Microsoft claims to have all of these game makers drooling over the XBox to make games, but have ANY of them posted a press release yet confirming what MS is saying? If so, I haven't seen one. If Microsoft is seriously making a gaming console, they should have a working prototype somewhere! Any idiot in a marketing department with one drop of common sense would have had big Bill up on stage with that prototype even if it could only run test patterns with various polygons and texture shading just to show off the sheer speed of the system compared to whatever else is available. They need to get consumers drooling over this thing so much that they're willing to put off buying any other console just to be the first person on their street with an XBox. Right now they're just blowing smoke with numbers and a few pictures that could have easily been drawn in Photoshop for all I know. There is still absolutely NO SOLID PROOF that this thing exists.
This is absolutely ridiculous. Yes, most of the top video game companies are on the record committing to XBox games, and many of their top programmers have made extremely favorable comments about the XBox, especially as regards its power and ease of programmability (in sharp contrast to the PS2). Obviously they all have development kits and have for months. Furthermore, Bill did indeed show off a prototype, on stage, with several extremely impressive real-time demos, several months ago. You may have read about it at Slashdot.
Of course, this prototype and the XDK's don't represent the true power of the XBox, because the most important component, the nVidia's new custom graphics chip, isn't finished yet. But that's a strength of the XBox, not a liability; because the graphics chip will be just a variant of nVidia's two-generations-from-now NV25 core, you can bet that it will not only be done on time (nVidia has never missed a release date) and damned fast.
And in any case, this is some of the most ridiculous, uninformed FUD I've ever heard of; how this managed to get moderated up is beyond me.
HP 9000 Model N4000 552 MHz PA-RISC 8600
SPECintbase2000: 367 (equivalent to a P3-800)
SPECfpbase2000: 338 (barely better than a P3-1000)
As for the 8700, what I said was not, "HP is dead meat," but rather "HP desperately needs to release a new processor"--namely the 8700. Unfortunately, they are not expected to do so for another year or so, in the second half of 2001. And when they do it will be little more than a process shrink of the 8600, itself just a critical path tweak of the 8500, a process shrink of the 8200, which was a tweak of the now 5 year-old PA-RISC 8000. In other words, the 8700 will be no more a new processor than was the Coppermine P3 (a process shrink and reworking of the Katmai P3, itself a tweak of the Deschutes P2, which was a process shrink of the Katmai P2, which was a tweak of the original P2, which was a process shrink and relayout of the 6 year-old PPro). Worse yet, all indications are that the 8800 and 8900 will be yet more tweaks and shrinks, rather than new cores. Don't get me wrong--the PA-8x00 has turned out to be a great core. But diverting most of their chip engineers over to help Intel with IA-64 looks like a bad move on HP's part these days. Maybe in a year and a half McKinley will change our minds, though.
SPECfp2000 results are available for the UltraSparc-III 900 MHz. It scored a 482. Pretty damn quick, especially when you consider that its score is more than 50% higher than the Pentium-III 933 Mhz, which got a 305.
Wrong comparison. First off, the proper score to be using is SPECfp_base, not SPECfp_peak. In case you didn't know, while recently some pretty ridiculous SPEC optimizations have been sneaking into the compilers used for SPEC_base, they are at least optimizations included in the standard compilers; SPEC_peak numbers include optimizations which would break any other code, and thus are not considered widely applicable.
Second, you clearly ought to be comparing the US3-900 to the P3-1000. Yes, the GHz P3 was unavailable for 6 months after it was supposedly "launched", but it is available now, or at least as available as the US3-900. Plus, the P3-933 numbers you quoted were hobbled by the horrible i820 chipset (yes, the i840 is only used for high-end workstations, but that's the market we're talking about here, right), and were obtained using an older version of Intel's Fortran compilers. Now, many people have complained that Intel's new compilers are so good as to call into question the usefulness of the SPEC_base benchmarks, since successive versions of the compiler have shown remarkable improvement in SPEC scores on otherwise identical computers. Still, they meet SPEC's rules for base scores, and everyone optimizes their compilers for SPEC, and most importantly the SPEC tests seek to benchmark not CPUs but entire platforms, and the compiler is an extremely important part of any platform.
Thus, the numbers you should have quoted are:
SPECfp_base:
US-III@900: 427
P-III@1000: 327
Looks a lot less impressive, doesn't it. Especially when you consider the fact that any chip with an ISA less than 20 years old ought to beat the pants off x87 in SPECfp, due to x87's crippling 8-register stack-based FPU implementation. Once the x86 chips finally phase out x87 in favor of SSE2 (coming with Intel's P4 and later with AMD's K8 "Hammer" family), they will finally have a decent platform for double-precision fp, and their SPEC_fp scores should rise accordingly.
In any case, considering the US-3 is destined primarily for the server market, the more important SPEC benchmark is not SPECfp but rather SPECint. Let's check those scores, shall we...
SPECint_base:
US-III@900: 438
P-III@1000: 438
Ouch.
Of course, the real strength of Sun's UltraSparc line is its tremendous scalability. Yes, you're overpaying for a 1-way Sun system, or even 2- or 4-way, but what you're paying for is the headroom to later buy a 64-way machine without having to completely switch your architecture. Fine. Considering the poor scalability of x86 and Compaq's awful support of the Alpha platform, it's completely understandable that IT departments continue to overpay for Sun boxes. Intel's flubbing of IA-64 thus far has given Sun a 3 year reprieve, and it'll be another year and a half before a real IA-64 CPU (McKinley) shows up on the scene.
Still, don't try arguing that Sun can compete with anything (except HP, which desperately needs to release a new processor) on straight price/performance. The US-3 closes the gap quite a bit from the extraordinarily outdated US-2, but not all the way. Sun's done a decent job squeezing performance out of an in-order design, but when Intel releases the SPEC scores for the P4 5 weeks from now they're going to make it (and indeed everything else) look extremely bad.
The Supreme Court did NOT rule that anything other than timeshifting was copyright violation.
They ruled that copyright law cannot be used to outlaw a device that has significant legitimate uses, or even just the potential for such uses. Timesharing was ruled to be such a use. Because the Court only needed to find one legitimate use to throw out the studios' case, they didn't need to rule on every possible use of VCR technology.
Fine, that's true. Still, either the lower courts found that "librarying" was indeed copyright infringement or Sony did not even contest this fact. In any case, the point still stands that there are several significant noninfringing uses of Napster, easily meeting the Sony test. And it stands that the fair use that exonerated them was completely different from the uses Sony encouraged through their advertising.
There are plenty of legally arguable fair uses of Betamax (and video taping technology for that matter) beyond time-shifting TV shows.
Well that was the only one made to the Supreme Court in MPAA v. Sony Betamax, and that was the one on which the case was decided. Remember, neither video camcorders nor video rentals existed at the time.
Now you're just making stuff up. Napster never asked for any such list and the RIAA never refused one. In fact I remember a post on Slashdot by someone saying such a list didn't exist to which another poster replied with a link.
Well I'd appreciate such a link if you could dig it up. In the meantime, I'm most certainly *not* making stuff up. This and indeed all my arguments are taken directly from Napster's legal filings. Particularly their opposition brief (pp. 19) and appeal brief (pp. 5, 13-14). (One other thing: turns out I was mistaken with my 1 million figure; the actual estimate of RIAA-copyrighted recordings is a whopping 10 million.) Unless you are accusing Napster of lying to the judge by pretending they'd petitioned the plaintiffs on the court record for such a list (not a very clever lie, IMO), then you're the one making stuff up.
And the judge came down on Napster because there was no doubt in her mind, nor should there be any in anyone else's mind, that Napster existed solely for the purpose of being able to distribute copyrighted music. Their advertisements claiming that you won't find crappy no-name bands on their site are proof to this effect. Then they smugly lied and pretended that they existed to support independent artists.
Guess what? All of Sony's advertisements for the Betamax highlighted the fact that you could copy movies off TV and watch them as much as you want--which is unambiguously copyright infringment. Napster's advertisements highlighted the fact that it could allow users to noncommercially copy copyrighted recordings from other users--which is of at worst ambiguous legality because the AHRA specifically excludes all noncommercial copying of recordings from being considered infringing. Even if this noncommercial copying were illegal (again, the AHRA specifically legalizes it), Napster's practices are no different from Sony's. Indeed, even if Napster did just invent its New Artist program to stave off a lawsuit, the fact is that they already have more artists signed to it and authorizing the sharing of their songs than there are artists signed with all major labels! Similarly, it is almost certain that Sony came up with the "time-shifting is fair use" idea after they had been sued. Luckily, the correct standard from the Sony case is not when the noninfringing use was first advertised, or whether the defendent even considered such a noninfringing use for their technology. The standard is, once again, whether the service is "capable of significant noninfringing use." This is a direct quotation from the Supreme Court's Sony decision (emphasis added). So long as this condition is fulfilled (and it very obviously is), Napster can't be held liable.
I have no problems with judges throwing the book at offenders who are smug about their crimes and lie and try to use technicalities to squirm out. The judge did this in the Microsoft trial and did the same here too.
If you do consider the Supreme Court's precedent setting standard in a perfectly analagous case a "technicality", then I guess you have no problem outlawing VCR's which, incidentally, now provide the majority of MPAA income. Meanwhile, the judicial system functions on the basis of laws and precedents, whether you call them "technicalities" or not. MS was found guilty because it was determined that they broke the law, as it is set by Congress and interpreted by judicial precedent, "technicalities" and all. The fact that they were arrogant (much more so than Napster) about it didn't help their case, but is no reason to find them guilty. In the Napster case, on the other hand, Napster is clearly not liable, both on the basis of the applicable laws (the AHRA and the safe harbor provision of the DMCA) and on the basis of a Supreme Court precedent, the strongest judicial precedent in the land.
The argument about the Betamax standard is irrelevant because the judge did not outlaw Napster. The judge asked Napster to make reasonable attempts to prevent (and these are not as hard to do as Napster would pretend they are) the distribution of illegal material. Yes, there are several non-illegal uses of Napster and those are NOT being outlawed.
No. The only legally argued fair use of the Betamax was time-shifting--watching your fav TV shows at a different time because you weren't home when they were aired. In other words, according to the Betamax case, it's only fair use if you watch everything you tape with your VCR exactly once; beyond that, it's "librarying", which is copyright violation. The Supreme Court could have considered forcing Sony to, for example, make the Betamax erase a tape as it played it. That's the equivalent of forcing Napster to put up filters that would somehow filter out RIAA-copyrighted songs.
Indeed, the Betamax technical solution which I just came up with off the top of my head would be considerably easier to implement than any logical filtering system on Napster. Consider, first, that any filtering system on Napster would have to filter out bad stuff, rather than just allowing good stuff. This is because if I want to, say, take advantage of Napster's viral distribution model to distribute my band's songs and get us noticed, I don't have to register with anyone, and shouldn't have to. Also there'd be no way of dealing with live recordings, which are copyright of the band, not the label, and many if not most bands allow their exchange. But suddenly we run into our first problem--how to tell a studio version ("illegal") from a live one (legal)?? Impossible. But let's forget about that for a second. So now we just need a list of all the RIAA-copyrighted songs to filter out of Napster. Fine. One problem--such a list doesn't exist. Napster has repeatedly asked for it in order to comply with a possible injunction, and the RIAA hasn't given them one. Indeed, when one considers that estimates of the size of such a list run to over 1,000,000 recordings, it's no wonder they haven't complied. And it's pretty obvious that filtering out 1,000,000 titles, even if they knew what they were, would indeed be quite an onerous burden on Napster. But that's the real problem--they're just titles. All that's uploaded to Napster is a file name and a file location. When you think about it, there's almost no way to filter out a list of RIAA-copyrighted songs (much less a list 1,000,000 entries long) based only on song titles. Do you only filter out exact matches? A quick search on Napster shows that the same song is probably named with at least 10 different filenames. Do you filter out anything that includes, say, "Metallica" or "Enter Sandman"? What about "my band covers Metallica-Enter Sandman.mp3"? Or just "Ode to Metallica.mp3"? With up to 1,000,000 names to filter out, it's pretty clear that the names of many authorized songs would conflict with RIAA-copyrighted names. What do you do then??
So, you see, it would have been considerably easier to modify the VCR to be fair use-only than it would Napster. Indeed, all the foregoing examples miss one crucial point: the download of an RIAA-copyrighted song can be fair use, if it is for space-shifting or sampling purposes. Indeed, research shows that a significant portion of Napster traffic falls into these categories. This is the analogous activity to the time-shifting which the Supreme Court found was significant enough to allow the Betamax to continue. Thus, to follow your suggestion, Napster would need to create a filter which not only searched to filter out those 1,000,000 "unauthorized" songs (based on a list they never recieved and which may not exist), but further attempted to determine whether the downloading person owned some copy of the song already (this is possible, ala my.mp3.com, if it's on CD, though extremely onerous--Napster needs a copy of every CD in the world plus must run a challenge-and-response test for each download; what if they own it on tape, vinyl, etc.?), or attempt to ensure that they only listen to it for "sampling" purposes. Maybe they could just insert brain probes which would periodically administer electric shocks if someone enjoyed a song they downloaded but didn't buy it.
Oh yeah--and you have to develop it all and put it in place by Friday night (the judges ruling came down on Tuesday afternoon).
So there's your filter. And there's your proof that what the judge's original injuction was indeed designed to shut down Napster, not to just rid it of RIAA-copyrighted songs. The judge's own statements in handing down the injunction make it painfully clear that she didn't give a shit whether it was possible to fulfill it short of shutting down Napster completely. But that's all besides the point, which is that the Supreme Court rejected such a ruling against the Betamax, even though it would have been considerably easier to implement. Instead, they put in place a legal doctrine, stating that a service is not guilty of contributory copyright infringement as long as it is "capable of significant noninfringing use". Napster is, as you admit, very capable of such use, and is indeed used that way every day. Thus, by the Betamax standard, it ought to win the case.
Beyond that, I agree that this argument is getting old and picayune. We've gotten horribly worked up about some trivial details in what, after all, was meant more to be a whimsical but thought-provoking analogy than an iron-clad argument.
I do happen to think I'm right on these details (especially that of whether Jupiter conducts meaningful surveys or misleading ones), but I do take your general point that one crucial difference is that while libraries don't change much from year to year, Napster and MP3 sharing in general may yet morph into something potentially dangerous for the music industry. Or rather, I believe (and hope) that they will turn out at least mildly dangerous for the record labels, while believing quite strongly that they will turn out to spur, rather than stifle, artistic creativity and the overall quality and quantity of music available for society. Of course I realize that the last point is anything but a sure thing, and that no one can predict exactly what will happen. It does make sense to point out that the arts have always survived the emergence of new technologies predicted to destroy them; whether those who have sought to control and profit off the work of artists will make the transition as well is happily less certain. MP3 might turn out disasterous for the record labels and maybe might impact the earnings of a few of the most successful musicians, but I have little doubt that it will not only spread the art of the average musician to a much wider audience, but make him or her more money as well. Still, it's too early to know for certain.
And with that, I think I'm done, unless you have anything else to say. I would like to point out that if you've just been arguing with me because I happened to say something in that Bush/Gore/Clinton/economics thread that, on reflection, sounded rather stuck up (the "look at my email addy" comment), well, I didn't mean it to sound that way and you've certainly wasted a lot of your time being mad at me. Course, you've wasted just as much of my time, so let's call it a draw.;)
What you mean to say, of course, is that I am necessarily more ignorant because I'm less ignorant than you in these matters.
No, what I mean to say is that your perspective is skewed because you have much more experience with the "early adopters"--who will go to such great lengths to get something for free that they will be very unlikely to pay for the legitimate product in addition--than you do with the "mainstream adopters"--who use MP3 for mainly fair uses and for whom Napster causes an increase rather than a decrease in legitimate music buying.
One thing I actually meant to stick in my previous reply which I forgot (as if it wasn't long enough already!) was the following statement (elsewhere in this thread) from jtregear, which confirmed what I'd only guessed when I started this thread: "First, I want to say that I've enjoyed reading this exchange very much. IAMTAL (I Am Married To A Librarian) and my wife and I have been discussing the similarities between Napster and libraries for a while now.... I also wanted to say that from my experience living with an avid reader and library patron, that dedicated library patrons NEVER buy books. My wife reads approximately four books a week and in the twenty years we have been married she has never bought a single book." The point, of course, is that with both libraries and Napster there is a "hardcore" community who use the library/Napster as a replacement for buying books/music; however, in both cases, the majority of users use the library/Napster to supplement their continuing purchases of books/music. Research shows that, in its current incarnation at least, Napster actually helps record sales; I would guess, based on the fact that most people read books only once but listen to a piece of music indefinitely, that the same cannot be said of libraries overall. While this sort of calculus is important in determining how we feel about a content sharing system, in the end it is only one piece of the puzzle: we not only allow but laud and publicly subsize libraries because most people feel that their function in bettering society outweighs the probable loss of income for authors and publishers. Indeed, publishers attempted to sue libraries out of existence with the same arguments the RIAA is currently making about Napster (just as the MPAA tried to sue VCR's out of existence 20 years ago). They lost, because their best interests were at odds with the best interests of society--and it is society, not publishers or even artists--for whom copyright law exists. In the case of Napster, which offers the same societal benefits as libraries and even has the side effect of increasing record sales, the choice is even easier--and thus we should expect Napster to be lauded (and subsidized??) even more than public libraries.
Now, you raise some interesting long-term questions about where all this is heading. I do obviously realize that as bandwidth increases, bitrates will go up and MP3 quality will get closer to CD quality. As I commented elsewhere in this thread, this in itself will have little effect on what is the primary limiter of MP3 sound quality for the vast majority of people: namely, that computers are simply not stereos. They are hideously electrically noisy environments, and even now with expensive computer speakers becoming more common, speaker quality is far inferior to that of real speakers, due to small size, poor listener placement (2 feet in front of the speakers), plastic housing, magnetic shielding, etc. Unfortunately, there is no such thing as Moore's Law for speakers, so speakers of any quality will continue to be big and wooden and expensive, and be designed to fill a large room with sound, not direct it at an individual 2 feet away. While it's concievable that some people will hook up real speakers to their computers to play MP3s--indeed, I've seen it done--the vast majority of people will use their computers as cheap sampling devices and leave their high-quality speakers connected to their real stereo. In any case, the reason I said downloading MP3s to burn to CD-R sounds worse than a tape is that there are two lossy conversions going on: wav->MP3->wav. (The last isn't technically "lossy" but involves a loss of actual quality just as any change of format does.)
If napster becomes common, the market for mp3s goes up. As the mp3 market grows, the prices of devices will come down. And so on and so on.
But you'll always get crappy sound quality from a cheap Rio, with or without 5 cent headphones. Just like you still get crappy sound quality from a Discman. Might Rio's cannibalize the market for Discmen? Sure, but as I doubt too many people have their Discman as their only CD player, it shouldn't hurt the market for CD's too much. If people do only own a Discman, they're getting ripped off, because they're paying for full CD quality and playing it back on a device that sounds worse than an 8-track player.
If napster were given carte blanche to ride over IP, other similar services and modifications could be made. You complain of corrupted files? Well there is no reason why a parallel database of checksums of "perfect" mp3s couldn't be stored. You would never have to waste your time with bad mp3s. If the courts would clear the way for napster, they would clear the way for corporate interests to make these things a reality.
Just a nitpick, really, but this is false. If (when) Napster wins this case, it will either be because 1) the music copying that goes on over Napster is individual-to-individual, and thus non-commercial, and thus legal under the AHRA or 2) the songs made available on Napster are chosen and by individuals, not Napster; thus, as Napster merely facilitates the transfer, it is legal so long as their system is "capable of significant noninfringing uses" (quotation taken from the Supreme Court's decision in the MPAA v. Betamax case). Neither of these defenses would likely be available for a company which offered the service of "perfect" MP3s (which cannot exist anyways, since even at the highest bitrates it's still a lossy codec). The first wouldn't hold water, because the party offering the file would be a company, and thus not noncommercial; the second wouldn't work either, because a court could then legitimately ask them not to offer just those songs which they don't have rights to, without impacting any noninfringing uses. As I noted before, I seriously doubt your notion of "MP3 clans" will ever regain much currency. "A democratic system/database of sorts" is a more plausible idea to me. Still, even a high quality MP3 is still lossy, and as I said the more important quality concern relates to hardware, not software.
But all this is besides the point. The content part of the book you get at the library is generally of the same quality as the one you get in the store (same print quality, etc.), assuming no one has underlined or highlighted it. People still pay for books (as you noted), because they generally want to compensate those who give them worthwhile services, and because of the added look-and-feel issues of owning a nice crisp new book. These same reasons will always remain for legitimately buying physical media, and it's not hard to imagine ways artists could "value-add" to their authorized sales of MP3s.
Getting warez may not be as easy as using Napster, but even amongst those who are entirely capable of finding whatever warez they want, the vast majority still purchase their software. People will pay for something if it's worth it to them. Most people don't steal, even though they could. And that's why most people buy music they've already downloaded off Napster--because it's the right thing to do. However, people still want the right to exercise fair uses of music, things like sampling and space-shifting. People also tend to believe that there's no moral problem with being able to listen to a lower quality version of a song that they like to have around for kicks but would never pay for. And they're right. Just like they were right to believe that making mix-tapes for friends was moral, even while the recording industry claimed it was theft. If I were the music industry, I would start reinforcing with people these moral issues, rather than trying to sue technology and loudly proclaiming that all "unauthorized" copying of music is "stealing." The first is obviously doomed to failure, but possibly not before taking away some basic civil rights. The second serves only to muddy the moral waters and make people believe that there is no moral difference between using MP3 to discover new music to buy and using it to replace music buying altogether.
Despite the much-accepted multimillion user figure of napster, only a fraction of this country is in the position to take advantage of the service. Only some 1.5 million people in the US had broadband last year.
First off, that number is very rapidly increasing. Second off, it doesn't include college students or businesses; while as I said earlier the demographics of Napster have changed such that college students are no longer the majority, they are still something like 40 or 45% of the user base, and most of them have broadband.
So how can a reasonable person be expected to take news that a nationwide increase in record sales as proof that napster can't hurt sales? How can you ignore similarly high growth in other similar sectors of the economy? How can you ignore the fact that napster is very new to most users?
Good points all. But I wasn't offering evidence of the record industry's record profits as proof in-and-of-itself that Napster helps record sales, but rather as evidence supporting the various targeted studies showing this effect. The point is that you're arguing that Napster will have such a large negative effect on record sales as to effectively shut down the record industry and prevent new songs from being recorded. (Or, is this your point? Have you stated your point??) To put it mildly, if this were the case then one doubts that the year in which the number of Napster users jumped from 0 to 20 million would be the year the record industry would record not just record profits, but record profit growth. (That's a lot of "records", huh.) My argument is not that Napster is good because it increases CD sales. My argument is that Napster is good in-and-of-itself, and would only be bad if it catastrophically decreased CD sales to the point where less new music was recorded. I think by now we have proven that the latter is emphatically not the case, especially because Napster serves as a conduit for more unsigned new music. And that's all we need to declare Napster an overall benefit to society.
[re: why my warez analogy doesn't apply to current Napster users] They used it because it's gotten that easy and convenient. I see no reason to believe that the rest of the CD buying population would be any different when, and if, the means reach them.
This is exactly the point. Warez kids generally have some money as well (or more to the point, don't even use a lot of what they warez, like Photoshop etc.). The point is that when a technology is new and difficult, only those who are willing to put in a lot of time and effort, those who care about the technology itself and the subculture that surrounds it, are the ones who use it. Thus these people tend to be the most hardcore users of the technology. And to justify the time and aggravation, they need to make sure the technology has a large impact in their lives--so they use it to take the much larger step of replacing CD buying.
When the technology becomes widespread, easy to use, and convenient, on the other hand, then normal people will start incorporating it into their everyday lives. Because it's now easy to use, they don't need to replace CD buying completely in order to get use out of it. (Also, Napster makes it much easier to try out new music you haven't heard of than it was in the days of IRC, difficult-to-use rippers, much smaller MP3 selection, and 14.4 modems.) Since they don't have all the time and effort invested in the technology, they don't need to give up the moral claim of compensating the artist in order to justify their small time and energy investment.
Put it another way: people who just want all their music for free, and want it bad enough to dismiss the moral problems with this, are the ones who got into MP3s 3, 4 years ago. People who just want to use MP3 for convenience and trying out new music (the vastly larger group) are going to wait until it's convenient and easy to find new music. Because you were involved in the MP3 scene years ago, you mistakenly believe that all people are like the first group, when instead 98% of people fit more in the second group. That's why Napster increases CD sales, not decreases them--and why it will increase them more as more and more people begin to use it.
Now onto the Jupiter stuff. This is the last time I'm going to discuss this, as I'm getting tired of explaining a simple study to you. Let me first point out that if, as you say, the study doesn't mean what I say it does, the RIAA would have jumped all over it, just as Napster has jumped all over the RIAA's flawed "college music stores" study. The Napster legal filings are chock full of detailed refutations of the RIAA's one measly study and with evidence from the several independent studies which support their position. The RIAA's legal briefs tend to be silent on the issue...
Not even the press release claimed Napster causes an increase in purchases, that is entirely your imagination. If that is what they meant, they would have said so. Instead, they said "Napster Users Are 45 Percent More Likely to Increase Music Spending".
Yes. Exactly Napster users are 45% more likely to increase music spending than non-Napster users. People who use Napster are more likely than people who don't to be buying more CDs than they used to. Indeed, this goes directly to your point above that the strong economy might be responsible for the increase in music sales. Of course, it is to a very large extent. But correspondingly more of the increase in music sales comes from Napster users than non-users.
And the effect remains even after controlling for all relevant demographic factors. Yes, it's a correlation and not a proof of cause-and-effect, but you can never prove more than correlation. But while we can't see the methodology they used, if the study shows at all what the press release claims it does, then it appears to be about as close to cause-and-effect as one can expect to get.
Much like saying that there is a strong relationship between icecream consumption and drowning, while failing to mention that both are done almost exclusively during the summer.
No...it's like saying that icecream consumers are 45% more likely to drown than non-icecream consumers, even after controlling for factors like season, weather, swimming ability, proximity to a body of water, and previous rate of drowning before icecream was invented.
Although it is true, that they can make some random phone calls, I ask you to consider some of the difficulties.
Virtually every study starts out with random phone calls. It could be that Jupiter convened a focus group (in which case they would offer participants money), but they would still start out with random phone calls to seed the focus groups.
. First, unlike with most of these surveys, the market penetration is low--even lower if you only count regular usage.
20 million people is "low market penetration"?? Especially when you consider that this really means 20 million computers, not 20 million people, this represents and astounding market penetration. Indeed, last I'd heard there were "only" about 50 million households/individuals in America connected to the Internet. Obviously not all 20 million are American, but a large majority probably are.
Let's imagine they want a sample of, say 2k, napster users.
You don't need a sample nearly that high. 500 people is enough for a 5% margin of error on a yes/no question; I don't know the math, but with a quantitative question (how many CD's/month did you buy before/after Napster use), considerably fewer are needed to generate accurate results.
If you assume that less than 1% of the people who answer their phones are napster users, this means they've got to call roughly 20k people.
Based on the above, as many as 40% of American Internet connected PC's have a Napster account on them. After correcting for various factors (non-Americans, multiple accounts, people who haven't used it enough to qualify) I think 20% is a fair estimate. 1% is absurd.
All in all, we're looking at enough calls to get at most 1-2k respondants (including the non-Napster users group). Maybe a bit more so that they have enough data to control for various demographic concerns. Definitely not much larger than your average election poll, or your average study of this type.
Furthermore, whoever said the user is likely to be candid over the phone? Many people will lie about such issues. Many would also LIKE to believe they'd buy more--it is, after all, the partyline. Not so terribly different from what you'd get on IRC.
Most of the 20 million Napster users don't know there is a party line. It's too big a group for there to be such ingrained dogma that a significant number of people will lie over it.
Jupiter did not lie (based on the available facts, though they do depend on the internet's success....mmmm...motive).
That's ridiculous.
The press release is trying to imply that, with their data, napster users are still more willing than the rest of the population to buy RIAA's music [though they do conclude napster does not spell the end for RIAA, that is not supported].
No, it states (not implies) that Napster users are willing to buy more music than they personally did before they used Napster, to a greater degree than the rest of the population. Reading comprehension!
Though I can argue with even that conclusion, it is not necessary because it is really quite meaningless. The only thing fact that might be contested on its face is that income, wealth, age, etc. were not they deciding factor in the increases in the their survey. That sounds pretty reasonable to me, but I've yet to hear of a litmus test for music lovers, other than their historic purchases.
Their historic purchases were controlled for in the study! Reading comprehension!!
As regards the redeeming value of books vs. music conversation, I have to say I think it's getting a bit silly. But here goes anyways:
First and foremost, the issue is what society thinks.
We're miscommunicating here. My entire point was that society should value Napster as much as it does public libraries. I totally agree that society tends to have a knee-jerk bias towards books being more culturally or artistically redeeming than music, especially non-classical music. Part of my point was that this bias is not based in any meaningful distinction and that most knowledgable people would disagree with it, and thus that Napster ought to get as much respect as libraries do, in a fairer world.
You can argue intrinsic worth till you turn blue in the face, but you're not going to prove it to society unless you can back it up with tangibles. When you send kids to the library, they learn to read. When they learn to read and write, their brains develop. The better they can read, the better they can compete in school. Reading improves writing, which improves the ability to handle complex logic. All of these things have definite economic benefits for society.
In fact, one might even argue that, even if libraries were to have some nominally negative impact on the percentage of book sales, a more classically educated public is more economically fit and better able to compete globally. A strong economy would lead to a larger market in all likelihood.
Frankly, I think it's a bit chilling that you seem to think that culture is only socially relevant if it has a measurable positive economic impact! I'm pretty sure most of society agrees with me on this one. In any case, music theory comprehension has been shown to increase mathematical abilities, although it's arguable how much of an effect listening to pop music has on that. On the other hand, just like most of Napster sharing is pop music, most of what libraries check out is "nonredeemable" fiction purely for entertainment value. Sorry, but I doubt you're going to convince me that middle-aged women reading the latest Danielle Steele romance novel is going to enhance our global competitiveness. Yet libraries still manage to hold a cherished position in society.
And finally (phew!) we haven't even touched on the current nature of the recording industry, in which a small oligopoly of record labels controls nearly all of what music is produced, what is heard on the radio, what gets shelf space in stores, and which due to this chokehold on a musician's prospects for success, is able to get away with unconscionable contracts keeping the vast majority of the profits to themselves while keeping most artists--even successful ones--in debt for their entire recording careers. In case you haven't read it before, here's Courtney Love's enlightening speech on the subject. Frankly, after reading this I'm unhappy that Napster promotes CD sales. But thankfully, what Napster also does is loosen the major's grip on the industry, and offers an alternative model for new artists. This can only lead to fairer contracts for musicians choosing to stay within the system.
The big question is whether artists will be able to sell their recordings on their own over the Internet. You would probably argue that Napster makes this type of thing less likely, but I strongly disagree. Because of the math involved in typical record contracts, a band could sell only 1/10 as many albums as before and still come out ahead; Napster could and would provide a forum for new bands to get noticed and appreciated far easier than they could in the old model. Due to Napster's enhanced distribution model (well, and mostly cause it's free), perhaps 5-10 times as many people would download a particular musician's songs as would buy it under the old system. If only 1-2% of them actually paid for the song online or bought a CD direct from them, the artist would come out ahead!
But if Napster is shut down, this type of much needed reform in the music industry would probably get shut down with it. This, of course, is why the fight for Napster is so important morally. The fact that my library analogy is entirely correct is sort of beside the point--it just serves as a means to show that the RIAA's demonization of Napster is counter to commonly accepted principles of society.
I don't remember whether the AHRA "immunity from lawsuit for (legal and illegal) noncommercial copying" applies to all such copying, or only to copying done on crippled SCMS-equipped devices.
From the legal briefs in the Napster case, it appears as though this point is, surprisingly, undecided. The Act itself seems ambiguous on the point, and each side has claimed that Congressional deliberations about the AHRA clearly show that they are right. Judge Patel seems to agree with the RIAA, but I don't think we'll know for sure what the AHRA says until at least after the appeals court is done with it.
It would seem Napster should have an ability for the Napster user community to support and promote their favorite finds. Of course, I'm not a big Napster user so I might be missing an aspect of "community" more savvy Napster users are a part of.
There are three such ways. (Well, two-and-a-half.)
1) You can add any user to your "hot list" (right click their name). This allows you to browse their entire MP3 collection. That way, you can, for example, do a search for your favorite band, and then find out what else people who also like that band listen to. This is my favorite way of discovering totally new music on Napster.
2) Plus they have chat rooms sorted by music genre where you can a) find people to add to your hot list by genre and b) get people's recommendations directly.
2.5) Plus there's instant messaging which can serve the same purposes, although I tend to think it odd when strangers IM me on Napster...
All these are relatively effective ways to discover totally new music that you might be very likely to enjoy, and they all involve at least a modicum of community. In addition, Napster is great for finding sorta-new music, because you can search by artist name only--songs from that band's first album you didn't know about, or B-sides, or live versions of everything, or, best yet, compilations with other artists you hadn't heard before. Yes, a google search will most likely turn up a fan site which contains this information, but Napster just makes it more convenient.
All in all, I'd give Napster about a 6 out of 10 in terms of fostering community, and maybe a 7.5 in terms of introducing one to new music one is likely to enjoy. It's not perfect in these respects, and it's possible to imagine ways it could do better. (Depending on what they are, they would theoretically get them in more legal trouble, but since the judge has ruled they're not entitled to safe-harbor protection as a content-neutral ISP, there might no longer be a reason it would put them in a worse position legally.) Still, I think its community aspects are significant, and its a more effective and convenient way to find good new music than any other I've come across.
According to Napster's legal filings, the AHRA makes all noncommercial sharing of audio recordings legal. According to the RIAA's briefs, it only makes it legal when its done on media which have RIAA-taxes imposed, like DAT or those CD-Rs that cost 5 times as much as they should. Napster's argument is that the paragraph in question states "no action shall be brought under this title blah blah blah" (emphasis added), meaning Title 17, which is the entire US Copyright Law--that thus the noncommercial sharing exemption applies to the entire copyright code, not just the AHRA. The RIAA's argument is that in the context of the AHRA, "audio recordings" are considered to only include those recordings which are on RIAA-taxed media. Both sides claim that the deliberations of Congress make it quite clear that their interpretation is correct. In my readings, I have to say the Napster interpretation is more convincing, especially in light of the fact that the RIAA pushed for changes to the copyright law to make Napster illegal just this summer. (If it already was illegal, why bother holding hearings??) On the other hand, IANAL and I am probably biased as well.
I think Napster's really strong argument, however, is that under the Betamax case they only need to be capable of significant noninfringing uses to be ok; since they clearly are, I believe they'll win eventually.
Remember, Napster's defense is that they do not pirate the music themselves, they only provide a service for sharing the files.
Actually, no. If you read Napster's legal filings you will find that this is not their defense. Nor can it be. They are being sued for contributory copyright infringment, not actual copyright infringement, and contributory copyright infringement is an uncontroversial part of copyright law.
Instead, Napster's first line of defense is quite a bit more simple: the sharing of files on Napster is not illegal. No one is breaking the law on Napster, and thus neither is Napster. The basis for this shocking (well, shocking if you get your news from large corporations as most of us do) argument is quite simple: the 1992 Audio Home Recording Act, which quite plainly makes all noncommercial copying of recorded music legal. Since no one is making any money or getting any commercial benefit for sharing their music on Napster, there is no copyright infringement going on, and thus no contributory infringement.
The RIAA is arguing that when the bought and paid for the AHRA in 1992, that wasn't what they meant for it to say. What they meant for it to say was that noncommercial copying was ok only if it was done on DAT, because the other part of the AHRA allowed the RIAA to charge ridiculous royalties on every DAT tape sold to compensate for the loss of royalties due to copying. This isn't what the AHRA actually says, but the recording industry hopes the judge doesn't notice (so far it looks as if she hasn't).
Now, Napster's second line of defense, if the above fails, is to note that a significant portion of the uses of Napster are fair uses. According to the standard set by the Supreme Court in the MPAA vs Sony Betamax case, this is all that is necessary for a provider to be absolved of contributory infringement. (Actually, according to the Betamax case, it is only necessary that the system be capable of substantial noninfringing uses.) There is little doubt that this is true. A surprisingly large portion of Napster traffic is that of unsigned artists/artists who have explicitly allowed their material to be traded. Indeed, there are several times more artists in Napster's "New Artists" program than there are signed by the major labels--and all of them allow trading of their music. Furthermore, many copies of RIAA-copyrighted songs are made for protected fair use purposes, like sampling and space-shifting.
Amazingly enough, Judge Patel managed to get around this point by insisting that it doesn't matter that Napster is capable of substantial noninfringing uses, or even used for substantial noninfringing uses, it only matters that its "primary" use is infringing. No matter that this test was explicitly rejected by the Supreme Court. No mention of how she even figured out that Napster's "primary" use was infringing, except that Napster's internal memos alluded to it. Well, Sony's advertising for the Betamax played up its infringing uses and didn't mention its fair uses, but the Supreme Court ruled that it doesn't matter what the company says, only if the product is also capable of substantial noninfringing uses. Judge Patel doesn't seem to care.
But Judge Patel is going to get overturned on appeal, and that will be sustained by the Supreme Court. Without a new law to replace the AHRA and change the Betamax standard, the RIAA doesn't have a legal leg to stand on. Indeed, they're pushing for such a law now; they held hearings on it a couple months ago, although the Senate wasn't too impressed by the RIAA's whining this time around.
But just so you know, the defense of "it's not us, it's the people using our system" doesn't legally hold water. Luckily all of Napster's other defenses are pretty watertight.
Well congrats. You're friends with a lot of warez d00dz. Unfortunately, this has obviously colored your view of humanity, or at least your view of Internet users. See the thing is, these days the two are getting more and more synonymous. Napster has over 20 million users these days, and chances are only a very very few of them are like your illustrious friends, willing to spend hours of their time working on entirely suboptimal solutions for avoiding paying for a CD. (i.e. downloading MP3s, converting them to.wav and recording on a CD-R. Gak! Talk about a humongous waste of time for a finished product barely more listenable than a tape!)
As it turns out, there is apparently a large body of independent evidence backing up my claims that most Napster users engage in significant fair uses like sampling and space-shifting, and that the majority of their "non-fair uses" (if even there are any, since the AHRA explicitly legalizes all noncommercial copying of audio recordings) do not displace purchases which would otherwise be made. The Jupiter study is the only one I can find which has been released to the news media. (Sorry for relying on the press release; the actual study, like all their studies, is only available for a very large fee. However, it's worth noting that this was an independent study, not commissioned by Napster.) However, there are references to many others which substantially agree with the Jupiter study in Napster's court filings. I suggest you read the Opposition to RIAA's Motion for Preliminary Injunction (182 kB PDF) and Napster's Brief Appealing Preliminary Injunction to the Ninth Circuit (216kB PDF) in particular. They not only include quite a lot of information on the various independent studies of Napster (plus the ones commissioned by Napster and the RIAA), but a lot of other data indicating that much if not most Napster traffic is non-infringing, even if the AHRA's safeguarding of non-commercial copying is disregarded, and that Napster use helps CD sales.
Beyond that general statement, I'd like to point out a few specific places where your argument is particularly lacking.
[re: the health of the publishing industry in the face of libraries] It's been empirically proven. The industry is healthy, despite the existence numerous of libraries.
LOL! This in no way precludes the fact that libraries have damaged book sales; all it says is that libraries haven't put the publishers out of business. Meanwhile, not only are the RIAA-member labels "empirically" "healthy", but their profits are the highest they have ever been in history, rising a remarkable 8% in the first half of 2000 over a year earlier, all whilst Napster's user base was ramping from 0 to 20 million! There are probably more Napster users than library users, and the recording industry has never had it this good.
[re: the Jupiter study]I don't see how they could gather a reliable sample. Napster is essentially anonymous, it would be virtually impossible to get a truely random sample here. They obviously did not do a before and after, and most likely it was not random in the least. The biggest hint we get is:
"But when we conducted our consumer survey, controlled for key music purchasing factors-such as existing spending level, age, income, gender, and online tenure-we still found that Napster usage is one of the strongest determinants of increased music buying." If you ever studied statistics, you would know this does not mean anything like: Those who start using napster, start buying more music. Quite the contrary, it means: Those who use napster, are more likely to buy music. In other words, Jupiter looked at a certain population based on the above controls, and determined that those who used napster were 45% more likely to buy CDs than those who appeared the same based on those criteria and did not use the service. The problem with this statistic is that it does not tell you whether or not those same music lovers in the selected populations would be more inclined to use napster and would be self-selecting in the survey. It does not deny the possibility that those users DECREASED their CD purchases since they started using napster
Unfortunately, your reading comprehension is apparently not so good. How, pray tell, do you conclude that Jupiter "obviously did not do a before and after" study when one of the factors they controlled for was "existing spending level"??? When the press release specifically said on numerous occasions that Napster users had "increased" spending levels rather than "greater" or "larger" or "higher" spending levels?? (For the English-challenged "increase" is a verb meaning to become greater or larger; it explicitly implies a period of time and a before-and-after comparison.) And for crying out loud, why on earth would a firm as respected as Jupiter release a study which made the horrifically obvious error of only measuring whether Napster users (i.e. music fans) buy more music than non-Napster users (non-music fans)? And by the way, in case you have never taken a statistics course, it is dreadfully easy to find a random selection of people and to measure their before/after music buying. One simple method for doing so:
1) Call random people on the phone (all telephone-based poll studies are seeded with randomly generated telephone numbers, checked only to make sure they are valid numbers).
2) Ask the person answering if they have ever used Napster. If no, thank them for their time and call someone else.
3) If yes, ask them a variety of questions on their demographic information/Napster using habits/music buying habits. For example, "how many CD's a month did you buy before you started using Napster?" and, "how many CD's a month have you bought since you started using Napster?"
4) Compile and realize that Napster use causes a 45% increase in CD buying over before the same person used Napster.
Obviously you lack experience with the internet and the vast quantities of warez (pirated software) available to those who know how to get it. If you had, you'd know that the warez groups are able to distribute warez out to thousands, and millions, of people with just one copy, in a compressed format, such that if even one byte is corrupt, the entire package is bad. Similar systems could easily be setup within napster, and in fact, there were atleast such groups when I used mp3s more regularly. They took responsibility for ensuring a clean rip and a decent encoding, not to mention distribution [which is largely moot now] With decreased file size sensitivity, these groups could essentially gaurantee very high quality mp3s.
...Combine this with the above mentioned "mp3 group", and it could happen with reliability [i.e., check summing schemes] What's more, these groups can get and distribute the songs before others can even buy them, they don't even half to wait....but people do anyways. I encourage you to look at the warez groups, it may give you a little insight here.
And I encourage you to actually go on Napster, as it will give you a great deal more insight into how songs actually get uploaded these days. Alright, I'll do it for you. Since we've used the new N'Sync CD as our example, I just searched for "It's Gonna Be Me" off of that album. In its current incarnation, Napster is limited to returning 100 results. But of those 100 results, there were fully 40 different filesizes. Thus we find that out of 100 files shared, there were 40 different rips. (To be fair, a couple of these were from N'Sync's performance at the MTV Music Awards; on the other hand, I believe all these live performances had the same filesize, so it's possible we would have gotten more source files if they were excluded.) To make sure that "It's Gonna Be Me" wasn't a bit of a fluke, I did the same experiment with Britney Spears' "Baby One More Time". 60 different source files in the first 100 results. I think this pretty much demolishes your argument. Now let's take a look at why.
You made the comparison to the warez scene and to the early MP3 scene, both of which you are apparently more familiar with than with Napster. First, let's go through the typical process by which a new game gets warezed.
1) A member of a warez cl4n, typically picked out in advance, buys the game the first day it comes out.
2) Then they get out their debugger and their disassembler and get to work. Most games these days ship with either a CD check mechanism or a key input mechanism as copy protection.
3) The cracker determines which is at work, or whether a more novel copy protection scheme has been utilized.
4a) If it's a CD check mechanism, the cracker "simply" needs to find the routine called in memory by the CD check (with his debugger), go there and figure out how it works (with his disassembler), find out where it is called from, and what it calls when the CD check is passed (debugger and disassembler needed here), then go back to the original calling function and hand edit the hex machine code to skip the CD check and call the function called after the check would normally be passed. Also they need to hope the scheme isn't more complicated than this, that the CD isn't expected any other time during the game. Oh, it is? You just need to change all of those functions too. And repackage the game with a new installer which copies files which would have otherwise been left on the CD off it. And maybe edit out any wasteful pieces of code, like video and CD audio tracks, that would make a full HD installation too large. All of this with your hex editor working on assembly or with an editor working on obfuscated decompiled junk. Then you need to test your edited game, make sure all the packaging works and installs correctly, and ship it out.
4b) If it's a key check, well you're in luck--you might be able to bypass it according to the above method. Or maybe you can't. In which case you need to code your own key generator. Don't worry; it's just a matter of finding the key-checking function with your debugger/disassembler, and reverse engineering it. In possibly obfuscated assembly code. What if it's a true cryptographic one-way hash? Well, it's back to square one. If you're lucky, though, you'll be able to figure it out and generate working keys. Now you just need to code that algorithm into your own app, package it with the original game, and ship it out.
5) Where do you post to? Well, you probably ship it to your warez d00dz buddies first, and then maybe you go on IRC for a couple hours to brag and barter for other warez. Or maybe you upload it to a ratio FTP site. Or maybe you post it on your own warez website, in which case you have to set up banner ads which will pay you a lot for click-throughs, because you'll require a password which can only be gotten by clicking on a series of ads.
6) Be sure to include a little text file detailing your crack, shouting out to your warez budz, etc. Sign it with a clever handle, hopefully something with lots of z's and x's. Be sure to include some neat ASCII art to top it off!
Phew. I may have gotten the process a bit off (you might be able to correct me; I was never into the whole BBS/warez scene, although some friends were), but I think it's mostly right. And who actually goes through the trouble to get warez? Kids with a lot of time on their hands. There's emphatically no Napster for warez, so the only way to get some is to have some (i.e. for ratio sites) or to jump through a lot of hoops on IRC or the web. Even if noncommercial software sharing were legal like noncommercial music sharing (it's not; the AHRA explicitly excludes software), little of what goes on in the warez community would qualify; ratio sites, barter exchanges on IRC, and even forced banner ad clicks all qualify as "commercial" under current law (the DMCA). Sharing files on Napster, on the other hand, is not, because there is no quid pro quo exchange.
Alrighty. Now, let's take a look at how the average song gets on Napster.
1) Someone buys a CD.
2) They are one of the millions of people who want to listen to it on their Rio/other portable MP3 player.
3) They rip it using one-click ripping software included with their Rio etc.
4) Some (large) portion of users will have their default MP3 directory shared on Napster; others may have to *gasp* move the file to their Napster directory.
5) Log onto Napster to get more MP3's, and don't even notice that you are sharing a new file.
That's it. In other words, there is a vast vast population (we're talking in the millions) who doesn't have to do anything intentional to provide a source file for Napster. Most of them certainly must realize what's going on, and probably many are slightly proud of providing new source material to Napster, since it's a form of giving back to a great service and community. But they don't have to go out of their way to do so. Furthermore, there is emphatically no subculture surrounding MP3's to increase one's standing in, and no way of signing "your" rips anyways (technically you could use the ID3 tags, although no one ever looks at those). There is no ego boost to doing something that thousands of people are going to do "accidentally" just by using their Rio's and signing on to Napster.
Frankly, your notion of an "MP3 ripping group" is anachronistic and laughable. The proportion of the 20 million Napster users who would even care who ripped their MP3s, much less be impressed by them the way warez kids are by warez clans, is miniscule. And in any case, they are the sort of people you used to hang out with on #mp3--the ones who would trade MP3s just as easily if Napster and every other peer-to-peer program were shut down.
They are the type who will actually buy huge hard drives and work out the technicalities of hooking up real speakers to a computer (or converting MP3's to.wav and recording on a CD-R! God that's funny!) just so they can "save money" and be all b4d4ss. They used to make up a significant proportion of the MP3 sharing community; now the vast majority of MP3 users also buy CD's, and indeed buy more CD's then they did before, as a result of their MP3 collections. For them, for most people, MP3 complements purchased music, not replaces it.
Books build on each other and on the mind in a way that music does not [part of the reason why libraries are key]. One can go to a library, and providing they have enough diligence, teach themselves hundreds of usefull things--even more than you think you know. The reader can improve themselves in ways that society can grasp and appreciate.
Music may be marvelous, but it is simply not interchangable with the many forms of books. Society has long placed a preference on reading, and has regarded music as a form of entertainment. Consider, for a moment, what portion of your curiculuum has been dedicated to books versus music. Most likely, your answer is something around 1/40th. If you were told that your kids weren't going to read anymore, but would listen to music in class instead, how would you react? You know damn well how you would react...It's a question of priorities, just one more reason why you can't quite make that analogy.
Books are more informational than music. Books have several academic uses that music has no analogue for. There is no musical equivalent to the textbook. However, the majority of library check-outs are for entertainment and artistic pleasure, and from a cultural or artistic perspective, there is no arguing that books are any more or less "superior" than music. As for why literature is more often studied in schools than is music, it's generally for the following reasons:
1) Music, like visual art, is more difficult to appreciate than are books. Most music is either not terribly artisticly redeeming, or is too subtle and complex for serious study much below the college level.
2) Furthermore, books tend to be more concrete and thus easier to teach than music or visual art. It's easier to write a paper on a book than a song, especially when you have more practice with the first. This doesn't mean they're any less worthy of individual study or appreciation, though.
3) Habit and prejudice.
In any case, there is no good argument that fictional books are more socially redeeming than music, and no good argument why we should have an almost infinite selection of (government-subsidized no less!) free books while we have to either pay for music or listen to the 150 predetermined hits/year the RIAA purchases radio time for.
Has nothing to do with being a leech or a jerk or anything, but rather with the way Gnutella (or at least the version I have) works/is programmed. You see, the beauty and the curse of Gnutella is that, unlike Napster, it turns everyone's computer into their own server. Which is great for avoiding the fate that may befall Napster and other centralized databases, except that it means that each computer must do a string search through its own database of shared files with each search request made to the system. The way I set up Gnutella originally, that meant searching through a couple thousand files a couple hundred times a second. Furthermore, unlike Napster, that version of Gnutella didn't have the option to limit the number of simultaneous downloads from your system--thus, I would have 20 or more people downloading from me at a time, all whilst I may or may not have been downloading.
The upshot of all this is, Gnutella makes your computer act like a real file server, and most people's computers aren't cut out for that. I don't know if it was a bug in that particular version of Gnutella (Win32, 0.52) or what, but it was causing my system to seriously chug. As in, CPU utilization at 100%. I couldn't play MP3s without serious skipping, couldn't browse the web without noticable slowdowns. Even my system clock started running slow!
Now, it could have just been my system, and it could have been a bug which has since been fixed, but it was seriously unacceptable. Since then I've used Gnutella much much less, and often decide not to share when I do (or I share a smaller folder).
It does not have anything to do with my not being willing to share, or being a freeloader. If this is an inherent limitation of the way Gnutella distributes its file serving, then the problem will go away soon with more powerful computers; if (more likely) it was just an implementation bug, it is probably fixed by now. In fact, I think I'll go check...
Very interesting post. I especially liked this part:
The only questions left deal with volume.
1) Will more works be created (beneficial) if copyrights exist than would be created and improved upon (beneficial) if copyrights did not.
2) If works are copyrightable, what copyright laws will encourage the optimal ratio of creation (benefical) to harm caused to society by the inability to freely redistribute and modify those works (harmful)
You've really done a great job here of distilling all the relevant tradeoffs into two short sentences. All I was doing with this thread was pointing out the second half of your second sentence, which seemed to have gone unmentioned in most of the Napster good/bad discussions on/. That is, I was pointing out that not only has our society traditionally put a very high value on the ability to freely redistribute and share copyrighted works, but that it allows a service very similar to Napster to operate when the traded material is books. Not only allows it to operate, but if fact operates it itself, subsidizes it, and lauds it as the epitome of what's good about the world and such.
Of course, this is without even considering whether technology, by changing the act of copying from something expensive, available only to a select few--something that would only be undertaken for commercial reasons--to something essentially free, available to all and worth undertaking for noncommercial and even selfless reasons, has raised the potential benefits of allowing free redistribution such that the balance copyright seeks to strike must be shifted to once again reflect the best interests of society. Interesting article at Motley Fool on this subject; this was posted elsewhere in this discussion, but I'd be interested to see what you might have to say about it.
IIRC the libraries here have a limit of a few hundred items at any one time. I think that it was only set because of businesses (notably day cares) checking out entire sections of the library and renewing them as much as possible. But most people don't run into that.
Interesting info. In any case, not only is it irrelevant to how individuals use a library (as you point out), there is a vital legal difference as well, at least from the point of view of how Napster is defending themselves. That is, a day care checking out entire sections of the library would be a commercial use of the library, whereas Napster is arguing that it ought to be legal because it is only used for non-commercial use. Well, actually all Napster has to prove is that they have a substantial noninfringing use, and according to the AHRA and most copyright law, non-commercial use qualifies.
Of course, now I'm getting offtopic since I meant this thread to discuss the moral implications of Napster, not the legal ones. Oh well--thought it was a sorta interesting point anyways.
Library's have been proven not to be a great threat to the sale of books.
Where has this been proven? Can you show me some evidence?? The fact is that libraries would continue to enjoy wide public support even if they were shown to hurt book sales, because they provide an undeniable public benefit, just as Napster does.
The same cannot be said, that napster will not hurt the sale of records.
And while you may try to refute that sales will actually be hurt, that is unproven, and highly doubtful.
No it's not. Read the link. (I've included it several times in this thread, but you seem to have never clicked on it.) In case you're wondering, Jupiter Communications is one of the most respected media research and analysis in the world.
As that article in the Atlantic Monthly pointed out, CD sales around college campuses were down [though not in huge numbers], while national sales were up. This fact alone is cause for concern, or at least question.
Yes it is. Luckily, these questions have been answered. The research at issue was part of a study bought by the RIAA to use at the trial. Fortunately, there are myriad problems with its seemingly negative conclusions. Most egregiously, the study failed to take into account purchases of CDs at online stores like CDNow. Due to the fact that college students are among the most wired and moreover among the most likely to purchase items online of any demographic, this failing very likely explains entirely the fall in "college music store" sales. Further supporting this conclusion is the fact that the study found sales at "college music stores" fell more in the year before Napster came out than in the year after!! Thus the most likely conclusion to be drawn from this RIAA-sponsered study is that 1) online stores like CDNow and amazon.com have taken sales from record stores near college campuses, but 2) Napster has spurred CD sales enough amongst college students to partially reverse the trend.
And in any case, despite what you may believe, the average Napster user is *not* a college student. Besides, speaking from my own experience as a college student, Napster has actually limited my recent CD purchases, because I don't currently own a stereo besides my computer. Once I move out of my tiny dorm room into an apartment, though, you can bet I'll buy a good stereo, and plenty of CD's--many of them purchases I would never have made had I not had my enjoyment of different types of music enhanced by Napster.
Napster traffics the most popular songs in almost instantly, and theoretically, only one purchase needs to be made for this to happen!
Oh come on. For one thing, there are something like 100 different (unconnected) Napster servers, and most users are only logged on a small fraction of the time, so in any real world situation hundreds of source copies are necessary to cause any particular song to be available on Napster even remotely reliably. But this is all besides the point. Are you honestly telling me that only 1 (or very few) of Napster's 20 million users went out and bought, eg. the new N'Sync CD which sold 2.4 million copies in its first week? Obviously not. This is totally, patently absurd and has nothing to do with whatever real effect Napster has on CD sales.
Something like 90% of the mp3s listed on there are redundant--only the most recent and currently popular songs.
Just logged onto Napster now, and it's showing 765,685 songs being shared on this particular server alone. If we accept your 90% figure (I'd guess 95% is closer to the truth, but whatever), that means people are sharing over 75,000 unique songs at this moment on that server alone!! In comparison, the RIAA ensures that only 150 new songs get radio play in any given year. 150. So let's see which avenue of free music is more culturally enriching and offers more avenues away from the "most recent and currently popular songs":
radio--150 songs a year
Napster--75,000 songs at any given time
Hmm...looks like society and the spread of worthwhile art come out about 500 times better with Napster than with the old way of getting free music. Indeed, that 75,000 songs represents almost three times as many songs as are released by the major labels in an entire year! That's right--the major labels only released around 2,600 albums in 1999; meanwhile, over 3,000 artists have explicitly released their music for distribution over Napster (and an additional 14,000 have given their permission by joining Napster's new artist program). Let me restate that for you: there have been more songs expressly released to Internet public domain sharing since Napster debuted than there have been songs distributed by the major labels in the same time period.
And you want to claim that Napster consists only of "the most recent and currently popular songs"? Are you joking or just remarkably ignorant???
You're going to have a hard time arguing that music enriches the mind to the same extent that a good book does, especially when it's pop music!
Well now you've really made an idiot of yourself. Suffice it to say that no one with any appreciation of art or culture--least of all writers of important literature--would ever claim inherent superiority for any one particular medium of art over all others. In fact, most knowledgable people would argue that particular pieces of music can be every bit as expressive, enriching, artistic and important as the greatest works of literature, much less the trashy romance novel drivel which makes up the plurality of check outs at the typical public library. Nevermind Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms (although you can certainly find not only their works but those of almost every classical composer of note on Napster); nevermind even the great impact of jazz, argued by many to be the most important artistic movement of the 20th Century. There are plenty of challenging, important, "mind enriching" works of art to be found even amongst today's pop music. Any attempt to compare the artistic worth of the typical piece of fiction on the New York Times Bestseller List to, just to take a very successful and rather mainstream pop album, Radiohead's masterful Ok Computer, is laughable. For crying out loud, look at that list! It's all romance novels and police thrillers, with some battle-the-Antichrist born-again lit thrown for variety (#11). You have to go all the way to #16 (off the official list) to even find an important author. And this is without taking into account the NYT's recently spun-off Harry Potter Bestseller List.
The average piece of new fiction sold today is almost certainly of lower cultural and artistic value some of the most popular new music. Sorry to destroy your illusions, but the average book checked out of a public library is probably of even lower quality.
But that's besides the point. The point of all this isn't to engage in cultural snobbery and certainly not to censor based on it. Despite, probably because of, the fact that libraries check out millions of copies of trashy romance novels a day, they are still vital institutions to society, providing important positive functions to their communities. Exactly the same, if not more, can be said of Napster.
On a side note, if you really don't believe that music can be as enriching as written words, you probably just haven't heard enough good music. Start exploring.
Well, my argument is that libraries and Napster are the same functionally, not legally, so your post is sort of OT. My argument revolves around the fact that people use books in a different way than how they use CD's; thus while having to give back the book is not a restriction on getting full enjoyment out of it (you've already read it!), having to give back the CD is. Perhaps that's why checking out books is by far the more popular library function than checking out CD's. Still, I'll answer your questions in case you were wondering.
OK, I get the gist of the argument here, but let's expand the comparison. Besides books, I can check out a CD from my library. I can stuff it in my CD-ROM and copy to my CD-Write.
Q#1: If I only make a copy for my personal use, ie, non-commercial, is that legal or not? Think carefully before answering!
Depends. If you make a copy onto a CD-R which you bought at a record store, and which has the vile RIAA tax added on (i.e. if your CD-R cost $4 instead of $.50), then it is completely legal, persuant to the AHRA. If you copy it onto a CD-R which you bought at a computer store, then it may or may not be legal; indeed, one of the primary legal issues of the current Napster case is whether the AHRA's blanket legalization of all non-commercial audio copying applies to all media (as the act seems to say), or only to those which have had the RIAA royalty tax applied (as the act seems to imply). If it's the former, then it is also legal for you to rip the CD to another non-RIAA taxed medium--your hard drive. If it's the latter, it's probably not.
Q#2: How is this different than Napster? Think carefully again...
See the beginning of my comment for why my argument is that Napster is more closely analagous to checking out books, and not CD's, from the library. Having said that, it's slightly different from Napster in a couple ways. First off, you're getting a functionally perfect copy of the CD, not the functionally disabled copy you get with MP3. Second, the reason it just feels slimier than getting the songs off Napster probably has more to do with the fact that you're using a service in a way other than it was intended, rather than with any true moral or legal problems involved (although there may be some for the above reasons). After all--you wouldn't feel strange or immoral for photocopying a chapter out of a book you has checked out--why should you feel bad for copying a track off a CD?
IIRC, the i860 and i960 have done ok. Since they were RISC chips from Intel that weren't x86 compatible no one as far as I know used them as a main CPU. They were mainly used as co-processors or embedded cpus.
Exactly. If you read the linked article, you'd find out that for a time Intel intended on marketing the i860 as a main CPU, and using it to take on the established RISC-Unix server/workstation market. However, after much hype, the final product performed quite poorly, and the chip had to tone its ambitions down to use as a lowly math co-processor.
I remember correctly (it's been a long thread) you mentioned that early on publishers tried to put libraries out of existence. Are you aware of any articles or published works that describe those efforts?
I mentioned that I thought I remembered hearing such a thing. I'm pretty sure I did, but don't have any evidence to point you to. I was rather hoping someone else would steer me to such evidence; as they haven't it might be worth considering that I remembered incorrectly on this point...
I also wanted to say that from my experience living with an avid reader and library patron, that dedicated library patrons NEVER buy books. My wife reads approximately four books a week and in the twenty years we have been married she has never bought a single book. So the idea of your antagonist here that libraries are an inferior version of Napster from the standpoint of availability or that they libraries encourage people to buy books, at least from my experience, is unfounded in practice. She may have to wait a few weeks for some latest and greatest novel to wend its way through the "on hold" list, but hell there are 89 other trashy novels to read in the meantime so it's not a problem. Does the phrase "why would they buy it, if they can get if for free" ring a bell?
That was my impression, but it's nice to have it confirmed by someone who's more familiar with libraries than me. Meanwhile, we have factual evidence that just the opposite is true with Napster. And yet people who donate trashy novels to the local public library are looked up to as good samaritans, while someone posting a difficult-to-find and musically important song to Napster is a scum-sucking pirate!
I have gone back and forth on my feelings about Napster. I do use it extensively and feel that for the first time in my life I finally have the same kind of access to music that avid readers have always enjoyed because of the existence of libraries. The only people who have had this kind of access to music before were either extremely wealthy or were somehow attached to the music industry (radio people, music reviewers, etc.) I now essentially have the same or better access to music for research or just plain out of curiosity purposes and this is a great thing. If I wanted to listen to every version or cover of a particular song I like I can do that now. It has really increased my appreciation and knowledge of music immensely.
Then don't feel guilty about it! (As long as you buy the CD/compensate using fairtunes the artists you really appreciate!) The fact that you're so fraught with doubt about something that you recognize has significantly impacted your life for the better shows just how successful the RIAA has been in demonizing Napster.
Can you imagine how even less literate our culture would be now if all reading was pay per view? In fact, using this logic, it might explain the relatively low musical taste of the mass culture. When one has to buy every piece of music one wants to listen to it discourages taking a lot, or any, chances when buying CD's.
A very insightful point. In my experience, most people still get their books from stores, not libraries, but the fact that one can browse a book to your heart's content before buying it probably does have a lot to do with the risks we take on interesting literature.
However, I do worry about the artist conpensation aspects of the Napster controversy. I don't think this whole composing and producing for tips idea will fly.
It will be interesting to see. Personally, I'm supporting fairtunes and trying to give it a chance. Still, it's worth noting that that's not the only way for artists to make money in a world of unrestricted MP3 flows. For one thing, many if not most people will probably still choose to support those artists they really enjoy, even if they can get their music for free. For another, artists could include various other un-Napsterable incentives along with buying their CD, like first dibs on the best concert seats. In addition, artists are beginning to experiment with a model in which they would announce that they have, for example, just finished recording an album, but they won't release it until they get x preorders--enough to cover their costs and maybe get some profit for themselves. Even if the total number of sales is lower than it would have been under the old system, the fact that the Internet is allowing musicians to bypass the big labels means that the artists can make much more money even with much lower volume sales. And finally, the sound quality of a CD played out of a real stereo will beat MP3 for the forseeable future.
Err...how many times do you read a book? Once. Thus, even if it was faded the first time, there's no benefit to you to go out and buy a brand new copy, because you're done with it.
With music, on the other hand, you listen to it lots of times. Thus, you always have an incentive to upgrade to the better quality copy you get from buying the CD. Which is part of the reason why Napster causes people to buy more CD's than they would otherwise and libraries cause people to buy fewer books. Your argument is both theoretically poor and factually invalidated.
Not being up to snuff in SPECfp is a marketing problem. Considering the chip is being marketed to Database Admins and not Quake Players, it's not so much a real world problem. (Where the lack of cache would be.)
The SPEC suite is heavily biased towards server/workstation apps. SPECint, for example, is moderately biased towards database benchmarking. Indeed, while SPECfp may have little to do with database speed, it also has nothing to do with Quake--it tests entirely double-precision floating point, while 3D engines tend to use exclusively single-precision floats. In any case, all the SPEC tests are known for testing cache hierarchy gruelingly.
In short, SPEC scores are entirely relevant to a chip's database performance, as well as its web serving performance, and most certainly to its performance in scientific and workstation applications. These are the fields Intel is pushing for Itanium, and the fact that it will not outperform its desktop chips on the SPEC benchmarks means it will probably never be released. What SPEC is particularly not good at measuring is desktop application performance (unless you include compiling as a desktop PC activity); the only truly desktop-oriented benchmark in the entire suite is a speech-recognition test.
Itanium's performance (or lack thereof) is indeed a huge real-world problem.
This effect does apply to Napster - people use it similarly to a library. I'll accept that part of the argument.
Good that we agree on something.:)
What you're forgetting is that Napster gets new material faster than libraries, and has a larger selection.
The faster argument is true and somewhat valid, although I'm not aware of anything inherent in the way libraries are organized (or the law regarding libraries) which prevents them from getting recently published books quickly. While the publishing industry may not like it, I doubt many people would argue that such a change would make libraries the plague on society that Napster is often protrayed to be, though.
As for the larger selection argument, I'm not sure I buy that. I still maintain that a decent public library will have many more unique titles than Napster has unique songs at any given time, and that inter-library loan means that any library can get any book ever published--an argument that cannot be made for Napster. On the other hand, there are many more books than songs published in a year, and my view of libraries' selections may be biased by the fact that I live within walking distance of the second largest library in the world...
The other thing is that the music industry doesn't care that the music quality on MP3 is inferiour to CD quality - they're afraid of what MP4 and MP5 might sound like! As technology gets better, tradable music will start sounding better and better. It will probably get larger and larger, but disk drive tech will probably keep up with them.
Another valid concern, which was why I was careful to preface "Napster" with "in its current form" in my original post. Still, the largest problems with the MP3 listening experience do not revolve around the quality of the codec. Rather they revolve around the physical nature of computers as beasts not very well suited for music reproduction. The first problem is the quality of computer speakers--compared to real speakers, they are underpowered, unbalanced, and compromised by their plastic housing, magnetic shielding, and small size. In additon, the typical listener placement--about 2 feet away--is very much less than ideal. Most of these problems can be overcome, but mainly only by added cost, larger size, and better materials. Moore's law doesn't apply to speakers, unfortunately. And while medium-quality speakers are finally becoming available for computers (Klipsch et. al.), I doubt they'll work their way into the mainstream for quite a while. People will hang on to their stereos as the best sound equipment in their house.
Second, the inside of a PC is inherently a very noisy environment, one not designed for handling sound. CD-ROM's, sound cards, internal and external wiring are all designed with parts too cheap to find their way into any decent stereo, and the added electrical noise of a motherboard and a GHz CPU is like putting your stereo in your microwave and trying to play CD's. Yet this is the environment in which a CD has to get ripped, and an MP3 decoded and played. This is not likely to change anytime soon either. So while file size may go up (and I doubt we'll see anything better than 192 kbps MP3 widely accepted for at least the next few years), the real obstacles to computers replacing stereos in terms of audio quality are physical, not virtual.
Even disregarding all that, I simply don't think computers will replace stereos in most peoples homes from a cultural point of view any time soon. Web-enabled stereo components are certainly a possibility, but that's far enough afield and offers enough possibilities for regulation short of shutting down Naptser that I don't think it impacts our conversation too much.
No, article should read: IBM notices Itanium is dead.
Heads up, folks: Itanium is never going to come out in volume. It's years late and horribly underperforming.
The design was finished over two years ago, but it took Intel over a year to go from finished design to tapeout. This indicates that the original design ran into huge problems and required many many revisions when they tried to translate it to actual silicon. The total on-die cache of Itanium is paltry a 128kB, less even than the crippled cache on a Celeron; this indicates that the core logic of the chip took up much much more die space than they planned, and they only had enough room for a token cache. (As the chip is an in-order design and its primary functions involve high data throughput, it needs more low-latency cache than an out-of-order chip, not less.) As recently as 2 months ago Intel was claiming they'd be selling Itanium systems by now. That would mean volume production of 800 MHz and higher chips. At Linuxworld last week, only 1 of the demonstrated systems had chips running over 500 MHz. That means Intel is having some serious, serious problems with their fabbing--they can't even get a couple demonstration chips running at 800 MHz, much less volume production. Think about that for a second--Itanium is supposed to be Intel's new flagship server chip, yet they can't even give it as much on-die cache or even as high clock speeds as their slowest Celeron?? Talk about embarrassing.
All these signs, plus Intel's ever-increasing delays on the chip, point to the fact that Itanium ran into design problems so serious that the project is in fact dead. Since they've built up so much hype behind it, though, Intel will keep announcing delays until they can finally claim that the reason they're not debuting Itanium in volume is because McKinley is just around the corner. (Expect a McKinley paper launch in 2H '01, with volume by the beginning of '02.) Indeed, some rather credible rumors eminating out of Intel now include that 1) Itanium is yielding so poorly that a relayout and critical path trim will be needed before it could possibly yield 800 MHz in volume; 2) the current versions are suffering from an errata in the power management circuitry which is limiting their clock speeds; and 3) Itanium is in fact yielding ok, but the extraordinarily complex compilers needed for EPIC are currently producing such slow code that Intel needs to pretend they can't make the chips to save face. Obviously all three aren't true, but the chance that one is is pretty high.
Meanwhile, McKinley (which, not so coincidentally, has been designed almost entirely by HP) looks on target to hit its rather impressive performance objectives, if a little late. MS--whether by choice or necessity--has decided to wait for McKinley before releasing NT-64, rendering Itanium pretty much dead anyways. If the compilers turn out ok, McKinley will probably be able to compete on a performance basis with Sun's US3, and maybe even IBM's Power4. (The Alpha 21364 will cream it, but what else is new?) Meanwhile, Itanic looks to be slower than a Celeron for integer code and about even with a high-end P3 for fp; the P4 if not the GHz P3 ought to beat it handily even in the rather server-oriented SPEC suite. Having your $3000 server chip beat in SPECfp by your mainstream desktop chip is an embarrassment Intel will never allow, even if that means not releasing Itanium at all.
Who would buy such a chip? Almost no one. The only Itanium boxes ever sold will be to ISV's who need development platforms for McKinley, and large corporations who want to prepare for McKinley. And they can all be served by development systems and engineering samples; there's no need for volume production of a chip that's only going to be used for development and validation.
And that's why this announcement is not a surprise. IBM accomplishes four things with this: 1) they associate themselves more with Linux, which is becoming a bigger part of their strategy these days; 2) they disassociate themselves from the Itanic, which is a bit of an industry joke; 3) they shift the emphasis to their upcoming Power4 architecture, which looks to be quite good and a worthy competitor to anything IA-64 will produce for a while; and 4) they still keep IA-64 compatability for the future, albeit less emphasized from a PR point of view.
All in all a smart decision. And not a surprising one.
Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft claims to have all of these game makers drooling over the XBox to make games, but have ANY of them posted a press release yet confirming what MS is saying? If so, I haven't seen one. If Microsoft is seriously making a gaming console, they should have a working prototype somewhere! Any idiot in a marketing department with one drop of common sense would have had big Bill up on stage with that prototype even if it could only run test patterns with various polygons and texture shading just to show off the sheer speed of the system compared to whatever else is available. They need to get consumers drooling over this thing so much that they're willing to put off buying any other console just to be the first person on their street with an XBox. Right now they're just blowing smoke with numbers and a few pictures that could have easily been drawn in Photoshop for all I know. There is still absolutely NO SOLID PROOF that this thing exists.
This is absolutely ridiculous. Yes, most of the top video game companies are on the record committing to XBox games, and many of their top programmers have made extremely favorable comments about the XBox, especially as regards its power and ease of programmability (in sharp contrast to the PS2). Obviously they all have development kits and have for months. Furthermore, Bill did indeed show off a prototype, on stage, with several extremely impressive real-time demos, several months ago. You may have read about it at Slashdot.
Of course, this prototype and the XDK's don't represent the true power of the XBox, because the most important component, the nVidia's new custom graphics chip, isn't finished yet. But that's a strength of the XBox, not a liability; because the graphics chip will be just a variant of nVidia's two-generations-from-now NV25 core, you can bet that it will not only be done on time (nVidia has never missed a release date) and damned fast.
And in any case, this is some of the most ridiculous, uninformed FUD I've ever heard of; how this managed to get moderated up is beyond me.
While HP has not published Spec2k numbers yet, it is doing quite well with the PA 8600 and the upcoming 8700 thank you.
Check again.
HP 9000 Model N4000 552 MHz PA-RISC 8600
SPECintbase2000: 367 (equivalent to a P3-800)
SPECfpbase2000: 338 (barely better than a P3-1000)
As for the 8700, what I said was not, "HP is dead meat," but rather "HP desperately needs to release a new processor"--namely the 8700. Unfortunately, they are not expected to do so for another year or so, in the second half of 2001. And when they do it will be little more than a process shrink of the 8600, itself just a critical path tweak of the 8500, a process shrink of the 8200, which was a tweak of the now 5 year-old PA-RISC 8000. In other words, the 8700 will be no more a new processor than was the Coppermine P3 (a process shrink and reworking of the Katmai P3, itself a tweak of the Deschutes P2, which was a process shrink of the Katmai P2, which was a tweak of the original P2, which was a process shrink and relayout of the 6 year-old PPro). Worse yet, all indications are that the 8800 and 8900 will be yet more tweaks and shrinks, rather than new cores. Don't get me wrong--the PA-8x00 has turned out to be a great core. But diverting most of their chip engineers over to help Intel with IA-64 looks like a bad move on HP's part these days. Maybe in a year and a half McKinley will change our minds, though.
SPECfp2000 results are available for the UltraSparc-III 900 MHz. It scored a 482. Pretty damn quick, especially when you consider that its score is more than 50% higher than the Pentium-III 933 Mhz, which got a 305.
Wrong comparison. First off, the proper score to be using is SPECfp_base, not SPECfp_peak. In case you didn't know, while recently some pretty ridiculous SPEC optimizations have been sneaking into the compilers used for SPEC_base, they are at least optimizations included in the standard compilers; SPEC_peak numbers include optimizations which would break any other code, and thus are not considered widely applicable.
Second, you clearly ought to be comparing the US3-900 to the P3-1000. Yes, the GHz P3 was unavailable for 6 months after it was supposedly "launched", but it is available now, or at least as available as the US3-900. Plus, the P3-933 numbers you quoted were hobbled by the horrible i820 chipset (yes, the i840 is only used for high-end workstations, but that's the market we're talking about here, right), and were obtained using an older version of Intel's Fortran compilers. Now, many people have complained that Intel's new compilers are so good as to call into question the usefulness of the SPEC_base benchmarks, since successive versions of the compiler have shown remarkable improvement in SPEC scores on otherwise identical computers. Still, they meet SPEC's rules for base scores, and everyone optimizes their compilers for SPEC, and most importantly the SPEC tests seek to benchmark not CPUs but entire platforms, and the compiler is an extremely important part of any platform.
Thus, the numbers you should have quoted are:
SPECfp_base:
US-III@900: 427
P-III@1000: 327
Looks a lot less impressive, doesn't it. Especially when you consider the fact that any chip with an ISA less than 20 years old ought to beat the pants off x87 in SPECfp, due to x87's crippling 8-register stack-based FPU implementation. Once the x86 chips finally phase out x87 in favor of SSE2 (coming with Intel's P4 and later with AMD's K8 "Hammer" family), they will finally have a decent platform for double-precision fp, and their SPEC_fp scores should rise accordingly.
In any case, considering the US-3 is destined primarily for the server market, the more important SPEC benchmark is not SPECfp but rather SPECint. Let's check those scores, shall we...
SPECint_base:
US-III@900: 438
P-III@1000: 438
Ouch.
Of course, the real strength of Sun's UltraSparc line is its tremendous scalability. Yes, you're overpaying for a 1-way Sun system, or even 2- or 4-way, but what you're paying for is the headroom to later buy a 64-way machine without having to completely switch your architecture. Fine. Considering the poor scalability of x86 and Compaq's awful support of the Alpha platform, it's completely understandable that IT departments continue to overpay for Sun boxes. Intel's flubbing of IA-64 thus far has given Sun a 3 year reprieve, and it'll be another year and a half before a real IA-64 CPU (McKinley) shows up on the scene.
Still, don't try arguing that Sun can compete with anything (except HP, which desperately needs to release a new processor) on straight price/performance. The US-3 closes the gap quite a bit from the extraordinarily outdated US-2, but not all the way. Sun's done a decent job squeezing performance out of an in-order design, but when Intel releases the SPEC scores for the P4 5 weeks from now they're going to make it (and indeed everything else) look extremely bad.
The Supreme Court did NOT rule that anything other than timeshifting was copyright violation.
They ruled that copyright law cannot be used to outlaw a device that has significant legitimate uses, or even just the potential for such uses. Timesharing was ruled to be such a use. Because the Court only needed to find one legitimate use to throw out the studios' case, they didn't need to rule on every possible use of VCR technology.
Fine, that's true. Still, either the lower courts found that "librarying" was indeed copyright infringement or Sony did not even contest this fact. In any case, the point still stands that there are several significant noninfringing uses of Napster, easily meeting the Sony test. And it stands that the fair use that exonerated them was completely different from the uses Sony encouraged through their advertising.
Wow. Trolling at level 0.
There are plenty of legally arguable fair uses of Betamax (and video taping technology for that matter) beyond time-shifting TV shows.
Well that was the only one made to the Supreme Court in MPAA v. Sony Betamax, and that was the one on which the case was decided. Remember, neither video camcorders nor video rentals existed at the time.
Now you're just making stuff up. Napster never asked for any such list and the RIAA never refused one. In fact I remember a post on Slashdot by someone saying such a list didn't exist to which another poster replied with a link.
Well I'd appreciate such a link if you could dig it up. In the meantime, I'm most certainly *not* making stuff up. This and indeed all my arguments are taken directly from Napster's legal filings. Particularly their opposition brief (pp. 19) and appeal brief (pp. 5, 13-14). (One other thing: turns out I was mistaken with my 1 million figure; the actual estimate of RIAA-copyrighted recordings is a whopping 10 million.) Unless you are accusing Napster of lying to the judge by pretending they'd petitioned the plaintiffs on the court record for such a list (not a very clever lie, IMO), then you're the one making stuff up.
And the judge came down on Napster because there was no doubt in her mind, nor should there be any in anyone else's mind, that Napster existed solely for the purpose of being able to distribute copyrighted music. Their advertisements claiming that you won't find crappy no-name bands on their site are proof to this effect. Then they smugly lied and pretended that they existed to support independent artists.
Guess what? All of Sony's advertisements for the Betamax highlighted the fact that you could copy movies off TV and watch them as much as you want--which is unambiguously copyright infringment. Napster's advertisements highlighted the fact that it could allow users to noncommercially copy copyrighted recordings from other users--which is of at worst ambiguous legality because the AHRA specifically excludes all noncommercial copying of recordings from being considered infringing. Even if this noncommercial copying were illegal (again, the AHRA specifically legalizes it), Napster's practices are no different from Sony's. Indeed, even if Napster did just invent its New Artist program to stave off a lawsuit, the fact is that they already have more artists signed to it and authorizing the sharing of their songs than there are artists signed with all major labels! Similarly, it is almost certain that Sony came up with the "time-shifting is fair use" idea after they had been sued. Luckily, the correct standard from the Sony case is not when the noninfringing use was first advertised, or whether the defendent even considered such a noninfringing use for their technology. The standard is, once again, whether the service is "capable of significant noninfringing use." This is a direct quotation from the Supreme Court's Sony decision (emphasis added). So long as this condition is fulfilled (and it very obviously is), Napster can't be held liable.
I have no problems with judges throwing the book at offenders who are smug about their crimes and lie and try to use technicalities to squirm out. The judge did this in the Microsoft trial and did the same here too.
If you do consider the Supreme Court's precedent setting standard in a perfectly analagous case a "technicality", then I guess you have no problem outlawing VCR's which, incidentally, now provide the majority of MPAA income. Meanwhile, the judicial system functions on the basis of laws and precedents, whether you call them "technicalities" or not. MS was found guilty because it was determined that they broke the law, as it is set by Congress and interpreted by judicial precedent, "technicalities" and all. The fact that they were arrogant (much more so than Napster) about it didn't help their case, but is no reason to find them guilty. In the Napster case, on the other hand, Napster is clearly not liable, both on the basis of the applicable laws (the AHRA and the safe harbor provision of the DMCA) and on the basis of a Supreme Court precedent, the strongest judicial precedent in the land.
The argument about the Betamax standard is irrelevant because the judge did not outlaw Napster. The judge asked Napster to make reasonable attempts to prevent (and these are not as hard to do as Napster would pretend they are) the distribution of illegal material. Yes, there are several non-illegal uses of Napster and those are NOT being outlawed.
No. The only legally argued fair use of the Betamax was time-shifting--watching your fav TV shows at a different time because you weren't home when they were aired. In other words, according to the Betamax case, it's only fair use if you watch everything you tape with your VCR exactly once; beyond that, it's "librarying", which is copyright violation. The Supreme Court could have considered forcing Sony to, for example, make the Betamax erase a tape as it played it. That's the equivalent of forcing Napster to put up filters that would somehow filter out RIAA-copyrighted songs.
Indeed, the Betamax technical solution which I just came up with off the top of my head would be considerably easier to implement than any logical filtering system on Napster. Consider, first, that any filtering system on Napster would have to filter out bad stuff, rather than just allowing good stuff. This is because if I want to, say, take advantage of Napster's viral distribution model to distribute my band's songs and get us noticed, I don't have to register with anyone, and shouldn't have to. Also there'd be no way of dealing with live recordings, which are copyright of the band, not the label, and many if not most bands allow their exchange. But suddenly we run into our first problem--how to tell a studio version ("illegal") from a live one (legal)?? Impossible. But let's forget about that for a second. So now we just need a list of all the RIAA-copyrighted songs to filter out of Napster. Fine. One problem--such a list doesn't exist. Napster has repeatedly asked for it in order to comply with a possible injunction, and the RIAA hasn't given them one. Indeed, when one considers that estimates of the size of such a list run to over 1,000,000 recordings, it's no wonder they haven't complied. And it's pretty obvious that filtering out 1,000,000 titles, even if they knew what they were, would indeed be quite an onerous burden on Napster. But that's the real problem--they're just titles. All that's uploaded to Napster is a file name and a file location. When you think about it, there's almost no way to filter out a list of RIAA-copyrighted songs (much less a list 1,000,000 entries long) based only on song titles. Do you only filter out exact matches? A quick search on Napster shows that the same song is probably named with at least 10 different filenames. Do you filter out anything that includes, say, "Metallica" or "Enter Sandman"? What about "my band covers Metallica-Enter Sandman.mp3"? Or just "Ode to Metallica.mp3"? With up to 1,000,000 names to filter out, it's pretty clear that the names of many authorized songs would conflict with RIAA-copyrighted names. What do you do then??
So, you see, it would have been considerably easier to modify the VCR to be fair use-only than it would Napster. Indeed, all the foregoing examples miss one crucial point: the download of an RIAA-copyrighted song can be fair use, if it is for space-shifting or sampling purposes. Indeed, research shows that a significant portion of Napster traffic falls into these categories. This is the analogous activity to the time-shifting which the Supreme Court found was significant enough to allow the Betamax to continue. Thus, to follow your suggestion, Napster would need to create a filter which not only searched to filter out those 1,000,000 "unauthorized" songs (based on a list they never recieved and which may not exist), but further attempted to determine whether the downloading person owned some copy of the song already (this is possible, ala my.mp3.com, if it's on CD, though extremely onerous--Napster needs a copy of every CD in the world plus must run a challenge-and-response test for each download; what if they own it on tape, vinyl, etc.?), or attempt to ensure that they only listen to it for "sampling" purposes. Maybe they could just insert brain probes which would periodically administer electric shocks if someone enjoyed a song they downloaded but didn't buy it.
Oh yeah--and you have to develop it all and put it in place by Friday night (the judges ruling came down on Tuesday afternoon).
So there's your filter. And there's your proof that what the judge's original injuction was indeed designed to shut down Napster, not to just rid it of RIAA-copyrighted songs. The judge's own statements in handing down the injunction make it painfully clear that she didn't give a shit whether it was possible to fulfill it short of shutting down Napster completely. But that's all besides the point, which is that the Supreme Court rejected such a ruling against the Betamax, even though it would have been considerably easier to implement. Instead, they put in place a legal doctrine, stating that a service is not guilty of contributory copyright infringement as long as it is "capable of significant noninfringing use". Napster is, as you admit, very capable of such use, and is indeed used that way every day. Thus, by the Betamax standard, it ought to win the case.
So ha!
;)
Beyond that, I agree that this argument is getting old and picayune. We've gotten horribly worked up about some trivial details in what, after all, was meant more to be a whimsical but thought-provoking analogy than an iron-clad argument.
I do happen to think I'm right on these details (especially that of whether Jupiter conducts meaningful surveys or misleading ones), but I do take your general point that one crucial difference is that while libraries don't change much from year to year, Napster and MP3 sharing in general may yet morph into something potentially dangerous for the music industry. Or rather, I believe (and hope) that they will turn out at least mildly dangerous for the record labels, while believing quite strongly that they will turn out to spur, rather than stifle, artistic creativity and the overall quality and quantity of music available for society. Of course I realize that the last point is anything but a sure thing, and that no one can predict exactly what will happen. It does make sense to point out that the arts have always survived the emergence of new technologies predicted to destroy them; whether those who have sought to control and profit off the work of artists will make the transition as well is happily less certain. MP3 might turn out disasterous for the record labels and maybe might impact the earnings of a few of the most successful musicians, but I have little doubt that it will not only spread the art of the average musician to a much wider audience, but make him or her more money as well. Still, it's too early to know for certain.
And with that, I think I'm done, unless you have anything else to say. I would like to point out that if you've just been arguing with me because I happened to say something in that Bush/Gore/Clinton/economics thread that, on reflection, sounded rather stuck up (the "look at my email addy" comment), well, I didn't mean it to sound that way and you've certainly wasted a lot of your time being mad at me. Course, you've wasted just as much of my time, so let's call it a draw.
What you mean to say, of course, is that I am necessarily more ignorant because I'm less ignorant than you in these matters.
No, what I mean to say is that your perspective is skewed because you have much more experience with the "early adopters"--who will go to such great lengths to get something for free that they will be very unlikely to pay for the legitimate product in addition--than you do with the "mainstream adopters"--who use MP3 for mainly fair uses and for whom Napster causes an increase rather than a decrease in legitimate music buying.
One thing I actually meant to stick in my previous reply which I forgot (as if it wasn't long enough already!) was the following statement (elsewhere in this thread) from jtregear, which confirmed what I'd only guessed when I started this thread: "First, I want to say that I've enjoyed reading this exchange very much. IAMTAL (I Am Married To A Librarian) and my wife and I have been discussing the similarities between Napster and libraries for a while now.... I also wanted to say that from my experience living with an avid reader and library patron, that dedicated library patrons NEVER buy books. My wife reads approximately four books a week and in the twenty years we have been married she has never bought a single book." The point, of course, is that with both libraries and Napster there is a "hardcore" community who use the library/Napster as a replacement for buying books/music; however, in both cases, the majority of users use the library/Napster to supplement their continuing purchases of books/music. Research shows that, in its current incarnation at least, Napster actually helps record sales; I would guess, based on the fact that most people read books only once but listen to a piece of music indefinitely, that the same cannot be said of libraries overall. While this sort of calculus is important in determining how we feel about a content sharing system, in the end it is only one piece of the puzzle: we not only allow but laud and publicly subsize libraries because most people feel that their function in bettering society outweighs the probable loss of income for authors and publishers. Indeed, publishers attempted to sue libraries out of existence with the same arguments the RIAA is currently making about Napster (just as the MPAA tried to sue VCR's out of existence 20 years ago). They lost, because their best interests were at odds with the best interests of society--and it is society, not publishers or even artists--for whom copyright law exists. In the case of Napster, which offers the same societal benefits as libraries and even has the side effect of increasing record sales, the choice is even easier--and thus we should expect Napster to be lauded (and subsidized??) even more than public libraries.
Now, you raise some interesting long-term questions about where all this is heading. I do obviously realize that as bandwidth increases, bitrates will go up and MP3 quality will get closer to CD quality. As I commented elsewhere in this thread, this in itself will have little effect on what is the primary limiter of MP3 sound quality for the vast majority of people: namely, that computers are simply not stereos. They are hideously electrically noisy environments, and even now with expensive computer speakers becoming more common, speaker quality is far inferior to that of real speakers, due to small size, poor listener placement (2 feet in front of the speakers), plastic housing, magnetic shielding, etc. Unfortunately, there is no such thing as Moore's Law for speakers, so speakers of any quality will continue to be big and wooden and expensive, and be designed to fill a large room with sound, not direct it at an individual 2 feet away. While it's concievable that some people will hook up real speakers to their computers to play MP3s--indeed, I've seen it done--the vast majority of people will use their computers as cheap sampling devices and leave their high-quality speakers connected to their real stereo. In any case, the reason I said downloading MP3s to burn to CD-R sounds worse than a tape is that there are two lossy conversions going on: wav->MP3->wav. (The last isn't technically "lossy" but involves a loss of actual quality just as any change of format does.)
If napster becomes common, the market for mp3s goes up. As the mp3 market grows, the prices of devices will come down. And so on and so on.
But you'll always get crappy sound quality from a cheap Rio, with or without 5 cent headphones. Just like you still get crappy sound quality from a Discman. Might Rio's cannibalize the market for Discmen? Sure, but as I doubt too many people have their Discman as their only CD player, it shouldn't hurt the market for CD's too much. If people do only own a Discman, they're getting ripped off, because they're paying for full CD quality and playing it back on a device that sounds worse than an 8-track player.
If napster were given carte blanche to ride over IP, other similar services and modifications could be made. You complain of corrupted files? Well there is no reason why a parallel database of checksums of "perfect" mp3s couldn't be stored. You would never have to waste your time with bad mp3s. If the courts would clear the way for napster, they would clear the way for corporate interests to make these things a reality.
Just a nitpick, really, but this is false. If (when) Napster wins this case, it will either be because 1) the music copying that goes on over Napster is individual-to-individual, and thus non-commercial, and thus legal under the AHRA or 2) the songs made available on Napster are chosen and by individuals, not Napster; thus, as Napster merely facilitates the transfer, it is legal so long as their system is "capable of significant noninfringing uses" (quotation taken from the Supreme Court's decision in the MPAA v. Betamax case). Neither of these defenses would likely be available for a company which offered the service of "perfect" MP3s (which cannot exist anyways, since even at the highest bitrates it's still a lossy codec). The first wouldn't hold water, because the party offering the file would be a company, and thus not noncommercial; the second wouldn't work either, because a court could then legitimately ask them not to offer just those songs which they don't have rights to, without impacting any noninfringing uses. As I noted before, I seriously doubt your notion of "MP3 clans" will ever regain much currency. "A democratic system/database of sorts" is a more plausible idea to me. Still, even a high quality MP3 is still lossy, and as I said the more important quality concern relates to hardware, not software.
But all this is besides the point. The content part of the book you get at the library is generally of the same quality as the one you get in the store (same print quality, etc.), assuming no one has underlined or highlighted it. People still pay for books (as you noted), because they generally want to compensate those who give them worthwhile services, and because of the added look-and-feel issues of owning a nice crisp new book. These same reasons will always remain for legitimately buying physical media, and it's not hard to imagine ways artists could "value-add" to their authorized sales of MP3s.
Getting warez may not be as easy as using Napster, but even amongst those who are entirely capable of finding whatever warez they want, the vast majority still purchase their software. People will pay for something if it's worth it to them. Most people don't steal, even though they could. And that's why most people buy music they've already downloaded off Napster--because it's the right thing to do. However, people still want the right to exercise fair uses of music, things like sampling and space-shifting. People also tend to believe that there's no moral problem with being able to listen to a lower quality version of a song that they like to have around for kicks but would never pay for. And they're right. Just like they were right to believe that making mix-tapes for friends was moral, even while the recording industry claimed it was theft. If I were the music industry, I would start reinforcing with people these moral issues, rather than trying to sue technology and loudly proclaiming that all "unauthorized" copying of music is "stealing." The first is obviously doomed to failure, but possibly not before taking away some basic civil rights. The second serves only to muddy the moral waters and make people believe that there is no moral difference between using MP3 to discover new music to buy and using it to replace music buying altogether.
Despite the much-accepted multimillion user figure of napster, only a fraction of this country is in the position to take advantage of the service. Only some 1.5 million people in the US had broadband last year.
First off, that number is very rapidly increasing. Second off, it doesn't include college students or businesses; while as I said earlier the demographics of Napster have changed such that college students are no longer the majority, they are still something like 40 or 45% of the user base, and most of them have broadband.
So how can a reasonable person be expected to take news that a nationwide increase in record sales as proof that napster can't hurt sales? How can you ignore similarly high growth in other similar sectors of the economy? How can you ignore the fact that napster is very new to most users?
Good points all. But I wasn't offering evidence of the record industry's record profits as proof in-and-of-itself that Napster helps record sales, but rather as evidence supporting the various targeted studies showing this effect. The point is that you're arguing that Napster will have such a large negative effect on record sales as to effectively shut down the record industry and prevent new songs from being recorded. (Or, is this your point? Have you stated your point??) To put it mildly, if this were the case then one doubts that the year in which the number of Napster users jumped from 0 to 20 million would be the year the record industry would record not just record profits, but record profit growth. (That's a lot of "records", huh.) My argument is not that Napster is good because it increases CD sales. My argument is that Napster is good in-and-of-itself, and would only be bad if it catastrophically decreased CD sales to the point where less new music was recorded. I think by now we have proven that the latter is emphatically not the case, especially because Napster serves as a conduit for more unsigned new music. And that's all we need to declare Napster an overall benefit to society.
[re: why my warez analogy doesn't apply to current Napster users] They used it because it's gotten that easy and convenient. I see no reason to believe that the rest of the CD buying population would be any different when, and if, the means reach them.
This is exactly the point. Warez kids generally have some money as well (or more to the point, don't even use a lot of what they warez, like Photoshop etc.). The point is that when a technology is new and difficult, only those who are willing to put in a lot of time and effort, those who care about the technology itself and the subculture that surrounds it, are the ones who use it. Thus these people tend to be the most hardcore users of the technology. And to justify the time and aggravation, they need to make sure the technology has a large impact in their lives--so they use it to take the much larger step of replacing CD buying.
When the technology becomes widespread, easy to use, and convenient, on the other hand, then normal people will start incorporating it into their everyday lives. Because it's now easy to use, they don't need to replace CD buying completely in order to get use out of it. (Also, Napster makes it much easier to try out new music you haven't heard of than it was in the days of IRC, difficult-to-use rippers, much smaller MP3 selection, and 14.4 modems.) Since they don't have all the time and effort invested in the technology, they don't need to give up the moral claim of compensating the artist in order to justify their small time and energy investment.
Put it another way: people who just want all their music for free, and want it bad enough to dismiss the moral problems with this, are the ones who got into MP3s 3, 4 years ago. People who just want to use MP3 for convenience and trying out new music (the vastly larger group) are going to wait until it's convenient and easy to find new music. Because you were involved in the MP3 scene years ago, you mistakenly believe that all people are like the first group, when instead 98% of people fit more in the second group. That's why Napster increases CD sales, not decreases them--and why it will increase them more as more and more people begin to use it.
Now onto the Jupiter stuff. This is the last time I'm going to discuss this, as I'm getting tired of explaining a simple study to you. Let me first point out that if, as you say, the study doesn't mean what I say it does, the RIAA would have jumped all over it, just as Napster has jumped all over the RIAA's flawed "college music stores" study. The Napster legal filings are chock full of detailed refutations of the RIAA's one measly study and with evidence from the several independent studies which support their position. The RIAA's legal briefs tend to be silent on the issue...
Not even the press release claimed Napster causes an increase in purchases, that is entirely your imagination. If that is what they meant, they would have said so. Instead, they said "Napster Users Are 45 Percent More Likely to Increase Music Spending".
Yes. Exactly Napster users are 45% more likely to increase music spending than non-Napster users. People who use Napster are more likely than people who don't to be buying more CDs than they used to. Indeed, this goes directly to your point above that the strong economy might be responsible for the increase in music sales. Of course, it is to a very large extent. But correspondingly more of the increase in music sales comes from Napster users than non-users.
And the effect remains even after controlling for all relevant demographic factors. Yes, it's a correlation and not a proof of cause-and-effect, but you can never prove more than correlation. But while we can't see the methodology they used, if the study shows at all what the press release claims it does, then it appears to be about as close to cause-and-effect as one can expect to get.
Much like saying that there is a strong relationship between icecream consumption and drowning, while failing to mention that both are done almost exclusively during the summer.
No...it's like saying that icecream consumers are 45% more likely to drown than non-icecream consumers, even after controlling for factors like season, weather, swimming ability, proximity to a body of water, and previous rate of drowning before icecream was invented.
Although it is true, that they can make some random phone calls, I ask you to consider some of the difficulties.
Virtually every study starts out with random phone calls. It could be that Jupiter convened a focus group (in which case they would offer participants money), but they would still start out with random phone calls to seed the focus groups.
. First, unlike with most of these surveys, the market penetration is low--even lower if you only count regular usage.
20 million people is "low market penetration"?? Especially when you consider that this really means 20 million computers, not 20 million people, this represents and astounding market penetration. Indeed, last I'd heard there were "only" about 50 million households/individuals in America connected to the Internet. Obviously not all 20 million are American, but a large majority probably are.
Let's imagine they want a sample of, say 2k, napster users.
You don't need a sample nearly that high. 500 people is enough for a 5% margin of error on a yes/no question; I don't know the math, but with a quantitative question (how many CD's/month did you buy before/after Napster use), considerably fewer are needed to generate accurate results.
If you assume that less than 1% of the people who answer their phones are napster users, this means they've got to call roughly 20k people.
Based on the above, as many as 40% of American Internet connected PC's have a Napster account on them. After correcting for various factors (non-Americans, multiple accounts, people who haven't used it enough to qualify) I think 20% is a fair estimate. 1% is absurd.
All in all, we're looking at enough calls to get at most 1-2k respondants (including the non-Napster users group). Maybe a bit more so that they have enough data to control for various demographic concerns. Definitely not much larger than your average election poll, or your average study of this type.
Furthermore, whoever said the user is likely to be candid over the phone? Many people will lie about such issues. Many would also LIKE to believe they'd buy more--it is, after all, the partyline. Not so terribly different from what you'd get on IRC.
Most of the 20 million Napster users don't know there is a party line. It's too big a group for there to be such ingrained dogma that a significant number of people will lie over it.
Jupiter did not lie (based on the available facts, though they do depend on the internet's success....mmmm...motive).
That's ridiculous.
The press release is trying to imply that, with their data, napster users are still more willing than the rest of the population to buy RIAA's music [though they do conclude napster does not spell the end for RIAA, that is not supported].
No, it states (not implies) that Napster users are willing to buy more music than they personally did before they used Napster, to a greater degree than the rest of the population. Reading comprehension!
Though I can argue with even that conclusion, it is not necessary because it is really quite meaningless. The only thing fact that might be contested on its face is that income, wealth, age, etc. were not they deciding factor in the increases in the their survey. That sounds pretty reasonable to me, but I've yet to hear of a litmus test for music lovers, other than their historic purchases.
Their historic purchases were controlled for in the study! Reading comprehension!!
As regards the redeeming value of books vs. music conversation, I have to say I think it's getting a bit silly. But here goes anyways:
First and foremost, the issue is what society thinks.
We're miscommunicating here. My entire point was that society should value Napster as much as it does public libraries. I totally agree that society tends to have a knee-jerk bias towards books being more culturally or artistically redeeming than music, especially non-classical music. Part of my point was that this bias is not based in any meaningful distinction and that most knowledgable people would disagree with it, and thus that Napster ought to get as much respect as libraries do, in a fairer world.
You can argue intrinsic worth till you turn blue in the face, but you're not going to prove it to society unless you can back it up with tangibles. When you send kids to the library, they learn to read. When they learn to read and write, their brains develop. The better they can read, the better they can compete in school. Reading improves writing, which improves the ability to handle complex logic. All of these things have definite economic benefits for society.
In fact, one might even argue that, even if libraries were to have some nominally negative impact on the percentage of book sales, a more classically educated public is more economically fit and better able to compete globally. A strong economy would lead to a larger market in all likelihood.
Frankly, I think it's a bit chilling that you seem to think that culture is only socially relevant if it has a measurable positive economic impact! I'm pretty sure most of society agrees with me on this one. In any case, music theory comprehension has been shown to increase mathematical abilities, although it's arguable how much of an effect listening to pop music has on that. On the other hand, just like most of Napster sharing is pop music, most of what libraries check out is "nonredeemable" fiction purely for entertainment value. Sorry, but I doubt you're going to convince me that middle-aged women reading the latest Danielle Steele romance novel is going to enhance our global competitiveness. Yet libraries still manage to hold a cherished position in society.
And finally (phew!) we haven't even touched on the current nature of the recording industry, in which a small oligopoly of record labels controls nearly all of what music is produced, what is heard on the radio, what gets shelf space in stores, and which due to this chokehold on a musician's prospects for success, is able to get away with unconscionable contracts keeping the vast majority of the profits to themselves while keeping most artists--even successful ones--in debt for their entire recording careers. In case you haven't read it before, here's Courtney Love's enlightening speech on the subject. Frankly, after reading this I'm unhappy that Napster promotes CD sales. But thankfully, what Napster also does is loosen the major's grip on the industry, and offers an alternative model for new artists. This can only lead to fairer contracts for musicians choosing to stay within the system.
The big question is whether artists will be able to sell their recordings on their own over the Internet. You would probably argue that Napster makes this type of thing less likely, but I strongly disagree. Because of the math involved in typical record contracts, a band could sell only 1/10 as many albums as before and still come out ahead; Napster could and would provide a forum for new bands to get noticed and appreciated far easier than they could in the old model. Due to Napster's enhanced distribution model (well, and mostly cause it's free), perhaps 5-10 times as many people would download a particular musician's songs as would buy it under the old system. If only 1-2% of them actually paid for the song online or bought a CD direct from them, the artist would come out ahead!
But if Napster is shut down, this type of much needed reform in the music industry would probably get shut down with it. This, of course, is why the fight for Napster is so important morally. The fact that my library analogy is entirely correct is sort of beside the point--it just serves as a means to show that the RIAA's demonization of Napster is counter to commonly accepted principles of society.
I don't remember whether the AHRA "immunity from lawsuit for (legal and illegal) noncommercial copying" applies to all such copying, or only to copying done on crippled SCMS-equipped devices.
From the legal briefs in the Napster case, it appears as though this point is, surprisingly, undecided. The Act itself seems ambiguous on the point, and each side has claimed that Congressional deliberations about the AHRA clearly show that they are right. Judge Patel seems to agree with the RIAA, but I don't think we'll know for sure what the AHRA says until at least after the appeals court is done with it.
It would seem Napster should have an ability for the Napster user community to support and promote their favorite finds. Of course, I'm not a big Napster user so I might be missing an aspect of "community" more savvy Napster users are a part of.
There are three such ways. (Well, two-and-a-half.)
1) You can add any user to your "hot list" (right click their name). This allows you to browse their entire MP3 collection. That way, you can, for example, do a search for your favorite band, and then find out what else people who also like that band listen to. This is my favorite way of discovering totally new music on Napster.
2) Plus they have chat rooms sorted by music genre where you can a) find people to add to your hot list by genre and b) get people's recommendations directly.
2.5) Plus there's instant messaging which can serve the same purposes, although I tend to think it odd when strangers IM me on Napster...
All these are relatively effective ways to discover totally new music that you might be very likely to enjoy, and they all involve at least a modicum of community. In addition, Napster is great for finding sorta-new music, because you can search by artist name only--songs from that band's first album you didn't know about, or B-sides, or live versions of everything, or, best yet, compilations with other artists you hadn't heard before. Yes, a google search will most likely turn up a fan site which contains this information, but Napster just makes it more convenient.
All in all, I'd give Napster about a 6 out of 10 in terms of fostering community, and maybe a 7.5 in terms of introducing one to new music one is likely to enjoy. It's not perfect in these respects, and it's possible to imagine ways it could do better. (Depending on what they are, they would theoretically get them in more legal trouble, but since the judge has ruled they're not entitled to safe-harbor protection as a content-neutral ISP, there might no longer be a reason it would put them in a worse position legally.) Still, I think its community aspects are significant, and its a more effective and convenient way to find good new music than any other I've come across.
doesn't the exemption apply to the whole act?
According to Napster's legal filings, the AHRA makes all noncommercial sharing of audio recordings legal. According to the RIAA's briefs, it only makes it legal when its done on media which have RIAA-taxes imposed, like DAT or those CD-Rs that cost 5 times as much as they should. Napster's argument is that the paragraph in question states "no action shall be brought under this title blah blah blah" (emphasis added), meaning Title 17, which is the entire US Copyright Law--that thus the noncommercial sharing exemption applies to the entire copyright code, not just the AHRA. The RIAA's argument is that in the context of the AHRA, "audio recordings" are considered to only include those recordings which are on RIAA-taxed media. Both sides claim that the deliberations of Congress make it quite clear that their interpretation is correct. In my readings, I have to say the Napster interpretation is more convincing, especially in light of the fact that the RIAA pushed for changes to the copyright law to make Napster illegal just this summer. (If it already was illegal, why bother holding hearings??) On the other hand, IANAL and I am probably biased as well.
I think Napster's really strong argument, however, is that under the Betamax case they only need to be capable of significant noninfringing uses to be ok; since they clearly are, I believe they'll win eventually.
Remember, Napster's defense is that they do not pirate the music themselves, they only provide a service for sharing the files.
Actually, no. If you read Napster's legal filings you will find that this is not their defense. Nor can it be. They are being sued for contributory copyright infringment, not actual copyright infringement, and contributory copyright infringement is an uncontroversial part of copyright law.
Instead, Napster's first line of defense is quite a bit more simple: the sharing of files on Napster is not illegal. No one is breaking the law on Napster, and thus neither is Napster. The basis for this shocking (well, shocking if you get your news from large corporations as most of us do) argument is quite simple: the 1992 Audio Home Recording Act, which quite plainly makes all noncommercial copying of recorded music legal. Since no one is making any money or getting any commercial benefit for sharing their music on Napster, there is no copyright infringement going on, and thus no contributory infringement.
The RIAA is arguing that when the bought and paid for the AHRA in 1992, that wasn't what they meant for it to say. What they meant for it to say was that noncommercial copying was ok only if it was done on DAT, because the other part of the AHRA allowed the RIAA to charge ridiculous royalties on every DAT tape sold to compensate for the loss of royalties due to copying. This isn't what the AHRA actually says, but the recording industry hopes the judge doesn't notice (so far it looks as if she hasn't).
Now, Napster's second line of defense, if the above fails, is to note that a significant portion of the uses of Napster are fair uses. According to the standard set by the Supreme Court in the MPAA vs Sony Betamax case, this is all that is necessary for a provider to be absolved of contributory infringement. (Actually, according to the Betamax case, it is only necessary that the system be capable of substantial noninfringing uses.) There is little doubt that this is true. A surprisingly large portion of Napster traffic is that of unsigned artists/artists who have explicitly allowed their material to be traded. Indeed, there are several times more artists in Napster's "New Artists" program than there are signed by the major labels--and all of them allow trading of their music. Furthermore, many copies of RIAA-copyrighted songs are made for protected fair use purposes, like sampling and space-shifting.
Amazingly enough, Judge Patel managed to get around this point by insisting that it doesn't matter that Napster is capable of substantial noninfringing uses, or even used for substantial noninfringing uses, it only matters that its "primary" use is infringing. No matter that this test was explicitly rejected by the Supreme Court. No mention of how she even figured out that Napster's "primary" use was infringing, except that Napster's internal memos alluded to it. Well, Sony's advertising for the Betamax played up its infringing uses and didn't mention its fair uses, but the Supreme Court ruled that it doesn't matter what the company says, only if the product is also capable of substantial noninfringing uses. Judge Patel doesn't seem to care.
But Judge Patel is going to get overturned on appeal, and that will be sustained by the Supreme Court. Without a new law to replace the AHRA and change the Betamax standard, the RIAA doesn't have a legal leg to stand on. Indeed, they're pushing for such a law now; they held hearings on it a couple months ago, although the Senate wasn't too impressed by the RIAA's whining this time around.
But just so you know, the defense of "it's not us, it's the people using our system" doesn't legally hold water. Luckily all of Napster's other defenses are pretty watertight.
Well congrats. You're friends with a lot of warez d00dz. Unfortunately, this has obviously colored your view of humanity, or at least your view of Internet users. See the thing is, these days the two are getting more and more synonymous. Napster has over 20 million users these days, and chances are only a very very few of them are like your illustrious friends, willing to spend hours of their time working on entirely suboptimal solutions for avoiding paying for a CD. (i.e. downloading MP3s, converting them to .wav and recording on a CD-R. Gak! Talk about a humongous waste of time for a finished product barely more listenable than a tape!)
.wav and recording on a CD-R! God that's funny!) just so they can "save money" and be all b4d4ss. They used to make up a significant proportion of the MP3 sharing community; now the vast majority of MP3 users also buy CD's, and indeed buy more CD's then they did before, as a result of their MP3 collections. For them, for most people, MP3 complements purchased music, not replaces it.
As it turns out, there is apparently a large body of independent evidence backing up my claims that most Napster users engage in significant fair uses like sampling and space-shifting, and that the majority of their "non-fair uses" (if even there are any, since the AHRA explicitly legalizes all noncommercial copying of audio recordings) do not displace purchases which would otherwise be made. The Jupiter study is the only one I can find which has been released to the news media. (Sorry for relying on the press release; the actual study, like all their studies, is only available for a very large fee. However, it's worth noting that this was an independent study, not commissioned by Napster.) However, there are references to many others which substantially agree with the Jupiter study in Napster's court filings. I suggest you read the Opposition to RIAA's Motion for Preliminary Injunction (182 kB PDF) and Napster's Brief Appealing Preliminary Injunction to the Ninth Circuit (216kB PDF) in particular. They not only include quite a lot of information on the various independent studies of Napster (plus the ones commissioned by Napster and the RIAA), but a lot of other data indicating that much if not most Napster traffic is non-infringing, even if the AHRA's safeguarding of non-commercial copying is disregarded, and that Napster use helps CD sales.
Beyond that general statement, I'd like to point out a few specific places where your argument is particularly lacking.
[re: the health of the publishing industry in the face of libraries] It's been empirically proven. The industry is healthy, despite the existence numerous of libraries.
LOL! This in no way precludes the fact that libraries have damaged book sales; all it says is that libraries haven't put the publishers out of business. Meanwhile, not only are the RIAA-member labels "empirically" "healthy", but their profits are the highest they have ever been in history, rising a remarkable 8% in the first half of 2000 over a year earlier, all whilst Napster's user base was ramping from 0 to 20 million! There are probably more Napster users than library users, and the recording industry has never had it this good.
[re: the Jupiter study]I don't see how they could gather a reliable sample. Napster is essentially anonymous, it would be virtually impossible to get a truely random sample here. They obviously did not do a before and after, and most likely it was not random in the least. The biggest hint we get is:
"But when we conducted our consumer survey, controlled for key music purchasing factors-such as existing spending level, age, income, gender, and online tenure-we still found that Napster usage is one of the strongest determinants of increased music buying." If you ever studied statistics, you would know this does not mean anything like: Those who start using napster, start buying more music. Quite the contrary, it means: Those who use napster, are more likely to buy music. In other words, Jupiter looked at a certain population based on the above controls, and determined that those who used napster were 45% more likely to buy CDs than those who appeared the same based on those criteria and did not use the service. The problem with this statistic is that it does not tell you whether or not those same music lovers in the selected populations would be more inclined to use napster and would be self-selecting in the survey. It does not deny the possibility that those users DECREASED their CD purchases since they started using napster
Unfortunately, your reading comprehension is apparently not so good. How, pray tell, do you conclude that Jupiter "obviously did not do a before and after" study when one of the factors they controlled for was "existing spending level"??? When the press release specifically said on numerous occasions that Napster users had "increased" spending levels rather than "greater" or "larger" or "higher" spending levels?? (For the English-challenged "increase" is a verb meaning to become greater or larger; it explicitly implies a period of time and a before-and-after comparison.) And for crying out loud, why on earth would a firm as respected as Jupiter release a study which made the horrifically obvious error of only measuring whether Napster users (i.e. music fans) buy more music than non-Napster users (non-music fans)? And by the way, in case you have never taken a statistics course, it is dreadfully easy to find a random selection of people and to measure their before/after music buying. One simple method for doing so:
1) Call random people on the phone (all telephone-based poll studies are seeded with randomly generated telephone numbers, checked only to make sure they are valid numbers).
2) Ask the person answering if they have ever used Napster. If no, thank them for their time and call someone else.
3) If yes, ask them a variety of questions on their demographic information/Napster using habits/music buying habits. For example, "how many CD's a month did you buy before you started using Napster?" and, "how many CD's a month have you bought since you started using Napster?"
4) Compile and realize that Napster use causes a 45% increase in CD buying over before the same person used Napster.
Obviously you lack experience with the internet and the vast quantities of warez (pirated software) available to those who know how to get it. If you had, you'd know that the warez groups are able to distribute warez out to thousands, and millions, of people with just one copy, in a compressed format, such that if even one byte is corrupt, the entire package is bad. Similar systems could easily be setup within napster, and in fact, there were atleast such groups when I used mp3s more regularly. They took responsibility for ensuring a clean rip and a decent encoding, not to mention distribution [which is largely moot now] With decreased file size sensitivity, these groups could essentially gaurantee very high quality mp3s.
...Combine this with the above mentioned "mp3 group", and it could happen with reliability [i.e., check summing schemes] What's more, these groups can get and distribute the songs before others can even buy them, they don't even half to wait....but people do anyways. I encourage you to look at the warez groups, it may give you a little insight here.
And I encourage you to actually go on Napster, as it will give you a great deal more insight into how songs actually get uploaded these days. Alright, I'll do it for you. Since we've used the new N'Sync CD as our example, I just searched for "It's Gonna Be Me" off of that album. In its current incarnation, Napster is limited to returning 100 results. But of those 100 results, there were fully 40 different filesizes. Thus we find that out of 100 files shared, there were 40 different rips. (To be fair, a couple of these were from N'Sync's performance at the MTV Music Awards; on the other hand, I believe all these live performances had the same filesize, so it's possible we would have gotten more source files if they were excluded.) To make sure that "It's Gonna Be Me" wasn't a bit of a fluke, I did the same experiment with Britney Spears' "Baby One More Time". 60 different source files in the first 100 results. I think this pretty much demolishes your argument. Now let's take a look at why.
You made the comparison to the warez scene and to the early MP3 scene, both of which you are apparently more familiar with than with Napster. First, let's go through the typical process by which a new game gets warezed.
1) A member of a warez cl4n, typically picked out in advance, buys the game the first day it comes out.
2) Then they get out their debugger and their disassembler and get to work. Most games these days ship with either a CD check mechanism or a key input mechanism as copy protection.
3) The cracker determines which is at work, or whether a more novel copy protection scheme has been utilized.
4a) If it's a CD check mechanism, the cracker "simply" needs to find the routine called in memory by the CD check (with his debugger), go there and figure out how it works (with his disassembler), find out where it is called from, and what it calls when the CD check is passed (debugger and disassembler needed here), then go back to the original calling function and hand edit the hex machine code to skip the CD check and call the function called after the check would normally be passed. Also they need to hope the scheme isn't more complicated than this, that the CD isn't expected any other time during the game. Oh, it is? You just need to change all of those functions too. And repackage the game with a new installer which copies files which would have otherwise been left on the CD off it. And maybe edit out any wasteful pieces of code, like video and CD audio tracks, that would make a full HD installation too large. All of this with your hex editor working on assembly or with an editor working on obfuscated decompiled junk. Then you need to test your edited game, make sure all the packaging works and installs correctly, and ship it out.
4b) If it's a key check, well you're in luck--you might be able to bypass it according to the above method. Or maybe you can't. In which case you need to code your own key generator. Don't worry; it's just a matter of finding the key-checking function with your debugger/disassembler, and reverse engineering it. In possibly obfuscated assembly code. What if it's a true cryptographic one-way hash? Well, it's back to square one. If you're lucky, though, you'll be able to figure it out and generate working keys. Now you just need to code that algorithm into your own app, package it with the original game, and ship it out.
5) Where do you post to? Well, you probably ship it to your warez d00dz buddies first, and then maybe you go on IRC for a couple hours to brag and barter for other warez. Or maybe you upload it to a ratio FTP site. Or maybe you post it on your own warez website, in which case you have to set up banner ads which will pay you a lot for click-throughs, because you'll require a password which can only be gotten by clicking on a series of ads.
6) Be sure to include a little text file detailing your crack, shouting out to your warez budz, etc. Sign it with a clever handle, hopefully something with lots of z's and x's. Be sure to include some neat ASCII art to top it off!
Phew. I may have gotten the process a bit off (you might be able to correct me; I was never into the whole BBS/warez scene, although some friends were), but I think it's mostly right. And who actually goes through the trouble to get warez? Kids with a lot of time on their hands. There's emphatically no Napster for warez, so the only way to get some is to have some (i.e. for ratio sites) or to jump through a lot of hoops on IRC or the web. Even if noncommercial software sharing were legal like noncommercial music sharing (it's not; the AHRA explicitly excludes software), little of what goes on in the warez community would qualify; ratio sites, barter exchanges on IRC, and even forced banner ad clicks all qualify as "commercial" under current law (the DMCA). Sharing files on Napster, on the other hand, is not, because there is no quid pro quo exchange.
Alrighty. Now, let's take a look at how the average song gets on Napster.
1) Someone buys a CD.
2) They are one of the millions of people who want to listen to it on their Rio/other portable MP3 player.
3) They rip it using one-click ripping software included with their Rio etc.
4) Some (large) portion of users will have their default MP3 directory shared on Napster; others may have to *gasp* move the file to their Napster directory.
5) Log onto Napster to get more MP3's, and don't even notice that you are sharing a new file.
That's it. In other words, there is a vast vast population (we're talking in the millions) who doesn't have to do anything intentional to provide a source file for Napster. Most of them certainly must realize what's going on, and probably many are slightly proud of providing new source material to Napster, since it's a form of giving back to a great service and community. But they don't have to go out of their way to do so. Furthermore, there is emphatically no subculture surrounding MP3's to increase one's standing in, and no way of signing "your" rips anyways (technically you could use the ID3 tags, although no one ever looks at those). There is no ego boost to doing something that thousands of people are going to do "accidentally" just by using their Rio's and signing on to Napster.
Frankly, your notion of an "MP3 ripping group" is anachronistic and laughable. The proportion of the 20 million Napster users who would even care who ripped their MP3s, much less be impressed by them the way warez kids are by warez clans, is miniscule. And in any case, they are the sort of people you used to hang out with on #mp3--the ones who would trade MP3s just as easily if Napster and every other peer-to-peer program were shut down.
They are the type who will actually buy huge hard drives and work out the technicalities of hooking up real speakers to a computer (or converting MP3's to
Books build on each other and on the mind in a way that music does not [part of the reason why libraries are key]. One can go to a library, and providing they have enough diligence, teach themselves hundreds of usefull things--even more than you think you know. The reader can improve themselves in ways that society can grasp and appreciate.
Music may be marvelous, but it is simply not interchangable with the many forms of books. Society has long placed a preference on reading, and has regarded music as a form of entertainment. Consider, for a moment, what portion of your curiculuum has been dedicated to books versus music. Most likely, your answer is something around 1/40th. If you were told that your kids weren't going to read anymore, but would listen to music in class instead, how would you react? You know damn well how you would react...It's a question of priorities, just one more reason why you can't quite make that analogy.
Books are more informational than music. Books have several academic uses that music has no analogue for. There is no musical equivalent to the textbook. However, the majority of library check-outs are for entertainment and artistic pleasure, and from a cultural or artistic perspective, there is no arguing that books are any more or less "superior" than music. As for why literature is more often studied in schools than is music, it's generally for the following reasons:
1) Music, like visual art, is more difficult to appreciate than are books. Most music is either not terribly artisticly redeeming, or is too subtle and complex for serious study much below the college level.
2) Furthermore, books tend to be more concrete and thus easier to teach than music or visual art. It's easier to write a paper on a book than a song, especially when you have more practice with the first. This doesn't mean they're any less worthy of individual study or appreciation, though.
3) Habit and prejudice.
In any case, there is no good argument that fictional books are more socially redeeming than music, and no good argument why we should have an almost infinite selection of (government-subsidized no less!) free books while we have to either pay for music or listen to the 150 predetermined hits/year the RIAA purchases radio time for.
Has nothing to do with being a leech or a jerk or anything, but rather with the way Gnutella (or at least the version I have) works/is programmed. You see, the beauty and the curse of Gnutella is that, unlike Napster, it turns everyone's computer into their own server. Which is great for avoiding the fate that may befall Napster and other centralized databases, except that it means that each computer must do a string search through its own database of shared files with each search request made to the system. The way I set up Gnutella originally, that meant searching through a couple thousand files a couple hundred times a second. Furthermore, unlike Napster, that version of Gnutella didn't have the option to limit the number of simultaneous downloads from your system--thus, I would have 20 or more people downloading from me at a time, all whilst I may or may not have been downloading.
The upshot of all this is, Gnutella makes your computer act like a real file server, and most people's computers aren't cut out for that. I don't know if it was a bug in that particular version of Gnutella (Win32, 0.52) or what, but it was causing my system to seriously chug. As in, CPU utilization at 100%. I couldn't play MP3s without serious skipping, couldn't browse the web without noticable slowdowns. Even my system clock started running slow!
Now, it could have just been my system, and it could have been a bug which has since been fixed, but it was seriously unacceptable. Since then I've used Gnutella much much less, and often decide not to share when I do (or I share a smaller folder).
It does not have anything to do with my not being willing to share, or being a freeloader. If this is an inherent limitation of the way Gnutella distributes its file serving, then the problem will go away soon with more powerful computers; if (more likely) it was just an implementation bug, it is probably fixed by now. In fact, I think I'll go check...
Very interesting post. I especially liked this part:
/. That is, I was pointing out that not only has our society traditionally put a very high value on the ability to freely redistribute and share copyrighted works, but that it allows a service very similar to Napster to operate when the traded material is books. Not only allows it to operate, but if fact operates it itself, subsidizes it, and lauds it as the epitome of what's good about the world and such.
The only questions left deal with volume.
1) Will more works be created (beneficial) if copyrights exist than would be created and improved upon (beneficial) if copyrights did not.
2) If works are copyrightable, what copyright laws will encourage the optimal ratio of creation (benefical) to harm caused to society by the inability to freely redistribute and modify those works (harmful)
You've really done a great job here of distilling all the relevant tradeoffs into two short sentences. All I was doing with this thread was pointing out the second half of your second sentence, which seemed to have gone unmentioned in most of the Napster good/bad discussions on
Of course, this is without even considering whether technology, by changing the act of copying from something expensive, available only to a select few--something that would only be undertaken for commercial reasons--to something essentially free, available to all and worth undertaking for noncommercial and even selfless reasons, has raised the potential benefits of allowing free redistribution such that the balance copyright seeks to strike must be shifted to once again reflect the best interests of society. Interesting article at Motley Fool on this subject; this was posted elsewhere in this discussion, but I'd be interested to see what you might have to say about it.
IIRC the libraries here have a limit of a few hundred items at any one time. I think that it was only set because of businesses (notably day cares) checking out entire sections of the library and renewing them as much as possible. But most people don't run into that.
Interesting info. In any case, not only is it irrelevant to how individuals use a library (as you point out), there is a vital legal difference as well, at least from the point of view of how Napster is defending themselves. That is, a day care checking out entire sections of the library would be a commercial use of the library, whereas Napster is arguing that it ought to be legal because it is only used for non-commercial use. Well, actually all Napster has to prove is that they have a substantial noninfringing use, and according to the AHRA and most copyright law, non-commercial use qualifies.
Of course, now I'm getting offtopic since I meant this thread to discuss the moral implications of Napster, not the legal ones. Oh well--thought it was a sorta interesting point anyways.
Library's have been proven not to be a great threat to the sale of books.
Where has this been proven? Can you show me some evidence?? The fact is that libraries would continue to enjoy wide public support even if they were shown to hurt book sales, because they provide an undeniable public benefit, just as Napster does.
The same cannot be said, that napster will not hurt the sale of records.
In fact much more can be said: Napster actually helps the sale of records.
And while you may try to refute that sales will actually be hurt, that is unproven, and highly doubtful.
No it's not. Read the link. (I've included it several times in this thread, but you seem to have never clicked on it.) In case you're wondering, Jupiter Communications is one of the most respected media research and analysis in the world.
As that article in the Atlantic Monthly pointed out, CD sales around college campuses were down [though not in huge numbers], while national sales were up. This fact alone is cause for concern, or at least question.
Yes it is. Luckily, these questions have been answered. The research at issue was part of a study bought by the RIAA to use at the trial. Fortunately, there are myriad problems with its seemingly negative conclusions. Most egregiously, the study failed to take into account purchases of CDs at online stores like CDNow. Due to the fact that college students are among the most wired and moreover among the most likely to purchase items online of any demographic, this failing very likely explains entirely the fall in "college music store" sales. Further supporting this conclusion is the fact that the study found sales at "college music stores" fell more in the year before Napster came out than in the year after!! Thus the most likely conclusion to be drawn from this RIAA-sponsered study is that 1) online stores like CDNow and amazon.com have taken sales from record stores near college campuses, but 2) Napster has spurred CD sales enough amongst college students to partially reverse the trend.
And in any case, despite what you may believe, the average Napster user is *not* a college student. Besides, speaking from my own experience as a college student, Napster has actually limited my recent CD purchases, because I don't currently own a stereo besides my computer. Once I move out of my tiny dorm room into an apartment, though, you can bet I'll buy a good stereo, and plenty of CD's--many of them purchases I would never have made had I not had my enjoyment of different types of music enhanced by Napster.
Napster traffics the most popular songs in almost instantly, and theoretically, only one purchase needs to be made for this to happen!
Oh come on. For one thing, there are something like 100 different (unconnected) Napster servers, and most users are only logged on a small fraction of the time, so in any real world situation hundreds of source copies are necessary to cause any particular song to be available on Napster even remotely reliably. But this is all besides the point. Are you honestly telling me that only 1 (or very few) of Napster's 20 million users went out and bought, eg. the new N'Sync CD which sold 2.4 million copies in its first week? Obviously not. This is totally, patently absurd and has nothing to do with whatever real effect Napster has on CD sales.
Something like 90% of the mp3s listed on there are redundant--only the most recent and currently popular songs.
Just logged onto Napster now, and it's showing 765,685 songs being shared on this particular server alone. If we accept your 90% figure (I'd guess 95% is closer to the truth, but whatever), that means people are sharing over 75,000 unique songs at this moment on that server alone!! In comparison, the RIAA ensures that only 150 new songs get radio play in any given year. 150. So let's see which avenue of free music is more culturally enriching and offers more avenues away from the "most recent and currently popular songs":
radio--150 songs a year
Napster--75,000 songs at any given time
Hmm...looks like society and the spread of worthwhile art come out about 500 times better with Napster than with the old way of getting free music. Indeed, that 75,000 songs represents almost three times as many songs as are released by the major labels in an entire year! That's right--the major labels only released around 2,600 albums in 1999; meanwhile, over 3,000 artists have explicitly released their music for distribution over Napster (and an additional 14,000 have given their permission by joining Napster's new artist program). Let me restate that for you: there have been more songs expressly released to Internet public domain sharing since Napster debuted than there have been songs distributed by the major labels in the same time period.
And you want to claim that Napster consists only of "the most recent and currently popular songs"? Are you joking or just remarkably ignorant???
You're going to have a hard time arguing that music enriches the mind to the same extent that a good book does, especially when it's pop music!
Well now you've really made an idiot of yourself. Suffice it to say that no one with any appreciation of art or culture--least of all writers of important literature--would ever claim inherent superiority for any one particular medium of art over all others. In fact, most knowledgable people would argue that particular pieces of music can be every bit as expressive, enriching, artistic and important as the greatest works of literature, much less the trashy romance novel drivel which makes up the plurality of check outs at the typical public library. Nevermind Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms (although you can certainly find not only their works but those of almost every classical composer of note on Napster); nevermind even the great impact of jazz, argued by many to be the most important artistic movement of the 20th Century. There are plenty of challenging, important, "mind enriching" works of art to be found even amongst today's pop music. Any attempt to compare the artistic worth of the typical piece of fiction on the New York Times Bestseller List to, just to take a very successful and rather mainstream pop album, Radiohead's masterful Ok Computer, is laughable. For crying out loud, look at that list! It's all romance novels and police thrillers, with some battle-the-Antichrist born-again lit thrown for variety (#11). You have to go all the way to #16 (off the official list) to even find an important author. And this is without taking into account the NYT's recently spun-off Harry Potter Bestseller List.
The average piece of new fiction sold today is almost certainly of lower cultural and artistic value some of the most popular new music. Sorry to destroy your illusions, but the average book checked out of a public library is probably of even lower quality.
But that's besides the point. The point of all this isn't to engage in cultural snobbery and certainly not to censor based on it. Despite, probably because of, the fact that libraries check out millions of copies of trashy romance novels a day, they are still vital institutions to society, providing important positive functions to their communities. Exactly the same, if not more, can be said of Napster.
On a side note, if you really don't believe that music can be as enriching as written words, you probably just haven't heard enough good music. Start exploring.
Well, my argument is that libraries and Napster are the same functionally, not legally, so your post is sort of OT. My argument revolves around the fact that people use books in a different way than how they use CD's; thus while having to give back the book is not a restriction on getting full enjoyment out of it (you've already read it!), having to give back the CD is. Perhaps that's why checking out books is by far the more popular library function than checking out CD's. Still, I'll answer your questions in case you were wondering.
OK, I get the gist of the argument here, but let's expand the comparison. Besides books, I can check out a CD from my library. I can stuff it in my CD-ROM and copy to my CD-Write.
Q#1: If I only make a copy for my personal use, ie, non-commercial, is that legal or not? Think carefully before answering!
Depends. If you make a copy onto a CD-R which you bought at a record store, and which has the vile RIAA tax added on (i.e. if your CD-R cost $4 instead of $.50), then it is completely legal, persuant to the AHRA. If you copy it onto a CD-R which you bought at a computer store, then it may or may not be legal; indeed, one of the primary legal issues of the current Napster case is whether the AHRA's blanket legalization of all non-commercial audio copying applies to all media (as the act seems to say), or only to those which have had the RIAA royalty tax applied (as the act seems to imply). If it's the former, then it is also legal for you to rip the CD to another non-RIAA taxed medium--your hard drive. If it's the latter, it's probably not.
Q#2: How is this different than Napster? Think carefully again...
See the beginning of my comment for why my argument is that Napster is more closely analagous to checking out books, and not CD's, from the library. Having said that, it's slightly different from Napster in a couple ways. First off, you're getting a functionally perfect copy of the CD, not the functionally disabled copy you get with MP3. Second, the reason it just feels slimier than getting the songs off Napster probably has more to do with the fact that you're using a service in a way other than it was intended, rather than with any true moral or legal problems involved (although there may be some for the above reasons). After all--you wouldn't feel strange or immoral for photocopying a chapter out of a book you has checked out--why should you feel bad for copying a track off a CD?
IIRC, the i860 and i960 have done ok. Since they were RISC chips from Intel that weren't x86 compatible no one as far as I know used them as a main CPU. They were mainly used as co-processors or embedded cpus.
Exactly. If you read the linked article, you'd find out that for a time Intel intended on marketing the i860 as a main CPU, and using it to take on the established RISC-Unix server/workstation market. However, after much hype, the final product performed quite poorly, and the chip had to tone its ambitions down to use as a lowly math co-processor.
I remember correctly (it's been a long thread) you mentioned that early on publishers tried to put libraries out of existence. Are you aware of any articles or published works that describe those efforts?
I mentioned that I thought I remembered hearing such a thing. I'm pretty sure I did, but don't have any evidence to point you to. I was rather hoping someone else would steer me to such evidence; as they haven't it might be worth considering that I remembered incorrectly on this point...
I also wanted to say that from my experience living with an avid reader and library patron, that dedicated library patrons NEVER buy books. My wife reads approximately four books a week and in the twenty years we have been married she has never bought a single book. So the idea of your antagonist here that libraries are an inferior version of Napster from the standpoint of availability or that they libraries encourage people to buy books, at least from my experience, is unfounded in practice. She may have to wait a few weeks for some latest and greatest novel to wend its way through the "on hold" list, but hell there are 89 other trashy novels to read in the meantime so it's not a problem. Does the phrase "why would they buy it, if they can get if for free" ring a bell?
That was my impression, but it's nice to have it confirmed by someone who's more familiar with libraries than me. Meanwhile, we have factual evidence that just the opposite is true with Napster. And yet people who donate trashy novels to the local public library are looked up to as good samaritans, while someone posting a difficult-to-find and musically important song to Napster is a scum-sucking pirate!
I have gone back and forth on my feelings about Napster. I do use it extensively and feel that for the first time in my life I finally have the same kind of access to music that avid readers have always enjoyed because of the existence of libraries. The only people who have had this kind of access to music before were either extremely wealthy or were somehow attached to the music industry (radio people, music reviewers, etc.) I now essentially have the same or better access to music for research or just plain out of curiosity purposes and this is a great thing. If I wanted to listen to every version or cover of a particular song I like I can do that now. It has really increased my appreciation and knowledge of music immensely.
Then don't feel guilty about it! (As long as you buy the CD/compensate using fairtunes the artists you really appreciate!) The fact that you're so fraught with doubt about something that you recognize has significantly impacted your life for the better shows just how successful the RIAA has been in demonizing Napster.
Can you imagine how even less literate our culture would be now if all reading was pay per view? In fact, using this logic, it might explain the relatively low musical taste of the mass culture. When one has to buy every piece of music one wants to listen to it discourages taking a lot, or any, chances when buying CD's.
A very insightful point. In my experience, most people still get their books from stores, not libraries, but the fact that one can browse a book to your heart's content before buying it probably does have a lot to do with the risks we take on interesting literature.
However, I do worry about the artist conpensation aspects of the Napster controversy. I don't think this whole composing and producing for tips idea will fly.
It will be interesting to see. Personally, I'm supporting fairtunes and trying to give it a chance. Still, it's worth noting that that's not the only way for artists to make money in a world of unrestricted MP3 flows. For one thing, many if not most people will probably still choose to support those artists they really enjoy, even if they can get their music for free. For another, artists could include various other un-Napsterable incentives along with buying their CD, like first dibs on the best concert seats. In addition, artists are beginning to experiment with a model in which they would announce that they have, for example, just finished recording an album, but they won't release it until they get x preorders--enough to cover their costs and maybe get some profit for themselves. Even if the total number of sales is lower than it would have been under the old system, the fact that the Internet is allowing musicians to bypass the big labels means that the artists can make much more money even with much lower volume sales. And finally, the sound quality of a CD played out of a real stereo will beat MP3 for the forseeable future.
Err...how many times do you read a book? Once. Thus, even if it was faded the first time, there's no benefit to you to go out and buy a brand new copy, because you're done with it.
With music, on the other hand, you listen to it lots of times. Thus, you always have an incentive to upgrade to the better quality copy you get from buying the CD. Which is part of the reason why Napster causes people to buy more CD's than they would otherwise and libraries cause people to buy fewer books. Your argument is both theoretically poor and factually invalidated.
Not being up to snuff in SPECfp is a marketing problem. Considering the chip is being marketed to Database Admins and not Quake Players, it's not so much a real world problem. (Where the lack of cache would be.)
The SPEC suite is heavily biased towards server/workstation apps. SPECint, for example, is moderately biased towards database benchmarking. Indeed, while SPECfp may have little to do with database speed, it also has nothing to do with Quake--it tests entirely double-precision floating point, while 3D engines tend to use exclusively single-precision floats. In any case, all the SPEC tests are known for testing cache hierarchy gruelingly.
In short, SPEC scores are entirely relevant to a chip's database performance, as well as its web serving performance, and most certainly to its performance in scientific and workstation applications. These are the fields Intel is pushing for Itanium, and the fact that it will not outperform its desktop chips on the SPEC benchmarks means it will probably never be released. What SPEC is particularly not good at measuring is desktop application performance (unless you include compiling as a desktop PC activity); the only truly desktop-oriented benchmark in the entire suite is a speech-recognition test.
Itanium's performance (or lack thereof) is indeed a huge real-world problem.
This effect does apply to Napster - people use it similarly to a library. I'll accept that part of the argument.
:)
Good that we agree on something.
What you're forgetting is that Napster gets new material faster than libraries, and has a larger selection.
The faster argument is true and somewhat valid, although I'm not aware of anything inherent in the way libraries are organized (or the law regarding libraries) which prevents them from getting recently published books quickly. While the publishing industry may not like it, I doubt many people would argue that such a change would make libraries the plague on society that Napster is often protrayed to be, though.
As for the larger selection argument, I'm not sure I buy that. I still maintain that a decent public library will have many more unique titles than Napster has unique songs at any given time, and that inter-library loan means that any library can get any book ever published--an argument that cannot be made for Napster. On the other hand, there are many more books than songs published in a year, and my view of libraries' selections may be biased by the fact that I live within walking distance of the second largest library in the world...
The other thing is that the music industry doesn't care that the music quality on MP3 is inferiour to CD quality - they're afraid of what MP4 and MP5 might sound like! As technology gets better, tradable music will start sounding better and better. It will probably get larger and larger, but disk drive tech will probably keep up with them.
Another valid concern, which was why I was careful to preface "Napster" with "in its current form" in my original post. Still, the largest problems with the MP3 listening experience do not revolve around the quality of the codec. Rather they revolve around the physical nature of computers as beasts not very well suited for music reproduction. The first problem is the quality of computer speakers--compared to real speakers, they are underpowered, unbalanced, and compromised by their plastic housing, magnetic shielding, and small size. In additon, the typical listener placement--about 2 feet away--is very much less than ideal. Most of these problems can be overcome, but mainly only by added cost, larger size, and better materials. Moore's law doesn't apply to speakers, unfortunately. And while medium-quality speakers are finally becoming available for computers (Klipsch et. al.), I doubt they'll work their way into the mainstream for quite a while. People will hang on to their stereos as the best sound equipment in their house.
Second, the inside of a PC is inherently a very noisy environment, one not designed for handling sound. CD-ROM's, sound cards, internal and external wiring are all designed with parts too cheap to find their way into any decent stereo, and the added electrical noise of a motherboard and a GHz CPU is like putting your stereo in your microwave and trying to play CD's. Yet this is the environment in which a CD has to get ripped, and an MP3 decoded and played. This is not likely to change anytime soon either. So while file size may go up (and I doubt we'll see anything better than 192 kbps MP3 widely accepted for at least the next few years), the real obstacles to computers replacing stereos in terms of audio quality are physical, not virtual.
Even disregarding all that, I simply don't think computers will replace stereos in most peoples homes from a cultural point of view any time soon. Web-enabled stereo components are certainly a possibility, but that's far enough afield and offers enough possibilities for regulation short of shutting down Naptser that I don't think it impacts our conversation too much.
Anyone remember Intel late unlamented 432? The things with Itanium sound awfully familiar...
Or the i860.
No, article should read: IBM notices Itanium is dead.
Heads up, folks: Itanium is never going to come out in volume. It's years late and horribly underperforming.
The design was finished over two years ago, but it took Intel over a year to go from finished design to tapeout. This indicates that the original design ran into huge problems and required many many revisions when they tried to translate it to actual silicon. The total on-die cache of Itanium is paltry a 128kB, less even than the crippled cache on a Celeron; this indicates that the core logic of the chip took up much much more die space than they planned, and they only had enough room for a token cache. (As the chip is an in-order design and its primary functions involve high data throughput, it needs more low-latency cache than an out-of-order chip, not less.) As recently as 2 months ago Intel was claiming they'd be selling Itanium systems by now. That would mean volume production of 800 MHz and higher chips. At Linuxworld last week, only 1 of the demonstrated systems had chips running over 500 MHz. That means Intel is having some serious, serious problems with their fabbing--they can't even get a couple demonstration chips running at 800 MHz, much less volume production. Think about that for a second--Itanium is supposed to be Intel's new flagship server chip, yet they can't even give it as much on-die cache or even as high clock speeds as their slowest Celeron?? Talk about embarrassing.
All these signs, plus Intel's ever-increasing delays on the chip, point to the fact that Itanium ran into design problems so serious that the project is in fact dead. Since they've built up so much hype behind it, though, Intel will keep announcing delays until they can finally claim that the reason they're not debuting Itanium in volume is because McKinley is just around the corner. (Expect a McKinley paper launch in 2H '01, with volume by the beginning of '02.) Indeed, some rather credible rumors eminating out of Intel now include that 1) Itanium is yielding so poorly that a relayout and critical path trim will be needed before it could possibly yield 800 MHz in volume; 2) the current versions are suffering from an errata in the power management circuitry which is limiting their clock speeds; and 3) Itanium is in fact yielding ok, but the extraordinarily complex compilers needed for EPIC are currently producing such slow code that Intel needs to pretend they can't make the chips to save face. Obviously all three aren't true, but the chance that one is is pretty high.
Meanwhile, McKinley (which, not so coincidentally, has been designed almost entirely by HP) looks on target to hit its rather impressive performance objectives, if a little late. MS--whether by choice or necessity--has decided to wait for McKinley before releasing NT-64, rendering Itanium pretty much dead anyways. If the compilers turn out ok, McKinley will probably be able to compete on a performance basis with Sun's US3, and maybe even IBM's Power4. (The Alpha 21364 will cream it, but what else is new?) Meanwhile, Itanic looks to be slower than a Celeron for integer code and about even with a high-end P3 for fp; the P4 if not the GHz P3 ought to beat it handily even in the rather server-oriented SPEC suite. Having your $3000 server chip beat in SPECfp by your mainstream desktop chip is an embarrassment Intel will never allow, even if that means not releasing Itanium at all.
Who would buy such a chip? Almost no one. The only Itanium boxes ever sold will be to ISV's who need development platforms for McKinley, and large corporations who want to prepare for McKinley. And they can all be served by development systems and engineering samples; there's no need for volume production of a chip that's only going to be used for development and validation.
And that's why this announcement is not a surprise. IBM accomplishes four things with this: 1) they associate themselves more with Linux, which is becoming a bigger part of their strategy these days; 2) they disassociate themselves from the Itanic, which is a bit of an industry joke; 3) they shift the emphasis to their upcoming Power4 architecture, which looks to be quite good and a worthy competitor to anything IA-64 will produce for a while; and 4) they still keep IA-64 compatability for the future, albeit less emphasized from a PR point of view.
All in all a smart decision. And not a surprising one.