No, we do not want to encurage the system of "labels" anyway.
First, we need a way to rate artists based on independence from the RIAA, i.e. a web site where you enter the artists name to find out how RIAA free they are. Artists could place little jpgs on their web page's indentifing their level of freedom.
Second, we need a way to find good artist. This can only really be done by mp3 voting sites, ala Kuro5hin for mp3, and/or recomendations from respected DJs. I'd like to see an internet radio program built on IRC which just sent out the URLs of recomended mp3s. Your mp3 player would collect the URLs that the people you like sent out and help you DL the files.
The problem then became that M$ reserved the rights to change the contracts when software got updated and the rights to extend these contracts whenever they felt like it.
IANAL but That should be illegal. I'm pretty shure it would be illegal if you tricked a person into a contract which said "we can change the congract later."
If Joe signs a contract saing "I'm Bill's slave after Bill pays me a billion dollars" then Joe should be able to just take Bill's billion dollars and walk away (it's bill's fault for tring to enslave someone). It's not such a big jump to say that when Bill chnages a contract without Joe's concent then Joe can just walk away, no matter what the previous contract said.
The funny thing about mass searches is that they have an amazingn umber of false positives. We have lots of people who have falsely been convicted based on DNA evidence dispite the fact that the chances for bad DNA evidence are very very high (much higher then the chances for a bad keyword search). The false positives become likely since so many people are searched so frequently.
We really need to pass laws with prohibit any evidence *type* collected from more then 100 suspects from use in a court of law, i.e. If you use any DNA evidence to find the suspects then you may not use any DNA evidence to convict. Simillarly, if you use any email to narow down the search (i.e. reduce the nuber of suspect at a time when the number of suspects exceaded 100) then you may not use any email evidence to convict. I think this would curtail the use and implementation ofthese type of systems.
Copyright laws were originally created to prevent corperations from stealing musicians / authors/etc work without just compensation. This works well in book publiishing where copyrights revert back to the author after the first printing. Unfortunatly, the RIAA labels make musicians selll them the copyright outright. I think the only way that traditional music distribution could be fair to artists would be to make it illegal to transfer a copyright away from the original orner, i.e. the labels would only have the rights to a single printing of an album, then it would be the authors. Unfortunatly, the above legal reform seems impossible considering the RIAA's power in cogress.
Now, if you can not fix the laws legally then you should fix them illegally. Musicians like Courtney Love feal that they would make more money if they fans just donated money to them and ignored the record industry---Fairtunes and Upriser are ting to implement a system which allows exactly this. Ideally, people would stop buying CDs and start giving money to artists directly which would totally screw the RIAA labels, thus allowing the artists to broker more benificial deals with their labels.
I think Ms. Love's strategy is a good one. It might work or it might not work, but it seems to be the only real option available to today musicians.. when your getting fucked over bad enough by the establisment then it's time to set fire to the establishment and hope the new order is more to your liking.
BTW> Napster is very very bad since it wants to replace the RIAA's strangle hold on musicians by monopolising the distribution of online music, so we should all try to get people to use diffrent file sharing systems.
Yes, Napster should win the trial and we should be happy about this, but we should want them to loose the injunction. Why? Napster is a greedy corporate entity, so we want their users to switch to non-corperate file sharing systems. This would happen if Napster was shutdown for 6-12 months, but finally won their case. Actually, we only want them to win their case to make it more difficult for the RIAA to attack Gnutella and Freenet.
Seriously, the consumer (and artists) will only win if the RIAA and Napster kill each other. The logical way for this to happen would be for the RIAA to get an injunction which lasts long enough to make Napster a minor player in the online music world, but for Napster to ultimatly win the court case.
We need to adjust out political suystem so that money influenced the distribution of ideas less.
We should set up land mines for lobbiests who send politicians and judges to confrences where they expouse an interpretation of the law which favors only the lobbiests clients. Specifically, we should reequire the government to support independent tracking of how judges and politicians spend their time AND allow orginisation which feal they have been wronged to sue for resources to counter the wrong, i.e. MPAA spends $10 million brain washing judges would mean the government must give the FSF and other anti-IP groups $10 million to counter the MPAA's arguments. This system would allow everyone who was not insane to speak their mind and be heard by the people who matter.
We should also adjust the laws to help special interest groups which use votes and phone calls instead of money (like the EFF, ACLU, ADL, AFL-CIO, NRA, Greanpeace, Log Cabin Republicans, etc.). We could start doing this by allowing orginisation which wish to challeng something to sue the government for funding, i.e. the ACLU/NRA/GReanpeace has somehting they want to take on in court. The just need to convince a judge that it's worth taking it on and they wilkl get some funding (or at least assistance from federal agencies).
Actually, they should post a quickies like story every couple weeks to list the new startups and idea for online file sharing. This article had two totally unrelated stories (RomNet and Upriser) which is a good start, but thery are not covering all the possible stories, like say Fairtunes.com. The only simple way to cover all these unrelated stories would be with something like quickies since these stories are really not big enough for a whole article.
Note: Fairtunes.com is a way to send money to musicians, i.e. Upriser == Fairtunes + Napster.
I'd really love to see the RIAA get a PR smack down for attacking the federal disabilities act, but I think they oftin tollerate bootlegs with small distribution, so I would not expect to see them try to stop this bootleging.
Also, I would not expect Slashdot to post this story unless the RIAA did something. It's not really Slashdt's job to keep up with the latest ways of making concert bootlegs.
The thing I don't understand is why Slashdot ran that story about Mojo, but did not run a story about Fairtunes. Fairtunes and it's cousins have much more potential for really creating the tipping based system of music distribution we all want, but Slashdot posts a story about a system which probable pays off the RIAA.
if you think of the artists as residing in a stable co-evolved system with paying fans, and free music fans as the hardy weed species that chokes out the source of the artist's "food" the analogy might be more complete
Actually, popular music has worked on the Streat Preformer Protocol for most of human existance. Now those musicians didn't make much money, but almost none else made much money either, so that's not a valid comparison.
Formal art music also used the SPP. It was just the few rich people and the church which were donating lots of money instead of lots of poor people donating a little bit of money.
Anywho, there is plenty of historical evidence for the streat preformer protocol. The only remaining qustion is will the anonyimity of the internet kill the "tipping culture." The internet is still too young to really predict the effects of this anonymousness, but the body of music fans which will not contribute to their artists deserves to have it's artists defect to other types of music (or just quit).
BTW> Attaching advertising to mp3s would not be a bad thing if the advertising is attached to the mp3 comment (say an embedded web page) and not to the audio.
This is a neat idea, unfortunately it does not make taking Mp3s legal. You are still breaking the law if you take an mp3 from napster, whether or not you pay the artist. The artist does not own the copyright on the song, the record company does. As a result, the record company is allowed to have whatever stranglehold they want on the distribution of those songs.
Who cares about breaking this stupid law. The point is not to avoid breaking the law. The point is to change the system (and maybe the law). If good unsigned artists make as much from donations as signed artists then artistx will not sign label contracts and not give up the copyright to their works. Now, I'd really like to see fairtunes tell you the artists opinion about your coping their music, so people would not pay the people like Metallica and Dr. Dre who support the current oppresive sytem.
We do not need more internet labels like mp3.com or more internet music distribution startups like Napster. All these companies are built arround the concept of "screw the artists" just like the current labels. We need non-profit orginisations to give artists buisness advice so they can make it without the RIAA, the labels, the radio stations, Mp3.com, or Napster.
The record companies "promotion" money is spent on bribery and one-hit wonder star manufacturing. I think it's pretty clear that this is a waist of resources.
The record companies "production" money is also a big waist. Independent production become easyer as better and cheaper home studio equipment is released. We must be nearing the point where a smart artists could do a better job with a *good* home studio which they built themselves. I mean execptional people like Trent Reznor were doing this a long time ago, but the equpment is much more available now.
I agree that Napster and Mp3.com are not good ways to discover new bands, but ways to discover new bands will evolve once more fans and bands start using the internet.
Example: If you wanted to promote artists you could set up a web page which offered a new song/mix to download every day. Artists would love the promotional exposure (once you had a lot of daily hits), so you would have a reasonable number of good unsigned people to make these songs. People would check out your seb page to lissen to todays act just like they check out an online comic strip every day.
Also, if your no main stream pop then you stand no chance of getting air time on a major radio station regardless of what label signed you, so you may as well stick to giving the college radio station DJs free copies of your songs. This type of promotion could be done with mp3s just as well with CDs.
Example: set up usenet newsgroups for diffrent types of music. Artists could post high quality mp3s of their songs and college radio DJs could read the newsgroups for mp3s they might want to air. This pretty much removes the need for a label to send copies of the CD to various DJs. Now, the people who read the news group have a lot of shit to throw away, but that's not a really big deal for a serious DJ. Plus, people with some authority would post messages saing "that was really good." Instant meritocrasy.
The thing aoubt production of music (#2) is that technoloical advances make it easy/cheap, i.e. if more people buying home studios then home studios become cheaper. Also, development of artist (#1) should really be the job of the artist anywho since the record companies do should a crappy job (ala Britney Spears). Anyway, we can now see that #1 and #2 should be done by the artist while #3 can be done by the fans and the artist.
Finally, copyrights were created to force record companies to compensate artists, but fans supporting artists is a non-issue.. let me repeat that "fans supporting artists is a non-issue." Why? It's pretty fucking simple, no artists == no music, so the fans of Joe Artists will need to pay Joe or Joe will get a day job and the fans will not get much new stuff by Joe. Now, Joe needs to be a savy buisness man to make shure that it's easy for his fans to pay him, but that's not really that difficult.
This is more like an explosion of a very hardy species (clever free music downloaders) which drives a weaker species (artists) to extinction.
This is a stupid analogy since the free music downloaders have no music without the artists.
The solution to the whole thing is pretty fucking simple: Artists release music for free and put up web pages which say "give us money if you like our music." the fans can chose to pay or not to pay, but the fans that don't pay will have no influence on which artists produce a lot of music, i.e. if you don't give the artist you like some money so that he/she can quit their day job then you will see very little music out of that artists. It's a pretty fucking simple system, so the fans wil eventually figure out that supporting the artists they like is worth it.
No, the open source project *could* probable do a better job at writing Windows 98 then Microsoft did.. and the open source project *could* do it faster then Microsoft did too. Remember, that have an example to base everything upon.
The real question is why would you care to write such a thing. It's not really useful from a geek point of view since Windows 98 is not really useful from a geek point of view. It's not an effecent way to get a video game system since Wine could just be ixed up to make games run better. Finally, your duplicating one of the worst operating systems sold today. If you want to make a GPL version of a commercial operating system then copy something useful like BeOS.
Still, I suppose someone will enjoy duplicating Windows 98. I wish them luck, but I just hope they don't distract too many developers from importent projects like Wine.
It would be cool to see the Irish, Welsh, Scottish, etc. start requiring email clients to use PGP and requiring systems to use IPsec. Unfortunatly, I don't see this happening.
It's a shame the people who funded the IRA don't know how importent this stuff is. They could fund a perfectly legal little effort to make shure that no email traveling between Irishmen went unencrypted.
Yes, it would be nice to reuire use to maintain a copyrightm but one must ask "what constitutes use."
Example: If I own Startrek: TNG, but I want it to die so people will watch Voyager, then I can offer to sell video tapes of the show but prohibit TV or internet distribution.
The solution is to say "You loose your copyright with respect to a specific media if you do not distribute it under that media for (say) 4 years."
Yes, some copyright laws are a good thing. The kind of copyright laws which shutdown companies for distributing a work without the artists permission. This is why copyright laws were created. These laws were not created to alow the companies to tel fans what they can do with copies of the music.
I suspect that Thoreau would agree that individuals are a totally diffrent story. Individuals should be able to do what they damn well please under "fair use."
Actually, I would carry this individual vs. company distinction so far as to prevent artists which use a lot of samples from incorperating or selling their work to a label, i.e. the label of their company could be sued, but the artist could not be sued.
This may sound like a strange interpretation of the law, but it's the interpretation which will protect atists and fan, i.e. the importent people.
Anywho, the current laws a very bad, so we should break them without directly doing physical harm to another person (i.e. copying their shit is fine).. I think it's pretty safe to say Thoreau would agree with that statment.
BTW> Americans realy do not put enough force behind their breaking of the laws. Thoreau really accomplished things during his day by breaking the law. It would be nice to see more Thoreau type activism today, i.e. a million people giving away pot in D.C. once a year to protest the War on Drugs, people writing easy to use crypto to fuck up the NSA, people writing manefestos about how it's immoral to not pirate all your music, etc.
I agree Napster must die for free music distribution to reamain free. Remember, Napster could start doing all sorts of nasty things to make money, like placing versions of the songs which include advertising first.
I do not know how long they will be down, but unfortunatly people would not really notice if they are only down for a short period of time and Napster wil come back with just as many users.
We need to maximize the harm done to Napster during this period. College students need to start campus orginiations to help people set up IRC, OpenNAP, napigator, Gnutella, FreeNet, etc. This is an opertunity to move free music distributin out from Napster's shadow that we should not miss.
Fall symester will be starting soon (September here at Rutgers). It would be good to have people posting banners arround campus between now and the end of the first month of school which instructed people in setting up napster alternatives. If we can divert the returning college students then we stand a real chance of preventing Napster from killing free music distribution by selling out to the RIAA.
In my opinion, the best approach is that used by Valve (Half Life, Team Fortress Classic)... support scripting, and when you have an update later, take the best features that people have 'added' via scripting and make them standard to the game. That way avid scriptwriters will have a significant, but only temporary advantage over that of the average player.
Yes, this is a very good thing, but you should also force the client to upload all the scripts to it's opponent. This means that someone who is vaguely competent at programming can take ideas from the people who beat them.
Also, I really hate those little timing exploits which quake scripts can exploit. Unfortunatly, game writers mayu be tempted to leave these "bugs" as some sort of reward for the person who waist a large amount of time mastering the timing of a timing "bug." Scripts will force them to make it a normal part of the game or remove the timing exploit.
BTW> Why should players who invest a significant amount of time outside the game engine not be rewarded more then players who jyust invest time inside the game engine? I agree that it changes that nature of the game, but I think it changes it in a good way.. it makes people think more then react.
The interesting thing is that sometimes "cheating" is the solution to the bigger problem of "kill the monster get a treat" which creates the "cheating."
A MUD which gives you levels for cheating will just have people write bots to raise their characters level. A RTS game which requires lots of mindless clicking for building troops and commanding troops will be hacked to automate these tasks.
These are *good* cheats! They remove a stupid unnessicary part of the game and allow the player to play the game they really want to play like role-playing with higher level characters and exploring dangerous lands in the MUD or thinging about the actual strategy in the RTS game.
Anywho, cheating is not always the problem.. sometimes it's the solution.
I suppose the real long term solution to cheating is adding a scripting langauge to the game to make writing "reasonable" cheats (like an auto produce peon button) easy but make writing the "unreasonable" cheats (like removing the fog of war) harder (ala the artice).
But consider what reflex augmentation could do in Warcraft 2, for example. One could write a script that caused the "mouse" to "click" on your Town Hall and Barracks, automatically creating peons and ogres at a set rate, while you controlled everything else.
Hos is this a bad thing? If there are nice abstract control features which can be added to a strategy game like Warcraft/Starcraft then it's crappy game design to not include them in the first place!
Seriously, aim-bot style "cheats" in RTS games like Starcraft are not cheats. They are improvments to the user interface. It's the game designers fault for expecting people to keep pushing the stupid create peon button like some kind of lab rat.
Now, it's true that one player gets the improved user interface and another player dose not, but that's easy to fix. Add a scripting langauge to your RTS game, but make the game send your scripts to everyone else who you play against. These people can paw through your scripts and pick out the part's they think they can use.
Anywho, my point is that a RTS game should not be based on mindless clicking. It should be based on strategy. It's not cheating to hire someone to click the mouse for you while you look over their sholder and tell them what to do, so why should it be cheating for the game to do the stupid stuff for you.
Actually, my roomate 2 years ago and I were pretty bad ass at sharing the effort of remembering to do all the stupid shit. One of us would play while the other would remind him to do the stupid stuff when it needed doing and help him to think though the biger strategic descisions. I've always considered the need for this kind of double teaming to be evidence of a poorly built game.
Yes, why people create things like music, OSS, science, art, mathematics, and novels is VERY complex. I just laugh at these people like ESR who claim to have it all figured out for OSS.
Online art and music need a lot of people to strat tring a variety of things including:
1) I'm writing one song per month, If people donate money I'll work at my day job less and make more songs.
2) Uploading versions of the song containing advertising to all the pirate mp3 sites, but distributing clean versions for free from the artists web site (which uses banner ads).
3) uploading mp3s to all the pirate sites which ask people to buy a CD of the same thing.
etc.
Anywho, It's a time for people to do what they enjoy and explore the finantial options surrounding their activities.. the operative words here being enjoy and explore.. not financial.
You really should encrypt before using steanography since you want the data your hiding to look like random noise *before* you hide it (the steanography program will *not* do this for you unless it asks for a password). Also, you should research the encryption program to verify that it's output looks like random noise.
You do not want the cops to find you by scanning for the words PGP START in the low order byte of image files.
If you need ot keep things on you drive hidden use StegFS. It provides plausable deniablility for the things you keep on the drive, i.e. the cop show up, take you computer, force you to give them the password, you give them a pass word, they find some mildly incriminating stuff, they let you go with a wrist slap. There is no way the could prove that you had more incriminating stuff on the drive sine you have given them a password and they can not prove there are more passwords.
Re:Why they /should/ be used, and more than one, t
on
MAPS vs. ORBS
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Doubling the amount of email would not kill the internet. It would not influence the total bandwidth at all.. just think about how much banwidth is used for pictures vs. email.. and remember that these 2nd emails are small. Now doubling the ammount of email might force a few ISPs to upgrade their servers next week instead of next year, but this is not much money.
Well it sounds to me like we don't need ORBS anyway. We should just add a feature to sendmail to test every system from which it recieves mail and kill/bounce the message if the system is an open relay. This test dose not really need much bandwidth.
Shure, it would crash some people's boxes, but who cares. It would only crash their boxes when they sent mail to someone running this modified sendmail. They can fucking figure it out and DL the patch.
Plus, there would be no centralized blacklist. It would just be a modification which every admin has a choice of installing.
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No, we do not want to encurage the system of "labels" anyway.
First, we need a way to rate artists based on independence from the RIAA, i.e. a web site where you enter the artists name to find out how RIAA free they are. Artists could place little jpgs on their web page's indentifing their level of freedom.
Second, we need a way to find good artist. This can only really be done by mp3 voting sites, ala Kuro5hin for mp3, and/or recomendations from respected DJs. I'd like to see an internet radio program built on IRC which just sent out the URLs of recomended mp3s. Your mp3 player would collect the URLs that the people you like sent out and help you DL the files.
The problem then became that M$ reserved the rights to change the contracts when software got updated and the rights to extend these contracts whenever they felt like it.
IANAL but That should be illegal. I'm pretty shure it would be illegal if you tricked a person into a contract which said "we can change the congract later."
If Joe signs a contract saing "I'm Bill's slave after Bill pays me a billion dollars" then Joe should be able to just take Bill's billion dollars and walk away (it's bill's fault for tring to enslave someone). It's not such a big jump to say that when Bill chnages a contract without Joe's concent then Joe can just walk away, no matter what the previous contract said.
The funny thing about mass searches is that they have an amazingn umber of false positives. We have lots of people who have falsely been convicted based on DNA evidence dispite the fact that the chances for bad DNA evidence are very very high (much higher then the chances for a bad keyword search). The false positives become likely since so many people are searched so frequently.
We really need to pass laws with prohibit any evidence *type* collected from more then 100 suspects from use in a court of law, i.e. If you use any DNA evidence to find the suspects then you may not use any DNA evidence to convict. Simillarly, if you use any email to narow down the search (i.e. reduce the nuber of suspect at a time when the number of suspects exceaded 100) then you may not use any email evidence to convict. I think this would curtail the use and implementation ofthese type of systems.
Copyright laws were originally created to prevent corperations from stealing musicians / authors /etc work without just compensation. This works well in book publiishing where copyrights revert back to the author after the first printing. Unfortunatly, the RIAA labels make musicians selll them the copyright outright. I think the only way that traditional music distribution could be fair to artists would be to make it illegal to transfer a copyright away from the original orner, i.e. the labels would only have the rights to a single printing of an album, then it would be the authors. Unfortunatly, the above legal reform seems impossible considering the RIAA's power in cogress.
Now, if you can not fix the laws legally then you should fix them illegally. Musicians like Courtney Love feal that they would make more money if they fans just donated money to them and ignored the record industry---Fairtunes and Upriser are ting to implement a system which allows exactly this. Ideally, people would stop buying CDs and start giving money to artists directly which would totally screw the RIAA labels, thus allowing the artists to broker more benificial deals with their labels.
I think Ms. Love's strategy is a good one. It might work or it might not work, but it seems to be the only real option available to today musicians.. when your getting fucked over bad enough by the establisment then it's time to set fire to the establishment and hope the new order is more to your liking.
BTW> Napster is very very bad since it wants to replace the RIAA's strangle hold on musicians by monopolising the distribution of online music, so we should all try to get people to use diffrent file sharing systems.
Yes, Napster should win the trial and we should be happy about this, but we should want them to loose the injunction. Why? Napster is a greedy corporate entity, so we want their users to switch to non-corperate file sharing systems. This would happen if Napster was shutdown for 6-12 months, but finally won their case. Actually, we only want them to win their case to make it more difficult for the RIAA to attack Gnutella and Freenet.
Seriously, the consumer (and artists) will only win if the RIAA and Napster kill each other. The logical way for this to happen would be for the RIAA to get an injunction which lasts long enough to make Napster a minor player in the online music world, but for Napster to ultimatly win the court case.
We need to adjust out political suystem so that money influenced the distribution of ideas less.
We should set up land mines for lobbiests who send politicians and judges to confrences where they expouse an interpretation of the law which favors only the lobbiests clients. Specifically, we should reequire the government to support independent tracking of how judges and politicians spend their time AND allow orginisation which feal they have been wronged to sue for resources to counter the wrong, i.e. MPAA spends $10 million brain washing judges would mean the government must give the FSF and other anti-IP groups $10 million to counter the MPAA's arguments. This system would allow everyone who was not insane to speak their mind and be heard by the people who matter.
We should also adjust the laws to help special interest groups which use votes and phone calls instead of money (like the EFF, ACLU, ADL, AFL-CIO, NRA, Greanpeace, Log Cabin Republicans, etc.). We could start doing this by allowing orginisation which wish to challeng something to sue the government for funding, i.e. the ACLU/NRA/GReanpeace has somehting they want to take on in court. The just need to convince a judge that it's worth taking it on and they wilkl get some funding (or at least assistance from federal agencies).
Actually, they should post a quickies like story every couple weeks to list the new startups and idea for online file sharing. This article had two totally unrelated stories (RomNet and Upriser) which is a good start, but thery are not covering all the possible stories, like say Fairtunes.com. The only simple way to cover all these unrelated stories would be with something like quickies since these stories are really not big enough for a whole article.
Note: Fairtunes.com is a way to send money to musicians, i.e. Upriser == Fairtunes + Napster.
Hey, that's a pretty coll way to make a bootleg.
I'd really love to see the RIAA get a PR smack down for attacking the federal disabilities act, but I think they oftin tollerate bootlegs with small distribution, so I would not expect to see them try to stop this bootleging.
Also, I would not expect Slashdot to post this story unless the RIAA did something. It's not really Slashdt's job to keep up with the latest ways of making concert bootlegs.
The thing I don't understand is why Slashdot ran that story about Mojo, but did not run a story about Fairtunes. Fairtunes and it's cousins have much more potential for really creating the tipping based system of music distribution we all want, but Slashdot posts a story about a system which probable pays off the RIAA.
if you think of the artists as residing in a stable co-evolved system with paying fans, and free music fans as the hardy weed species that chokes out the source of the artist's "food" the analogy might be more complete
Actually, popular music has worked on the Streat Preformer Protocol for most of human existance. Now those musicians didn't make much money, but almost none else made much money either, so that's not a valid comparison.
Formal art music also used the SPP. It was just the few rich people and the church which were donating lots of money instead of lots of poor people donating a little bit of money.
Anywho, there is plenty of historical evidence for the streat preformer protocol. The only remaining qustion is will the anonyimity of the internet kill the "tipping culture." The internet is still too young to really predict the effects of this anonymousness, but the body of music fans which will not contribute to their artists deserves to have it's artists defect to other types of music (or just quit).
BTW> Attaching advertising to mp3s would not be a bad thing if the advertising is attached to the mp3 comment (say an embedded web page) and not to the audio.
This is a neat idea, unfortunately it does not make taking Mp3s legal. You are still breaking the law if you take an mp3 from napster, whether or not you pay the artist. The artist does not own the copyright on the song, the record company does. As a result, the record company is allowed to have whatever stranglehold they want on the distribution of those songs.
Who cares about breaking this stupid law. The point is not to avoid breaking the law. The point is to change the system (and maybe the law). If good unsigned artists make as much from donations as signed artists then artistx will not sign label contracts and not give up the copyright to their works. Now, I'd really like to see fairtunes tell you the artists opinion about your coping their music, so people would not pay the people like Metallica and Dr. Dre who support the current oppresive sytem.
We do not need more internet labels like mp3.com or more internet music distribution startups like Napster. All these companies are built arround the concept of "screw the artists" just like the current labels. We need non-profit orginisations to give artists buisness advice so they can make it without the RIAA, the labels, the radio stations, Mp3.com, or Napster.
The record companies "promotion" money is spent on bribery and one-hit wonder star manufacturing. I think it's pretty clear that this is a waist of resources.
The record companies "production" money is also a big waist. Independent production become easyer as better and cheaper home studio equipment is released. We must be nearing the point where a smart artists could do a better job with a *good* home studio which they built themselves. I mean execptional people like Trent Reznor were doing this a long time ago, but the equpment is much more available now.
I agree that Napster and Mp3.com are not good ways to discover new bands, but ways to discover new bands will evolve once more fans and bands start using the internet.
Example: If you wanted to promote artists you could set up a web page which offered a new song/mix to download every day. Artists would love the promotional exposure (once you had a lot of daily hits), so you would have a reasonable number of good unsigned people to make these songs. People would check out your seb page to lissen to todays act just like they check out an online comic strip every day.
Also, if your no main stream pop then you stand no chance of getting air time on a major radio station regardless of what label signed you, so you may as well stick to giving the college radio station DJs free copies of your songs. This type of promotion could be done with mp3s just as well with CDs.
Example: set up usenet newsgroups for diffrent types of music. Artists could post high quality mp3s of their songs and college radio DJs could read the newsgroups for mp3s they might want to air. This pretty much removes the need for a label to send copies of the CD to various DJs. Now, the people who read the news group have a lot of shit to throw away, but that's not a really big deal for a serious DJ. Plus, people with some authority would post messages saing "that was really good." Instant meritocrasy.
The thing aoubt production of music (#2) is that technoloical advances make it easy/cheap, i.e. if more people buying home studios then home studios become cheaper. Also, development of artist (#1) should really be the job of the artist anywho since the record companies do should a crappy job (ala Britney Spears). Anyway, we can now see that #1 and #2 should be done by the artist while #3 can be done by the fans and the artist.
Finally, copyrights were created to force record companies to compensate artists, but fans supporting artists is a non-issue.. let me repeat that "fans supporting artists is a non-issue." Why? It's pretty fucking simple, no artists == no music, so the fans of Joe Artists will need to pay Joe or Joe will get a day job and the fans will not get much new stuff by Joe. Now, Joe needs to be a savy buisness man to make shure that it's easy for his fans to pay him, but that's not really that difficult.
This is more like an explosion of a very hardy species (clever free music downloaders) which drives a weaker species (artists) to extinction.
This is a stupid analogy since the free music downloaders have no music without the artists.
The solution to the whole thing is pretty fucking simple: Artists release music for free and put up web pages which say "give us money if you like our music." the fans can chose to pay or not to pay, but the fans that don't pay will have no influence on which artists produce a lot of music, i.e. if you don't give the artist you like some money so that he/she can quit their day job then you will see very little music out of that artists. It's a pretty fucking simple system, so the fans wil eventually figure out that supporting the artists they like is worth it.
No, the open source project *could* probable do a better job at writing Windows 98 then Microsoft did.. and the open source project *could* do it faster then Microsoft did too. Remember, that have an example to base everything upon.
The real question is why would you care to write such a thing. It's not really useful from a geek point of view since Windows 98 is not really useful from a geek point of view. It's not an effecent way to get a video game system since Wine could just be ixed up to make games run better. Finally, your duplicating one of the worst operating systems sold today. If you want to make a GPL version of a commercial operating system then copy something useful like BeOS.
Still, I suppose someone will enjoy duplicating Windows 98. I wish them luck, but I just hope they don't distract too many developers from importent projects like Wine.
It would be cool to see the Irish, Welsh, Scottish, etc. start requiring email clients to use PGP and requiring systems to use IPsec. Unfortunatly, I don't see this happening.
It's a shame the people who funded the IRA don't know how importent this stuff is. They could fund a perfectly legal little effort to make shure that no email traveling between Irishmen went unencrypted.
Yes, it would be nice to reuire use to maintain a copyrightm but one must ask "what constitutes use."
Example: If I own Startrek: TNG, but I want it to die so people will watch Voyager, then I can offer to sell video tapes of the show but prohibit TV or internet distribution.
The solution is to say "You loose your copyright with respect to a specific media if you do not distribute it under that media for (say) 4 years."
Yes, some copyright laws are a good thing. The kind of copyright laws which shutdown companies for distributing a work without the artists permission. This is why copyright laws were created. These laws were not created to alow the companies to tel fans what they can do with copies of the music.
I suspect that Thoreau would agree that individuals are a totally diffrent story. Individuals should be able to do what they damn well please under "fair use."
Actually, I would carry this individual vs. company distinction so far as to prevent artists which use a lot of samples from incorperating or selling their work to a label, i.e. the label of their company could be sued, but the artist could not be sued.
This may sound like a strange interpretation of the law, but it's the interpretation which will protect atists and fan, i.e. the importent people.
Anywho, the current laws a very bad, so we should break them without directly doing physical harm to another person (i.e. copying their shit is fine).. I think it's pretty safe to say Thoreau would agree with that statment.
BTW> Americans realy do not put enough force behind their breaking of the laws. Thoreau really accomplished things during his day by breaking the law. It would be nice to see more Thoreau type activism today, i.e. a million people giving away pot in D.C. once a year to protest the War on Drugs, people writing easy to use crypto to fuck up the NSA, people writing manefestos about how it's immoral to not pirate all your music, etc.
I agree Napster must die for free music distribution to reamain free. Remember, Napster could start doing all sorts of nasty things to make money, like placing versions of the songs which include advertising first.
I do not know how long they will be down, but unfortunatly people would not really notice if they are only down for a short period of time and Napster wil come back with just as many users.
We need to maximize the harm done to Napster during this period. College students need to start campus orginiations to help people set up IRC, OpenNAP, napigator, Gnutella, FreeNet, etc. This is an opertunity to move free music distributin out from Napster's shadow that we should not miss.
Fall symester will be starting soon (September here at Rutgers). It would be good to have people posting banners arround campus between now and the end of the first month of school which instructed people in setting up napster alternatives. If we can divert the returning college students then we stand a real chance of preventing Napster from killing free music distribution by selling out to the RIAA.
In my opinion, the best approach is that used by Valve (Half Life, Team Fortress Classic)... support scripting, and when you have an update later, take the best features that people have 'added' via scripting and make them standard to the game. That way avid scriptwriters will have a significant, but only temporary advantage over that of the average player.
Yes, this is a very good thing, but you should also force the client to upload all the scripts to it's opponent. This means that someone who is vaguely competent at programming can take ideas from the people who beat them.
Also, I really hate those little timing exploits which quake scripts can exploit. Unfortunatly, game writers mayu be tempted to leave these "bugs" as some sort of reward for the person who waist a large amount of time mastering the timing of a timing "bug." Scripts will force them to make it a normal part of the game or remove the timing exploit.
BTW> Why should players who invest a significant amount of time outside the game engine not be rewarded more then players who jyust invest time inside the game engine? I agree that it changes that nature of the game, but I think it changes it in a good way.. it makes people think more then react.
This is the most intelegent responce I have seen.
The interesting thing is that sometimes "cheating" is the solution to the bigger problem of "kill the monster get a treat" which creates the "cheating."
A MUD which gives you levels for cheating will just have people write bots to raise their characters level. A RTS game which requires lots of mindless clicking for building troops and commanding troops will be hacked to automate these tasks.
These are *good* cheats! They remove a stupid unnessicary part of the game and allow the player to play the game they really want to play like role-playing with higher level characters and exploring dangerous lands in the MUD or thinging about the actual strategy in the RTS game.
Anywho, cheating is not always the problem.. sometimes it's the solution.
I suppose the real long term solution to cheating is adding a scripting langauge to the game to make writing "reasonable" cheats (like an auto produce peon button) easy but make writing the "unreasonable" cheats (like removing the fog of war) harder (ala the artice).
But consider what reflex augmentation could do in Warcraft 2, for example. One could write a script that caused the "mouse" to "click" on your Town Hall and Barracks, automatically creating peons and ogres at a set rate, while you controlled everything else.
Hos is this a bad thing? If there are nice abstract control features which can be added to a strategy game like Warcraft/Starcraft then it's crappy game design to not include them in the first place!
Seriously, aim-bot style "cheats" in RTS games like Starcraft are not cheats. They are improvments to the user interface. It's the game designers fault for expecting people to keep pushing the stupid create peon button like some kind of lab rat.
Now, it's true that one player gets the improved user interface and another player dose not, but that's easy to fix. Add a scripting langauge to your RTS game, but make the game send your scripts to everyone else who you play against. These people can paw through your scripts and pick out the part's they think they can use.
Anywho, my point is that a RTS game should not be based on mindless clicking. It should be based on strategy. It's not cheating to hire someone to click the mouse for you while you look over their sholder and tell them what to do, so why should it be cheating for the game to do the stupid stuff for you.
Actually, my roomate 2 years ago and I were pretty bad ass at sharing the effort of remembering to do all the stupid shit. One of us would play while the other would remind him to do the stupid stuff when it needed doing and help him to think though the biger strategic descisions. I've always considered the need for this kind of double teaming to be evidence of a poorly built game.
Yes, why people create things like music, OSS, science, art, mathematics, and novels is VERY complex. I just laugh at these people like ESR who claim to have it all figured out for OSS.
Online art and music need a lot of people to strat tring a variety of things including:
1) I'm writing one song per month, If people donate money I'll work at my day job less and make more songs.
2) Uploading versions of the song containing advertising to all the pirate mp3 sites, but distributing clean versions for free from the artists web site (which uses banner ads).
3) uploading mp3s to all the pirate sites which ask people to buy a CD of the same thing.
etc.
Anywho, It's a time for people to do what they enjoy and explore the finantial options surrounding their activities.. the operative words here being enjoy and explore.. not financial.
You really should encrypt before using steanography since you want the data your hiding to look like random noise *before* you hide it (the steanography program will *not* do this for you unless it asks for a password). Also, you should research the encryption program to verify that it's output looks like random noise.
You do not want the cops to find you by scanning for the words PGP START in the low order byte of image files.
If you need ot keep things on you drive hidden use StegFS. It provides plausable deniablility for the things you keep on the drive, i.e. the cop show up, take you computer, force you to give them the password, you give them a pass word, they find some mildly incriminating stuff, they let you go with a wrist slap. There is no way the could prove that you had more incriminating stuff on the drive sine you have given them a password and they can not prove there are more passwords.
Doubling the amount of email would not kill the internet. It would not influence the total bandwidth at all.. just think about how much banwidth is used for pictures vs. email.. and remember that these 2nd emails are small. Now doubling the ammount of email might force a few ISPs to upgrade their servers next week instead of next year, but this is not much money.
Well it sounds to me like we don't need ORBS anyway. We should just add a feature to sendmail to test every system from which it recieves mail and kill/bounce the message if the system is an open relay. This test dose not really need much bandwidth.
Shure, it would crash some people's boxes, but who cares. It would only crash their boxes when they sent mail to someone running this modified sendmail. They can fucking figure it out and DL the patch.
Plus, there would be no centralized blacklist. It would just be a modification which every admin has a choice of installing.