure that your free downloads give you. Offer posters and t-shirts and you're into a different ballgame!
Payment per copy is the old distribution system, developed at a time when only multi-million dollar plants could stamp out recordings. The new environment recognizes that electronic duplication and distribution over the net costs virtually nothing, so demanding payment per copy isn't going to work. People aren't stupid.
If you're a musician, I think you'd be better off creating your own website, developing a recognized online identity for your band, and using a system of patronage by your fans, ie. marketing stuff for them to order online (not just your music in CD form). You'd be your own master too, and that's worth a lot in its own right.
This kind of report doesn't surprise me in the slightest. It was obvious that things were going in the wrong direction with MP3.COM as soon as details of their contractual arrangements emerged, because instead of merely offering a distribution system for bands, they were putting themselves on the same throne and in the same position of strength as the big studios.
The revolutionary thing about Internet distribution of music isn't that there are new institutions to replace the old. It is that there are no cartels nor power brokers at all, so that each band can reach out to its audience on an equal footing, without spending much money, and without signing rights away to anyone.
As has been pointed out, it verges on the trivial nowadays for a band to set up its own website and marketing machinery, and if they don't have the tech ability or desire to do it then there are countless others that will be glad to help for a very small fee.
You don't need MP3.COM guys! Go it alone, and be your own masters.