It is within your power to put a stop to this nonsense. But you have to act now.
In
Change the Law I point out that while the Constitution allows for Congress to enact copyright laws, it doesn't actually require it to do so. Copyright could be repealed tomorrow if we could get enough votes in Congress to do so.
If you don't think this could happen, consider that there are more Americans sharing files via peer-to-peer networks than voted for George Bush in 2000.
In my article I detail a number of steps you can take to bring about much needed copyright reform. My suggestions are that you:
If you feel as I do that more people need to read my article, you can help by linking to it from your website, weblog, or from other message boards.
If you're a US citizen and 18 years of age or over, you can vote in November. But to do that, you must be registered to vote in your state. The voter registration deadline for most states is just a few days away, October 2nd for most states. So register today!
Rock the Vote can help you with registration.
If you're a US citizen residing in a foreign country like me (I live in Canada), you can register to vote with the form you can obtain from the Federal Voting Assistance Program. You can register to vote in the last state you resided in in the US. But again, your registration must be received by your state by the deadline, so either express your application, or fax it, if a fax number is available.
(If you've never lived in the US, but one of your parents was a US citizen, then you're a US citizen too and you can register in the last state your parent resided in.)
If you want to make a campaign donation, a good choice would be Representative Rick Boucher. Rick Boucher has worked tirelessly for copyright reform, as you can see from his article Time to rewrite the DMCA.
My mom and I had tickets to the San Francisco Ballet the night the SF 49ers won the Super Bowl.
As we headed out of the Bay Area Rapid Transit Station, a young man pleaded with us not to leave the station. "They're breaking heads out there," he said.
My intrepid mother tightened her scarf and out onto the street we went. Near the station were a large group of police in riot gear (helmets, shields, sticks, etc.) but the crowds had largely dispersed by then.
We made it to the door of the opera house where we found a sign announcing the ballet's cancellation due to the riot, and how we could get tickets for a different date.
Happily, we got better seats when we came back, right up front. Romeo and Juliet. Exquisite.
Back when I was a UC Santa Cruz student, people used to organize food runs on the message board on the open access student timesharing computer, a PDP-11 called "ucscb", that ran BSD. You know, with adm-3a terminals and all.
Yes, I'm that old. This was around 1986 or so.
Anyway, one night there was a food run declared for midnight at the Lyons restaurant in Capitola. One hundred and ten students descended all at once on the otherwise empty restaurant, and all ordered coffee, some ice cream, and at the end asked for separate checks, each of which ranged from maybe one to five dollars.
There were only a couple employees on staff when we arrived. It took a long time to get served because they had to call off-duty employees on the phone, waking them out of bed to come work for the hour or two we were there.
As we prepared to depart, the restaurant manager sternly said "Don't ever do that again".
"A weblog for Liberals who are FED UP with Bush and the Right!"
Highly recommended.
Dave Johnson was one of the first game programmers for Atari, and founded my former employer Working Software, but now works on political issues for a labor union.
I'm not endorsing a particular candidate because I have the idea that doing so would turn off some readers who might otherwise support some of my other goals.
Yes, I'm very disappointed that both major party candidates are opposed to copyright reform.
I don't think my article will sway the election one way or the other, but my hope is that eventually copyright reform will become such a hot-button issue that all the candidates will have to address it.
Which lists about 1037th on the average voters list of "what is important to me".
Yes, most voters don't generally feel much desire to have either patent or copyright law reformed. Nor trade secret law - the DMCA is the first law to forbid reverse engineering.
The slashdot crowd cares, but they're not enough of us to make a difference during elections, and we tend not to be very organized.
If it looks weird that I would have a long section called "Change the Law" in an article entitled
Links to Tens of Thousands of Legal Music Downloads, it is precisely because my article is a carefully calculated piece of shameless propaganda. I worked very hard over a period of several weeks to do the very best job I could on it. I aimed to attract lots of readers by offerring them free music, but to give them a political education while I had their attention.
The reason being that I knew there are far more people using peer-to-peer networks to download music than there are us slashdotters. In the US there are more p2p users than voted for George Bush in 2000. The problem is that most of them are pretty clueless about the laws and the issues, and, like the slashdot crowd, they are not just not organized, they are resistant to organization, like trying to herd cats.
That's why my article goes on to suggest several specific steps any p2p user can take to effect change, ranging from
speaking out to
civil disobedience. Of course I encourage readers to
vote.
Of course many p2p users aren't of legal voting age, but they can take the other steps, and eventually they will be older and able to vote.
My server logs tell me that my article has been read by about 400,000 people so far. That's a lot, but not yet enough to impact the upcoming election, especially since the readers are from all over the world, not just the US. But I'm contuing to work towards getting every p2p user to read it eventually, and am now hoping I can get it to impact the midterm elections in 2006, whoever should win the one this year.
So let me repeat: if you agree with the goals I've expressed here, if you want to encourage p2p users to become active politically, if you want to bring about reform in the patent and copyright laws, you can help - significantly - if you link to
my article from your own website, weblog, or from message boards.
Thanks for your help.
Intellectual Property is a Recent Invention
on
Is IP Property?
·
· Score: 1
Before a couple hundred years ago, the concept of intellectual property did not exist. There was no such thing as copyright, and patents weren't granted to inventors, instead they were granted by the King to companies who got his favor somehow, so they would have a monopoly on some business. Such patents had nothing to do with invention.
For example there is a famous incident in which Gandhi, in trying to promote local cottage industry, went to the sea to make salt, thereby violating the patent that the British crown had given to some company, which had a monopoly for all salt production in India. This was portrayed in the excellent movie "Gandhi".
The only kind of "ip" which has existed from ancient times are trade secrets. Those aren't really property at all, because simply telling someone else makes it not a secret anymore.
It's only recently that trade secrets had any kind of legal protection: US state trade secret law only disallowed getting the secrets through nefarious means, but explicitly permitted reverse engineering. Trade secret protection wasn't meant to provide any kind of monopoly. There were patents for that, and the government preferred patents because they require the inventor to fully describe the process of making the product that's patented.
The DMCA was the first law in the US that outlawed any form of reverse engineering.
The US Constitution allowed for Congress to:
promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;
But even this didn't create the concept of intellectual propery, it was more intended to be a limited grant of monopoly to help stimulate the economy of the young United States. I don't think that the concept that inventions and copyrighted creations were property existed yet. Did Congress intend that such monopolies could be bought and sold like land could? I don't think so, but I'm not really sure.
I discuss this in more detail in my piece
Change the Law, and also have some extensive discussion of what you can do to change things.
If you feel as I do that more people ought to read my article, you can help by linking to it from your own website, weblog, or from message boards.
You might think this is a good thing at first, because it screws the record industry, but I don't think it is. For one thing, the patents could just as well be used against open source, so you couldn't use md5sum to check the integrity of distro packages or source tarballs. Also it has been pointed out that Altnet could get bought out by a record company, and the patents turned against everyone.
I'm sure you're all familiar with the arguments against software patents. But maybe you're not aware that while the US Constitution allows Congress to issue patents, it doesn't actually require it to do so. Patents could be eliminated tomorrow if we could get the votes in Congress to repeal the laws that authorize patents.
Patents are authorized in the same clause of the Constitution that authorizes copyrights. I discuss this, and what you can do to fix things, in
Change the Law. The discussion there is about copyright, but everything I say applies equally to patents.
If you feel as I do that more people need to read my article, you can help by linking to it from your website, weblog, or from other message boards.
Is there a VoIP service in Canada that uses SIP phones?
What I want, if I understand it correctly, is something that looks like a regular phone that I can plug into my home LAN, and use to dial regular phones anywhere else.
Do these things work on a network with IP masquerading? I use a debian box for a gateway & firewall, I could do port forwarding or something if it were needed.
The problem is finding a service I can use in Canada. Just try using Google to find products sold in Canada, or any other country other than the US. You can't really do it.
I've been spending about $300 a month in long distance. My clients and my family are all in the US, and my wife's family are all in another province. VoIP could really help.
Sorry, I should have explained, I left off all the more recent browsers. For comparison:
263277 - MSIE 6
11580 - Mozilla 1
5725 - Netscape 7
3250 - Safari 125
1662 - Opera 7
So this makes it more apparent that users of ancient browsers are a tiny fraction of my visitors, but there are enough of them to be noticed, and to wonder why they never upgraded.
My wife has done up a real nice redesign of what's presently a real haphazard site. Her new design is all validated XHTML 1.0 with CSS, including positioning.
It looks appalling in Netscape 4. One reason we haven't posted her new design yet is that, until her 1996-era Mac died a month or so ago, Netscape 4 was what my mom used. I convinced her to buy an iMac. She likes the stylish design.
Something people need to realize is that there are still many people who cannot upgrade. Some people aren't permitted to by their IT departments, but more likely many are people like my Mom using ancient hardware where Mozilla won't run.
Well, crap, can't link to bugzilla from slashdot anymore. It's bug # 182221. It should work if you use "copy link location" and paste it into the URL field at the top of your browser window.
Back when I submitted the bug in June of 2003, my wife was working as a freelance web designer, and tried to use Mozilla for her work after I stressed the importance of interoperable websites, but gave up in frustration because Mozilla had several UI bugs that made it unusable for her, bugs that no one seemed inclined to fix.
Well, flash forward to September of 2004, and now my wife is a happy user of Mozilla 1.7. She never touches internet explorer.
She's not a web designer anymore though. She found clients frustrating too.
The Mozilla people who commented on the bug were a bunch of grumps who never seemed to understand that my wife and I were genuinely trying to be helpful.
When I was a freshman at Caltech in 1982, in Pasadena, California, next to Los Angeles, I saw the launch of the Infrared Astronomical Satellite from atop one of the campus buildings.
If you look up Pasadena and Vandenburg on Yahoo Maps you'll see they are quite far apart, yet still we got an exciting view.
It was quite cool, not just because of the launch itself but because one of the project scientists was a Caltech professor who had recently given a talk on IRAS to one of my physics classes. We knew when it would launch, and knew all about what was being launched and what it would be expected to accomplish.
Also quite cool was that it was a night launch, so we saw this glowing dot rise up, accellerating, against the night sky, that was strikingly visible even against the glow of all of LA's light pollution.
In the summer of '85 I saw another launch, watching from Rosemead, near Pasadena. I don't recall what the project was called, but it was an atmospheric science experiment in which they launched a rocket into the ionosphere and blew up a bunch of sodium, blasting sodium vapor across a wide swath of the sky. The electrically excited sodium glowed a ghostly yellow in an expanding ball that slowly faded as it grew.
iRATE radio is a GPL'ed MP3 downloader and player. From the page:
iRATE radio is a collaborative filtering system for music. You rate the tracks it downloads and the server uses your ratings and other people's to guess what you'll like. The tracks are downloaded from websites which allow free and legal downloads of their music.
I've been using iRATE for a little over a year now, and have downloaded about a thousand tracks with it. If I were a typical user, then that would suggest that iRATE users all together have downloaded about fifteen million songs, thus far surpassing iTunes' puny one million download total.
Now, there are lies, damn lies, and statistics. Some of iRATE's downloads were existing users fetching updates, and not everyone who uses it keeps using it. But it clearly shows that free, legal downloads are potentially dwarfing the paid downloads being tracked by the BBC.
Note that the RIAA doesn't get a penny from iRATE's downloads. They can't complain either, because the copyright holders - the musicians themselved - give permission to us to download their tracks when they post them on MP3 hosting services like the Internet Underground Music Archive.
I was accepted into Caltech in 1982 to study astronomy. I later changed my major to physics.
Unfortunately, my whole world came unraveled when I began to suffer from a mental illness called
schizoaffective disorder.
It turned out to be a lot worse than it had to be because I would not seek treatment. I thought shrinks were for crazy people, and I didn't think I was crazy. Well, it turned out that by the time I got to see a shrink, I was crazy.
If you think you're mentally ill, get help from a mental health professional. Most colleges have some kind of counseling center, and often have staff psychiatrists and psychologists.
Life was pretty damn grim for a long time, but it got better because I finally got help.
I finally got my degree in physics, in 1993, after transferring to UC Santa Cruz.
This advice is particularly pertinent to college students because schizophrenia, manic depression, and schizoaffective disorder almost always strike a victim when they are a young adult. I knew a number of other people, both at Caltech and UCSC, who became quite crazy when they were students.
My understanding is that companies that have toll-free numbers have the option of capturing the calling number regardless of caller ID blocking. The reasoning behind this is that the recipient pays for the call, so they have good reason to want to know who's costing them for the call.
So if you call a toll-free number for whatever reason, they can capture your number and sell it to telemarketers - or collection agents.
iRATE's tracks aren't actually served by iRATE, but by the MP3 hosting websites where the artists originally placed their files.
iRATE's database is basically a big list of URLs, one for each available MP3 file. I think there are something like a hundred thousand tracks available. The database also has each user's ratings, that it used for its collaborative filtering calculation.
At least when iRATE started out, most of the tracks came from the Internet Underground Music Archive, which hosts thousands of bands. It was a popular site long before iRATE came around. So you can imagine that IUMA is heavily loaded, so whenever iRATE gets a track from a heavily loaded server, the download can be slow.
Fortunately a lot of work has been put into recovering from failed downloads. When I first used iRATE, way back during 0.1, I downloaded over a 56k modem and many of my downloads failed. But the developers made it work much better even for modems.
The download speed becomes less annoying after you've downloaded a couple dozen songs, because you then have a variety of tracks to listen to while new tracks download.
BTW, iRATE's homepage is Google's #1 hit for the query irate.
If your friend the musician offers any music downloads from his website, I can give his band a listing
here. All I ask is for him to link to my article from anywhere on his site, it doesn't have to be on his homepage.
The article has been getting 2000 hits a day steadily since march and has been Google's #1 hit for
legal music downloads for a whole year, as well as in the top ten for the much more popular search query
free music downloads for several months.
I report the article's statistics in more detail
here. I haven't updated it for a while but will do so shortly.
Note that the court in the Grokster vs. RIAA only found that publishers of P2P software did not infringe copyright. Sharing or downloading music without the permission of the copyright holder is still copyright infringement, for which the RIAA can still sue you.
But there's a way you can enjoy free music downloads without getting into trouble. Listen to the legal music that many unsigned and independent artists provide as a way to promote themselves. Find out how in my article:
If you downloaded such music instead of infringing copyright on the p2p networks, we'd make short work of the RIAA. You'd start listening to bands that aren't signed with RIAA labels, and the RIAA would have no cause to complain because no one's copyright is being infringed. The RIAA labels would wither away because no one is buying their music anymore, and a lot of deserving artists would get the exposure they deserve.
Here's a page that I found out about just a couple days ago and haven't added to the article yet. etree offers a page of
Bit Torrent Downloads, all of them
TradeFriendly.
If you feel as I do that more people need to read my article, you can help by linking to it from your own website, your web log, or from message boards. Be sure to email the link to all your friends who use P2P!
You should take the US-Australia free trade agreement as an example of why you should worry about US laws.
The agreement specified that the two countries would harmonize their laws regarding such things as copyright. Far be it from the US to adopt any of Australia's laws, instead Australia is going to enact its own DMCA.
Joining the EFF, even if you are a citizen of a different country than the US, will help keep your country from harmonizing their laws to be in accords with US ones.
Slashdot Mirror
In Change the Law I point out that while the Constitution allows for Congress to enact copyright laws, it doesn't actually require it to do so. Copyright could be repealed tomorrow if we could get enough votes in Congress to do so.
If you don't think this could happen, consider that there are more Americans sharing files via peer-to-peer networks than voted for George Bush in 2000.
In my article I detail a number of steps you can take to bring about much needed copyright reform. My suggestions are that you:
-
Speak Out
-
Vote
-
Write to Your Elected Representatives
-
Donate Money to Political Campaigns
-
Support Campaign Finance Reform
-
Join the Electronic Frontier Foundation
-
Practice Civil Disobedience
If you feel as I do that more people need to read my article, you can help by linking to it from your website, weblog, or from other message boards.If you're a US citizen and 18 years of age or over, you can vote in November. But to do that, you must be registered to vote in your state. The voter registration deadline for most states is just a few days away, October 2nd for most states. So register today! Rock the Vote can help you with registration.
If you're a US citizen residing in a foreign country like me (I live in Canada), you can register to vote with the form you can obtain from the Federal Voting Assistance Program. You can register to vote in the last state you resided in in the US. But again, your registration must be received by your state by the deadline, so either express your application, or fax it, if a fax number is available.
(If you've never lived in the US, but one of your parents was a US citizen, then you're a US citizen too and you can register in the last state your parent resided in.)
If you want to make a campaign donation, a good choice would be Representative Rick Boucher. Rick Boucher has worked tirelessly for copyright reform, as you can see from his article Time to rewrite the DMCA.
As we headed out of the Bay Area Rapid Transit Station, a young man pleaded with us not to leave the station. "They're breaking heads out there," he said.
My intrepid mother tightened her scarf and out onto the street we went. Near the station were a large group of police in riot gear (helmets, shields, sticks, etc.) but the crowds had largely dispersed by then.
We made it to the door of the opera house where we found a sign announcing the ballet's cancellation due to the riot, and how we could get tickets for a different date.
Happily, we got better seats when we came back, right up front. Romeo and Juliet. Exquisite.
Yes, I'm that old. This was around 1986 or so.
Anyway, one night there was a food run declared for midnight at the Lyons restaurant in Capitola. One hundred and ten students descended all at once on the otherwise empty restaurant, and all ordered coffee, some ice cream, and at the end asked for separate checks, each of which ranged from maybe one to five dollars.
There were only a couple employees on staff when we arrived. It took a long time to get served because they had to call off-duty employees on the phone, waking them out of bed to come work for the hour or two we were there.
As we prepared to depart, the restaurant manager sternly said "Don't ever do that again".
-
seetheforest.blogspot.com
"A weblog for Liberals who are FED UP with Bush and the Right!" Highly recommended. Dave Johnson was one of the first game programmers for Atari, and founded my former employer Working Software, but now works on political issues for a labor union.Off to find a pen...
Yes, I'm very disappointed that both major party candidates are opposed to copyright reform.
I don't think my article will sway the election one way or the other, but my hope is that eventually copyright reform will become such a hot-button issue that all the candidates will have to address it.
The slashdot crowd cares, but they're not enough of us to make a difference during elections, and we tend not to be very organized.
If it looks weird that I would have a long section called "Change the Law" in an article entitled Links to Tens of Thousands of Legal Music Downloads, it is precisely because my article is a carefully calculated piece of shameless propaganda. I worked very hard over a period of several weeks to do the very best job I could on it. I aimed to attract lots of readers by offerring them free music, but to give them a political education while I had their attention.
The reason being that I knew there are far more people using peer-to-peer networks to download music than there are us slashdotters. In the US there are more p2p users than voted for George Bush in 2000. The problem is that most of them are pretty clueless about the laws and the issues, and, like the slashdot crowd, they are not just not organized, they are resistant to organization, like trying to herd cats.
That's why my article goes on to suggest several specific steps any p2p user can take to effect change, ranging from speaking out to civil disobedience. Of course I encourage readers to vote.
Of course many p2p users aren't of legal voting age, but they can take the other steps, and eventually they will be older and able to vote.
My server logs tell me that my article has been read by about 400,000 people so far. That's a lot, but not yet enough to impact the upcoming election, especially since the readers are from all over the world, not just the US. But I'm contuing to work towards getting every p2p user to read it eventually, and am now hoping I can get it to impact the midterm elections in 2006, whoever should win the one this year.
So let me repeat: if you agree with the goals I've expressed here, if you want to encourage p2p users to become active politically, if you want to bring about reform in the patent and copyright laws, you can help - significantly - if you link to my article from your own website, weblog, or from message boards.
Thanks for your help.
For example there is a famous incident in which Gandhi, in trying to promote local cottage industry, went to the sea to make salt, thereby violating the patent that the British crown had given to some company, which had a monopoly for all salt production in India. This was portrayed in the excellent movie "Gandhi".
The only kind of "ip" which has existed from ancient times are trade secrets. Those aren't really property at all, because simply telling someone else makes it not a secret anymore.
It's only recently that trade secrets had any kind of legal protection: US state trade secret law only disallowed getting the secrets through nefarious means, but explicitly permitted reverse engineering. Trade secret protection wasn't meant to provide any kind of monopoly. There were patents for that, and the government preferred patents because they require the inventor to fully describe the process of making the product that's patented.
The DMCA was the first law in the US that outlawed any form of reverse engineering.
The US Constitution allowed for Congress to:
But even this didn't create the concept of intellectual propery, it was more intended to be a limited grant of monopoly to help stimulate the economy of the young United States. I don't think that the concept that inventions and copyrighted creations were property existed yet. Did Congress intend that such monopolies could be bought and sold like land could? I don't think so, but I'm not really sure.I discuss this in more detail in my piece Change the Law, and also have some extensive discussion of what you can do to change things.
If you feel as I do that more people ought to read my article, you can help by linking to it from your own website, weblog, or from message boards.
Thank you for your attention.
- Mike
I'm sure you're all familiar with the arguments against software patents. But maybe you're not aware that while the US Constitution allows Congress to issue patents, it doesn't actually require it to do so. Patents could be eliminated tomorrow if we could get the votes in Congress to repeal the laws that authorize patents.
Patents are authorized in the same clause of the Constitution that authorizes copyrights. I discuss this, and what you can do to fix things, in Change the Law. The discussion there is about copyright, but everything I say applies equally to patents.
If you feel as I do that more people need to read my article, you can help by linking to it from your website, weblog, or from other message boards.
Thank you for your attention.
-- Mike
What I want, if I understand it correctly, is something that looks like a regular phone that I can plug into my home LAN, and use to dial regular phones anywhere else.
Do these things work on a network with IP masquerading? I use a debian box for a gateway & firewall, I could do port forwarding or something if it were needed.
The problem is finding a service I can use in Canada. Just try using Google to find products sold in Canada, or any other country other than the US. You can't really do it.
I've been spending about $300 a month in long distance. My clients and my family are all in the US, and my wife's family are all in another province. VoIP could really help.
Thanks for any advice you can give me.
- 263277 - MSIE 6
- 11580 - Mozilla 1
- 5725 - Netscape 7
- 3250 - Safari 125
- 1662 - Opera 7
So this makes it more apparent that users of ancient browsers are a tiny fraction of my visitors, but there are enough of them to be noticed, and to wonder why they never upgraded.Better a divorce than a lifetime of torment for all concerned.
- Requests - Browser
- 402 - MSIE 4
- 42 - MSIE 3
- 2 - Mozilla M18
- 15 - Netscape 3
- 2 - Netscape 2
- 12 - Opera 5
My wife has done up a real nice redesign of what's presently a real haphazard site. Her new design is all validated XHTML 1.0 with CSS, including positioning.It looks appalling in Netscape 4. One reason we haven't posted her new design yet is that, until her 1996-era Mac died a month or so ago, Netscape 4 was what my mom used. I convinced her to buy an iMac. She likes the stylish design.
Something people need to realize is that there are still many people who cannot upgrade. Some people aren't permitted to by their IT departments, but more likely many are people like my Mom using ancient hardware where Mozilla won't run.
-
Please Understand Why My Wife Can't Stand Mozilla
Well, crap, can't link to bugzilla from slashdot anymore. It's bug # 182221. It should work if you use "copy link location" and paste it into the URL field at the top of your browser window.Back when I submitted the bug in June of 2003, my wife was working as a freelance web designer, and tried to use Mozilla for her work after I stressed the importance of interoperable websites, but gave up in frustration because Mozilla had several UI bugs that made it unusable for her, bugs that no one seemed inclined to fix.
Well, flash forward to September of 2004, and now my wife is a happy user of Mozilla 1.7. She never touches internet explorer.
She's not a web designer anymore though. She found clients frustrating too.
The Mozilla people who commented on the bug were a bunch of grumps who never seemed to understand that my wife and I were genuinely trying to be helpful.
If you look up Pasadena and Vandenburg on Yahoo Maps you'll see they are quite far apart, yet still we got an exciting view.
It was quite cool, not just because of the launch itself but because one of the project scientists was a Caltech professor who had recently given a talk on IRAS to one of my physics classes. We knew when it would launch, and knew all about what was being launched and what it would be expected to accomplish.
Also quite cool was that it was a night launch, so we saw this glowing dot rise up, accellerating, against the night sky, that was strikingly visible even against the glow of all of LA's light pollution.
In the summer of '85 I saw another launch, watching from Rosemead, near Pasadena. I don't recall what the project was called, but it was an atmospheric science experiment in which they launched a rocket into the ionosphere and blew up a bunch of sodium, blasting sodium vapor across a wide swath of the sky. The electrically excited sodium glowed a ghostly yellow in an expanding ball that slowly faded as it grew.
I've been using iRATE for a little over a year now, and have downloaded about a thousand tracks with it. If I were a typical user, then that would suggest that iRATE users all together have downloaded about fifteen million songs, thus far surpassing iTunes' puny one million download total.
Now, there are lies, damn lies, and statistics. Some of iRATE's downloads were existing users fetching updates, and not everyone who uses it keeps using it. But it clearly shows that free, legal downloads are potentially dwarfing the paid downloads being tracked by the BBC.
Note that the RIAA doesn't get a penny from iRATE's downloads. They can't complain either, because the copyright holders - the musicians themselved - give permission to us to download their tracks when they post them on MP3 hosting services like the Internet Underground Music Archive.
I discuss not only iRATE but a lot of other places to get free music downloads in my article Links to Tens of Thousands of Legal Music Downloads. Share the link with all your buddies who use p2p.
Thank you for your attention.
Unfortunately, my whole world came unraveled when I began to suffer from a mental illness called schizoaffective disorder.
It turned out to be a lot worse than it had to be because I would not seek treatment. I thought shrinks were for crazy people, and I didn't think I was crazy. Well, it turned out that by the time I got to see a shrink, I was crazy.
If you think you're mentally ill, get help from a mental health professional. Most colleges have some kind of counseling center, and often have staff psychiatrists and psychologists.
Life was pretty damn grim for a long time, but it got better because I finally got help.
I finally got my degree in physics, in 1993, after transferring to UC Santa Cruz.
This advice is particularly pertinent to college students because schizophrenia, manic depression, and schizoaffective disorder almost always strike a victim when they are a young adult. I knew a number of other people, both at Caltech and UCSC, who became quite crazy when they were students.
So if you call a toll-free number for whatever reason, they can capture your number and sell it to telemarketers - or collection agents.
iRATE's database is basically a big list of URLs, one for each available MP3 file. I think there are something like a hundred thousand tracks available. The database also has each user's ratings, that it used for its collaborative filtering calculation.
At least when iRATE started out, most of the tracks came from the Internet Underground Music Archive, which hosts thousands of bands. It was a popular site long before iRATE came around. So you can imagine that IUMA is heavily loaded, so whenever iRATE gets a track from a heavily loaded server, the download can be slow.
Fortunately a lot of work has been put into recovering from failed downloads. When I first used iRATE, way back during 0.1, I downloaded over a 56k modem and many of my downloads failed. But the developers made it work much better even for modems.
The download speed becomes less annoying after you've downloaded a couple dozen songs, because you then have a variety of tracks to listen to while new tracks download.
BTW, iRATE's homepage is Google's #1 hit for the query irate.
The article has been getting 2000 hits a day steadily since march and has been Google's #1 hit for legal music downloads for a whole year, as well as in the top ten for the much more popular search query free music downloads for several months.
I report the article's statistics in more detail here. I haven't updated it for a while but will do so shortly.
But there's a way you can enjoy free music downloads without getting into trouble. Listen to the legal music that many unsigned and independent artists provide as a way to promote themselves. Find out how in my article:
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Links to Tens of Thousands of Legal Music Downloads
If you downloaded such music instead of infringing copyright on the p2p networks, we'd make short work of the RIAA. You'd start listening to bands that aren't signed with RIAA labels, and the RIAA would have no cause to complain because no one's copyright is being infringed. The RIAA labels would wither away because no one is buying their music anymore, and a lot of deserving artists would get the exposure they deserve.Here's a page that I found out about just a couple days ago and haven't added to the article yet. etree offers a page of Bit Torrent Downloads, all of them TradeFriendly.
If you feel as I do that more people need to read my article, you can help by linking to it from your own website, your web log, or from message boards. Be sure to email the link to all your friends who use P2P!
The agreement specified that the two countries would harmonize their laws regarding such things as copyright. Far be it from the US to adopt any of Australia's laws, instead Australia is going to enact its own DMCA.
Joining the EFF, even if you are a citizen of a different country than the US, will help keep your country from harmonizing their laws to be in accords with US ones.