Sorry about my combative tone in the previous post. I was fed up with seeing the same misconceptions repeated over and over as fact, and I decided to pick on you. And I got a bit carried away, in that while most of what I said is undebatable fact, there is certainly some leeway in the way the AHRA can be interpreted. That is, it explicitly makes all non-commercial copying of recorded music legal, but elsewhere in the Act it places an automatic "RIAA-tax" royalty on blank recordable media--DAT at that time, and some CD-R's now.
The implicit assumption was that this way, at least the RIAA wouldn't lose any money on non-commercial copying. (It does, however, blow away any argument you and Lars may have that copyright entitles you to know and control exactly what happens to your music at all times.) The "problem" is that in the digital world, all media are created equal. That is, we no longer need a special medium built just to carry recorded music--anything which accepts 1's and 0's works equally well. Thus, since the RIAA couldn't possibly ask for royalties on hard drive sales, since hard drives can be used to hold anything, including music, then the tradeoff they thought they engineered into the law goes away. IMO, this in no way negates the fact that the law explicitly states that all non-commercial copying of recorded music is fair use, but there are those who would disagree.
So, to answer your question, the law at issue is the 1992 Audio Home Recording Act. ( 1008 is particularly relevant.) If you asked any Constitutional copyright law expert, they would probably tell you that was not a "change" but in fact a codification of existing copyright law--that if anything, the AHRA was a setback for consumer fair use rights, because of the assuption that non-commercial copying could only be "bought" in exchange for a tariff on blank media, and that it was only legal for recorded music and not all copyrighted materials. Of course, if you asked a corporate copyright attorney they'd probably tell you the opposite.
the fact remains that distribution of someone's art without their permission is wrong. If you believe otherwise, you truly belong in Stallman's academic socialist cults.
Ever been to a public library? Do you think they're morally "wrong"??
You do realize that a public library redistributes the work of thousands of authors without their permission and without compensating them, don't you??
Yes, there is one inherent difference between a library and Napster: when you take a book out of a library, you only get to read it once before you have to return it; with MP3s, you get to choose to keep the recording on your computer for as long as you want. Of course, the way people use books is totally different from the way they use songs--they usually read a book only once; if they do reread a book, they only do so after many years (and you can always check a book out of the library again and reread it later).
The end point is that a library performs exactly the same function as Napster--it allows one person who has purchased a copyrighted work of art to non-commercially donate it so that many people can use it for free in the way that such works of art are traditionally used by those who buy them. For all the same reasons as why libraries have not hurt sales of books, Napster will not and has not hurt sales of CD's. And for all the same reasons as why donating your books to your local library is an good deed and a benefit to your community, ripping CD's and sharing the MP3's on Napster is a good deed and a benefit to the worldwide community of Internet users. (Or is donating a book to the library only a good deal to those of us in "socialist cults"?? Hee hee hee.)
I damn well better have a way of making sure that I'm not losing CD sales to kids on fucking Napster. You may care less if the artists whose work you steal starve,
ask any professional musician what they think of the idea, and they won't like it.
Why don't you ask the Smashing Pumpkins what they think of it? Or Limp Bizkit? Or Chuck D? Or the Offspring? Or Courtney Love? Or Ben Folds Five? Or Eve 6?
I suppose Neil Young and Radiohead aren't professional musicians??? Nor the Greatful Dead??
All these musicians and more are on the record pledging support for Napster. Of course, many musicians are on the record as being against Napster as well. (Metallica, Dr. Dre, Eminem, Alanis Morrisette, etc.) The point is, just as none of these professional musicians can pretend to speak for each other, you or the RIAA very most certainly cannot. If you ask me, it matters much more what the Constitution and the Supreme Court record say, and it chooses my side over yours; but the point that even professional musicians (who, I might add, might be very reluctant to publically go against the RIAA even if they do support Naptser) are split on the issue ought to tell you something about the recording industry you're so desperately trying to ply as a moral good.
[If you rip a CD and share it on Napster]...you're just a lowly pickpocket.
Well, no. If your analogy made any sense, then to be correct it would be "you're just like Robin Hood"--that is, you're "stealing" something for the purposes of selflessly giving it to others.
Disregarding that, I have trouble believing that you cannot understand the difference between true theft, which involves taking a scarce good which cannot be replaced, and "unauthorized" copying, which involves making more of a non-scarce good without taking anything from anyone. (As for the argument that it takes away "sales", see above.)
To anyone who makes a living from the music industry, Napster is the digital equivalent of the LA riots.
Come on. If by "anyone who makes a living from the music industry" you mean a recording label executive, then I'd say it's the digital equivalent of the Boston Tea Party, if not the Montgomery Bus Boycott. If by "anyone who makes a living from the music industry" you mean a musician, then the suggestion that having your art spread to thousands more people than was otherwise possible is equivalent to having the corner market in which you have invested all your savings and decades of your life looted and burned is patently ridiculous and extremely insulting.
In the meantime, I'm going to go investigate the validity of your statements, and if what you say is true, today is a grim day for The_Messenger.
This is what really bothers me about your approach to this issue: you truly believe that creating something gives you the right to control every possible way that thing is ever used. Luckily, our intellectual property laws are not founded on such a ludicrous and unworkable premise.
And so I ask you: why on earth would such a day be so horribly grim??
From what you've told us about yourself, you're a musician; I'm going to assume, then, that you're also a music lover. Taking each position in turn, then...
As a musician, whose songs might be traded on Napster: Are you signed by a recording label?? If so, my sincere congratulations--only a small fraction of professional musicians are. Even if you are, though, I'm assuming that you're not one of the several-dozen-artists-per-year who is actively promoted to the mainstream public through label-directed radio play. Thus, by having your songs traded via Napster, you gain an incredible free promotional service which was never before available. Indeed, before Napster many up-and-coming artists had to buy copies of their own CD's to give them away in promotional record "clubs" like BMG and Columbia House (yes, the artist, not the label, pays for those copies)--now with Napster many more signed artists can reach many times more people for free! Plus, unlike a record club, someone who downloads your song from Napster and likes it is very likely to buy your entire CD; with a record club, they already have the CD, and usually have no idea that they are taking money from the artist's pocket instead of the other way around.
If you're not signed, then (should your recordings somehow find their way to Napster without your permission) you obviously have nothing to lose. You probably won't make any money off the deal, but you will have the satisfaction of spreading your art to thousands and potentially even more people, which ought to be the main goal of any real artist. Incidentally, in this case you ought to look into putting your music on something like mp3.com--it probably won't make you too much money, but it'll get you some income, expose your music to a huge listener base, and do so without putting you in debt for life to a recording label, which a record contract would most likely do.
As a music lover: Suddenly, you have access to Napster, the world's largest collection of music--perhaps the world's largest collection of art in history. Why don't you try it out? Download the software, fire it up...search for an artist you particularly love. Maybe you'll find live recordings you'd never have heard otherwise. Maybe you'll find out about an album they did that you'd never heard, or find remixes they'd done to others' music/had done to theirs.
Now, click on a user who has one of their songs and add them to your hotlist; then go to your hotlist and browse their shared library. Maybe you'll find songs you'd heard before and maybe even wanted to purchase but had forgotten to. Almost certainly you'll see lots of songs and artists you've never heard of. Download a couple. Try them out. Maybe you'll like them, maybe not.
Maybe you'll discover a new band that will speak to you. Given a few attempts at this, you probably will. Search for more of their stuff. Maybe you'll want to buy their CD, so you can listen to it on a real stereo. If you're a musician and appreciate sound quality, you probably will. Either way, if the music is really good you should ensure that the artist earns some money off of your enjoyment (no, buying the CD does **NOT** do ensure anyone gets any money except the label): donate $5 or $10 to them at fairtunes.com.
Suddenly you'll realize that today wasn't a grim day after all: you'll realize that it maybe changed the way you listen to music, maybe opened some new doors. Maybe slightly changed your life for the better.
And then that's when you'll start sharing the music you love with other people on Napster, so that they might search through your music library and find something that speaks to them like it speaks to you. That's when you'll realize that using Napster isn't about greed or whining or rationalizing, but is about sharing art, about finding new artistic experiences.
Let's face it: stealing is easy. If they wanted to, anyone with half a brain could steal (say) a Porsche a lot more easily than they could earn even a portion of the money it costs. The point is, most people don't steal if there's an alternative.
On the other hand, people don't like being taken advantage of. But that's what they are under both the current music-obtaining model, in which they are forced to pay $18 for an album, without getting the chance to listen to it first, even if they only want one song off it (if they want a digital copy of it so they can listen to it in their Rio, or upload it to their computer at work, they have to rip it themselves or they're out of luck), or under any new model which will pass the RIAA's SDMI requirements.
People like to reward things which impact their lives, which is why I think sales of unfettered MP3's for fair prices would take off if they were as convenient and centralized as Napster. And which is why I think fairtunes.com will grow tremendously in the meantime. I know I've already remunerated several artists whose MP3's I've had for a while and really enjoyed, and I plan on giving more soon.
Given the horriffic way artists are treated by the current system, I have a hard time imagining why anyone cognizent of the proven positive impact Napster has on people's willingness to pay for recorded music could view it as anything but a boon to music lovers everywhere. So why don't you explain to me why you're so against it?
the legal, ethical, "right" thing to do, which is to jump through the music management industry's hoops and use controlled distribution, management, and playback mechanisms.
Huh??? The ethical thing to do is to get your music from Napster (or copy the CD if you need higher quality), and then directly pay those artists whose music you really enjoy via something like fairtunes.com. That way, you get to exercise your fair use right to try-before-you-buy, and a $5 donation via fairtunes is over 5 times as much as the artist would get in royalties had you spent $18 for the CD. Plus, you can do your part by sharing the music which is important to you with the rest of the world.
Happily, because of the AHRA this is every bit as legal as doing what the RIAA would have you do: buy all new devices to pay-per-listen to lower quality music which denies you your Constitutional fair use rights, all in the name of perpetuating the RIAA's obscene profits and stranglehold over the distribution of music they had no part in creating. I think it's pretty obvious which approach is the more ethical one.
To a musician, making their recorded, copyrighted work available to others at no charge is tanamount to theft of their livlihood and art.
So if I make a musician's recorded, copyrighted work available to others at no charge by playing my new CD for a room of my friends, that's theft?
Or if I make a musician's recorded, copyrighted work available to others at no charge by making a mix tape (or mix CD-R) out of CD's I own, that's theft?
Well, so maybe that wasn't meant to say. But I bet you think what you meant to say was something like, if I make a musician's recorded, copyrighted work available to others by offering my computer's services to send them a copy of it at no charge, monetary or otherwise, then that's theft. Right? Cause then you said:
And yes, it's illegal.
Well no, it's not.
All three of the above activities were explicitly made legal by Congress with the 1992 Audio Home Recording Act. The last was specifically reaffirmed in the 1998 Digital Millenium Copyright Act, which had the opportunity to change the rules regarding non-commercial copying of (copyrighted) musical recordings, but instead just chose to redefine "non-commercial" to include any explicit quid pro quo exchange. Notice that that means the sort of activity which goes on on Napster--that is, "making a recorded, copyrighted work available to others at no charge--is explicitly protected by the law.
I think the difference between the Napster debacle and something like alcohol prohibition is that prohibtion took a legal product (alcohol) and made it illegal.
Is that what you think. The actual fact is that the Napster case...err, "debacle" is precisely akin to suing someone for serving alchohol in the years prior to prohibition. Indeed, just a few weeks ago Congress took what would be the first step towards making the trading which takes place on Napster--which, again, is currently legal pursuant to the AHRA--and making it illegal. They held hearings on the matter, thus giving the RIAA the opportunity to try to buy their 4th (by my count) major anti-constitutional extension of copyright law in the last decade. Happily, current indications are that Congress has decided 3 laws bought and paid for was enough for now. Maybe it's just that even today 20 million constituants are worth more than 20 million dollars.
So, nice try, but no cigar. Of course, your insistance on emphasizing that these aren't just any recordings, but *COPYRIGHTED!!* recordings, should have been the first tipoff that you have absolutely no idea what you are talking about. Guess what: copyright means a great deal less than you must think. And thank god it does, because *every* recorded utterance--whether it's the Post-It note I jot down, my answering machine message, or (heh heh) the playlist I just made in Winamp--is automatically copyrighted. That's right: that time I recorded myself farting into my computer's microphone is afforded exactly the same precious copyright protections as Lars and James' latest post-structuralist masterwork. Even though Metallica's may be a creation of perfect beauty, symmetry, strangeness, originality and moral truth and mine might just be loud repetitive ass-noise.
To wit: no one is allowed to **sell** (this means for a charge) either of our recordings without our express permission. That's about the extent of it.
Well, ok, so there's more: but it's all bad for you. So it turns out people actually *can* sell derivatives of Lars' new magnum opus (or of recorded flatulence)--provided the derivations fall within the various allowed "fair uses" of copyrighted material. That means Dr. Dre can sell a record which samples Lars' new drum solo without his permission, so long as the resulting work is more than just a simple repackaging of Lars' peerless musical artistry. It also means academians the world over can include as much of the original as they need to support their insights as they rush out their breathless analyses of James Hatfield's latest lyrical and historical tour-de-force.
Whether you go out and buy the CD the next day is completely irrelevant if you were never given permission to copy the work in the first place. Think of it this way: if you steal $50 from someone, and send them a check for $500 the next day, you're still guilty of theft.
Oh please. The difference, obviously, is that in your ridiculous analogy, the person a) cannot use those $50 until they get a check several days later and b) knows they were stolen from and thus feels less secure in their person/bank account/however the $50 was stolen in the first place. (Well, the difference is that taking money is theft and sharing music isn't, but I digress.) If there were a way to guarantee that the person who got the money "stolen" from them would always have at least their original amount of money any time they checked and/or wanted to buy something, then it's actively doubtful whether such a practice would be illegal or not. Incidentally, the normal operations of both our banking system and stock markets are predicated upon exactly such a system...
In any case, it is established fair use that you can listen to/watch/read/whatever a copyrighted product before you purchase it to see if you want to spend your money on it, so you're entirely wrong in yet another way!!
The law doesn't care if the victim is better off in the end. The law is the law.
Sorry kiddo--you're 0 for...well, how ever many this is. Amazingly, you got this one DOUBLE wrong!!
1) In order to bring a suit in this country you must have some claim of demonstrable harm. This is one of the most basic principles of law.
2) It turns out that copyright law cares even more if the "victim" is better off in the end. Indeed, the copyright law on the books makes a special point of exempting apparent infringements of copyright as fair use if they end up causing no harm to the "victim". So whereas for most "harmless" civil crimes, the law would technically be broken but the "victim" just couldn't legally sue over it, in the case of copyright law, "harmless" infringement is a legal non sequiter.
If you don't like the law, stop whining and do something about it. Organize, demonstrate, and vote.
ROFL!! So I guess you and all the top-level RIAA executives are going to stage your own little 36-man-and-one-woman-march on Washington???
No, I'm betting you'll all just keep whining. Although at least they're spending millions on lobbyists and bribes, which is more than you can say for yourself.
I agree with Lars wholeheartedly, and I think it is the duty of mega-bands to take a stand, because while Metallica won't feel the pinch of lost CD revenue, less successful musicians will.
I'd be rolling on the floor laughing again if the real situation weren't so tragically pitiful. The fact is that "less successful musicians"--by which I mean the bottom 90% of the lucky perhaps 2% who even get signed by a major label in the first place--never ever see a penny in album royalties. The only money they ever make to live on (from their music jobs at least) comes from pre-album advances.
Unfortunately for them, in the extraordinary event that their measly 5% or so royalty is enough to pay off what they "owe" the record label for studio time, producer time, studio supplies, promotion, marketing, "promotional CD's" like those at Columbia House etc. (yep--those come directly out of the artist's pockets. Hope you feel good about yourself for buying from music clubs now...), tour scheduling, tour equipment, tour promotion, etc. (they "owe" the record companies for all this stuff even though the record company gets to divvy up the remaining 95% of the money)...they even need to pay off the amount of their advance before the band can finally make a cent in royalties. And all the debt from previous, less successful albums follows them until they get out of their contract or go bankrupt (a not uncommon occurance).
Metallica, in rather sharp contrast, keeps something like 80% of the profit from their album sales, because they essentially have their own record label. Now guess who's the ones standing up for the $18-for-a-$1-CD and locked-down-monopolistic-distribution-model way of doing things? Err...I mean, uh, standing up for the, um, for the little bands...
In the end, Napster users are just whining because they want something for nothing, at the expense of artists.
No, Napster users aren't whining at all. They're busy sharing perhaps the largest collection of art ever indexed in one place. They're busy using the Internet up to its true promise--to spread art and ideas effortlessly throughout society, against the wishes of those who have profited by keeping ideas bottled up.
In case you hadn't noticed, it's the RIAA which is bitching to the media, suing everyone in sight, lobbying Congress for unreasonable extension of copyright privileges beyond anything envisioned in the Constitution for the 4th time in 9 years, raising the price of CD's even in the face of a free and superior distribution channel, and dragging their feet on providing a way for fans to both get music in a reasonable digital format (which almost certainly will not include support for fair use rights) while still compensating their favorite artists.
And it's you who's whining (quite ignorantly, I might add).
Which, as a musician, I find absolutely disgusting.
Which, as a/. participant interested in the truth, a citizen interested in my fair use rights and right to non-commercial sharing of recorded music, and a music lover interested in sampling as much new and worthwhile musical art as possible, I find...rather annoying to say the least.
Meanwhile, for everyone who wants to help break musicians free of a monopolistic model which steals artistic, promotional and distributional control of their art and steals the profits of their labor, you might want to check out fairtunes.com, which will forward your money directly to artists whose work has moved you, rather than lining the pockets of RIAA executives who have done nothing but sue Napster in an effort to stop you from exercising your Constitutional fair use rights. Even if you only contribute $5 for that CD you burned/downloaded, that's approximately 5-7 times as much as the artist would get had you paid $17 for the CD in the store--and plus it's money they can use today, not once their record label "debts" are paid off, if ever.
Exactly. They have a discussion on one of the main Gnutella sites about doing exactly this, and you've pretty much got it right. Still, it is theoretically quite easy to set up your own Gnutella "Intranet" and connect it to the main Gnutella-web through a Gnutella "proxy server" type thing. I think you'd have to hack around the client a bit to do this, though...
The point is that before the Internet made another distribution mechanism possible, the record labels had a monopoly on the only possible way to distribute your music to a lot of people.
The Internet is changing all that. But because their business model relies on the obscene shares of album sales which come along with a distribution monopoly (most artists get under 5% of album sales as royalties...and they don't see a penny of that until they pay off the record company for every single service they've given them, including recording costs, studio time, producers, album art, marketing, promotional CD's...) all the RIAA can do is try to sue the Internet out of the music business.
So, artists *will* be able to get better contracts...but only if mp3.com succeeds, only if Napster wins this suit and continues to promote new artists; only if the RIAA loses their effort to keep their monopoly business model by suing all competition out of existence.
This post is probably going to end up big and fuzzy, and contain lots of little issues for all you copyright nazi's to nitpick me on for days on end. And I know that a preliminary injunction is not a preliminary-injunction-sustained-on-appeal is not a verdict is not a verdict-sustained-on-appeal, and that the end of Napster is not the end of peer-to-peer file sharing; that indeed, nothing this or any judge or government can do can ever erase what Napster has wrought.
But I'm writing this tonight because I'm genuinely saddened by this ruling--saddened even though I have no doubt it'll be overturned soon, and no doubt it won't really affect anything in the long run. I'm sad because, when you take out all the hype and special reports at ZDNet and Wall Street Journal attack jobs and photos of Lars Ulrich testifying in the Senate Chambers and YRO flamewars at/. and Metallica parodies and debates over whether the current record label business model is more like indentured servitude or outright slavery and cover articles of every PHB-oriented PC rag in the biz on how MP3 is revolutionizing...something! (sidebar: copyright law and you)...what will happen on Friday afternoon is that the largest art museum in history will be closed up, maybe for good. And that's sad.
The largest art museum in history??? That's a new one! But it's true--that's precisely what Napster is: a big place where one can go in, browse, and enjoy a decent portion of the musical art recorded on the planet. If you disagree, then it must be because you don't actually think music is an art form--in which case, well, you either have different tastes from most of humanity or you just haven't come across the music that really speaks to you yet. But rest assured, that music exists, and it's available for your perusal somewhere on Napster.
But...Napster's can't be an art museum! Napster is all about stealing, and pirates, and ripping off artists! See, at an art museum--unlike Napster, ho ho ho!--every time you look at a painting the artist is compensated by... Oh yeah--they're not. Indeed, it's not such a bad analogy after all... But at a museum the artist is the one who *decides* whether *their art* is shared with the public or not! Absolutely wrong. The typical painting available for free public viewing at an art museum is donated by a private donor, who has bought the painting from the artist. The typical recording available for free public listening on Napster is donated by a private donor, who has bought the CD from the artist. The artist has no say in either donation--which is arguably a bad thing. However, what cannot be argued is the fact that the free public sharing is a great benefit for all of society. And furthermore, just as common sense tells you that free public art museums stimulate rather than inhibit public consumption of paintings (and thus help out the oftentimes actually "starving" visual artists), study after study confirms that Napster stimulates public consumption of RIAA music--which, incidently, helps the record labels far more than the artists, although it does help the artists use their piddling royalties (we're talking under 5% of album sales, people) to pay off the hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt they have accrued with the record label.
Yes, the shutting of Napster's doors would be a great public loss indeed. Now, of course, people will argue that Napster is just one of many peer-to-peer file sharing protocols, and that one can always get whatever music recording one wants via an OpenNap server using Napigator, or via Gnutella, Scour, iMesh, Hotline, IRC, FTP, the web... And they're right. But they're missing the point. While Napster may not be clearly the most technologically advanced of the peer-to-peer communities, it has (to my mind, at least) what none of the other options can quite match--a combination of convenience and community building features which make possible a truly new, and in some ways superior, way of getting one's music.
That is, using Napster (on a broadband connection) can sometimes evoke in me that singular experience which harkens back to the halcyon days of the web: surfing. While most of the other methods of getting music off the Internet only help if you know what you're looking for, Napster actually makes if easy (or reasonably easy; it could still stand some improvement, but then again, Mosaic and Netscape 0.9 had some kinks themselves, but in some ways they only added to the charm) to browse the MP3 collections of anyone on the system, searching for new artists and new music that you would have never otherwise heard. Just as a quick drill through the listings on Yahoo! (or a search on altavista once Digital brought it online) used to provide a starting point for my winding surfs across the nascent Web, a search for an artist I like but want to hear more of can provide a point of departure as I look through the shared files of those who already have that artist's music, finding new songs, live recordings, and artists new to me--both similar and entirely different from the one I started out searching for. Yeah, it's a tad cumbersome at the moment to start downloading something I've never heard of, fire up Winamp and stream the incoming song, and decide if I like it and want to look into more of this musician's work; but it often works alright, and it's certainly introduced me to some stuff which, while not quite earth-shattering, has been marginally life-enriching.
Unfortunately, it seems pretty difficult to imagine any for-pay model which could preserve and improve the wonderful surfing aspect of Napster. Or rather, it's not that difficult to imagine; it's just difficult to imagine the industry agreeing to a fair model for distribution--say, the first 3 listens of a particular song are free, then the song costs a cent/minute per listen for another 10 listens, after which point the user owns the song. (Cost for a typical 55 minute album, $5.50--a reasonably fair price, IMO.)
But no, it is difficult to imagine, because music is free now: Napster has made it free. Or really, the Internet made music free, just like it has made newspapers and encyclopedias free (note that you don't see the New York Times or Encyclopedia Britannica suing to shut down the Internet like the RIAA and MPAA are), just like it has made long-distance communications and negotiation buying free, just like it will make movies free, and hopefully (and already has to some degree) make political news and speech in oppressed countries free. Free music is considerably less important than some of these benefits (although arguably more important than others), but that's not the point: the point is that all of them and many others are inherent in what the Internet IS--a medium by which any human being can communicate with any other with no marginal cost.
The RIAA and others can whine all they want, but they won't be able to change the fact that the fundamental nature of the Internet, combined with a good idea some kid at Northeastern University had less than a single year ago, has broken their monopoly on recorded music forever. What they can do, however, is buy unconstitutional laws and gum up the US court system trying to get them enforced, using the power of US law to obtain injunctions against grass-roots Internet art museums left and right. To be fair, I was always a bit squeamish that Napster was desperately trying to think up a way to make money off its service--not because I don't think the service isn't incredibly valuable, but because it's just one of those things which inherently ought to be free, like an art museum. (I know many if not most public art museums aren't free. They should be, though.)
The ironic thing about all this is that a court win for the RIAA will probably be the worst possible outcome for their member labels in the long-run. It will only give the RIAA complacency they cannot afford, drive users to noncorporate peer-to-peer services like Gnutella (try getting an injunction against that!), antagonize the general public (20 million people already use Napster, and according to the RIAA itself, 70 million would have by the end of the year had the case not gone forward--that is, a very very substantial portion of Internet users and society as a whole) and inevitably delay the time when the record labels do what is obviously necessary: digitize their entire catalogs, and sell them, in open, standard, non-access-controlled MP3 format, for a fair price. As it stands now, I doubt I will ever pay an RIAA label again for recorded music, but many Internet users will be less idealistic or more forgiving than me. I would pay a fair fee direct to the artist to download his or her musical art in a heartbeat. (I'd sample it for free off Napster to see that I wanted it first, though.)
But all of that is for the future. Frankly, I've sort of had it with MP3's for a while--the sound quality out a pair of computer speakers isn't horrible, but it's not great either. I've been planning on getting a good stereo for a bit now (at the moment my only CD player is in my computer; dorm life...), and I suppose I'll go ahead with that anyways. Too bad I'll probably have to burn my own CDs. But for now I'll just go on exposing myself to as much music as possible, and mourning the potential end of one of the most incredible uses of the Internet for the betterment of society which has come around so far.
Perhaps Napster will end up like Netscape after all--gone but not forgotten, a company which changed the world for the better but then made the fatal flaw of trying to charge for something it had already made free, its spirit carried on in a community-owned open-source extension of its original promise.
This is wrong. The consumer level version of the chip is poor (not terrible) for general purpose use, but this is because it needs to be in a $299 device. So, for example, there's only 8K of data cache and 16K of instruction cache, and the clock speed is a "slow" 300MHz.
Have you read the articles I linked to?? I'd guess not.
If you did, you'd find that the EE is very strongly optimized for SIMD and not at all for general purpose computing. In effect it's sort of like an AltiVec latched onto a 68030 core instead of a G3/G4.
Hmmm...re-reading the above I find it humorous that a 300MHz chip isn't treated with reverence.
I wasn't dissing the clock-speed. Indeed, I wasn't dissing the chip at all--I was defending its ability to go up against SGI machines, for cryin' out loud! I was simply pointing out that it was designed to handle 3D graphics, not as a general purpose chip. If you think that's an insult against the EE, then you don't know very much about it.
One of these links has already been posted above, but if anyone wants a well-written, easy-to-understand-but-plenty-technical introduction to why the Emotion Engine is cheap to produce and a terrible general-purpose chip, but an amazing design for high-quality low-latency 3D graphics, assuming programers can figure out how to take advantage of it...
start with these excellent articles from ArsTechnica:
The second article is, IMO, the particularly interesting and relevant one, since the approach to rendering taken by today's high end graphics workstations from SGI et. al. is more similar to the PC + graphics card way of doing it than the EE way of doing it. Or rather, the PC + graphics card way of doing it was copied from the workstation approach. Of course, the major problem spot of the PC + card approach to rendering--the horrible bandwidth from the motherboard to the graphics card (the AGP bus is a joke compared to what would be required to actually stream textures into the graphics card in real-time; as it is now, entire levels must be loaded into the graphics card memory and stay there until the next level is accessed)--is not such a problem on a high-end workstation. It'll be quite interesting to see how this GScube thing compares, but the specs are there for it to make a very inexpensive and powerful alternative to the standard SGI stuff.
You're completely missing the point. This has nothing, absolutely positively nothing, to do with open-source, Free software, RMS, or even revealed-source.
This only has to do with Linux being able to play Sorensen encoded video. Basically, there are two ways this can be accomplished (note that neither has anything to do with open-source):
1) Apple can release Sorensen from their exclusive contract, allowing them to license (for a fee and without releasing any source code) their codecs to xanim, just like nearly every other video codec has been licensed to xanim.
2) Apple can port (without open-sourcing their code or anyone's codecs) Quicktime to Linux, just as they have to Windows.
Either would be acceptable to nearly everyone. Neither has to do with revealing any of Sorensen's source code. The first would require the compliance of both Apple and Sorensen, but Sorensen has already publically stated that they would agree to it. The second is entirely in Apple's hands.
Having exhaustively proven you completely wrong, I'm going to consider any further responses trolls.
What part of "Apple does not *OWN* all of the codecs" do you people not understand???
Almost EVERY time Apple is mentioned here, some fool will bitch about "no Quicktime on Linux".
...You wanna bitch to someone? Go talk to Sorenson, et al.
As has been pointed out many times before, the only reason the Sorensen codec is not licensed to any other video player is because Apple paid Sorensen to give them an exclusive license. What part of "EXCLUSIVE CONTRACT" do you not understand???
Guess what--it's not Sorensen's call. If Apple would permit them to license their codecs for a Linux-based player, they almost surely would. Or if Apple would just be half as charitable as MS and come out with a slow, buggy Quicktime player for Linux (to match the slow and buggy QT player for Windows), everyone'd stop complaining.
You wanna be rude and condescending on/.? Get your facts straight.
And how are they supposed to participate in this market? By selling MP3s which one person buys and then distributes to everyone else? How do you make money doing that? Everyone says they want digital music, but they only want it in MP3 format. Why? Because what they really want is FREE digital music.
They are supposed to realize that digital information is, by its very nature, infinitely reproducable and sharable. Then they should get over it. Then they should make their digital information available for unencrypted sale just like everyone else.
There's nothing to stop one person from buying the software which a software company sells and then distributing it to everyone else. And, of course, this still occurs to a degree. But it's a small degree, and it most certainly doesn't interfere with successful software corporations' ability to make obscene profits. After all, MS rose to being the most valuable company in the entire fricking world (by market cap.) selling nothing but copyrighted digital information which anyone could distribute to everyone else for free. (Sure, there were dirty tricks, serial numbers, Windows taxes and wheel mice along the way, but the point still stands.)
In any case, "copyright protections" are inevitably circumvented, inconvenient for users who never try to copy anything, and inherently act as "fair use preventions" just as much as "copyright protections." As such they ought to be ruled prima facie illegal, and I wouldn't be surprised if that's how the Supreme Court will rule once the DMCA, DVD CSS, and their ilk finally wind their way up there.
Rather than try to insult their already-ripped-off consumers with "copyright protection" schemes which harass uses and take away their constitutionally-guaranteed fair use rights, perhaps the RIAA might have managed to prevent the ubiquitous rise of free (beer) digital music had they just sold their wares as MP3s those long years ago. It's not like it would have increased the number of MP3s in the "infringing" distribution channel (actually, according to the Audio Home Recording Act, trading digital music recordings noncommercially isn't infringing at all); anyone can, and always will, be able to just rip the CD. Instead, it would have simply provided a convenient way to meet the demand for high-quality digital music--a demand which went unmet until Napster. (While you could always get a large music collection via IRC and FTP, it could never have competed in convenience from a fast, central, fairly-priced, online store selling all RIAA recordings.)
But the RIAA didn't want to do that; they would rather keep their monopoly over an outmoded form of distribution, and try to abuse the legal system to curtail any new, more efficient ones which they could not completely control (and nevermind the implications for free speech, privacy and anonymity rights, fair use, or the growth of the Internet). If it'd worked, it would have been a great justification for an antitrust inquiry. Indeed, it still may.
But instead, technology won as it always does and always will, and the RIAA needs to go to Washington to cry about it. Thank god the Senate (except Dianne Feinstein--who also wants to outlaw mention of illegal drugs on the Internet, BTW) is too smart to let them.
Napster does not make music a non-scarce good; it makes music *recordings* a non-scarce good. Luckily there are plenty of other ways for musicians and songwriters to make a living creating music. Some are already around--concerts, t-shirts, etc. Some will be modifications of the current pay-for-recordings model--it will likely turn out that most fans will be willing to pay their favorite artists for songs they enjoy, even if free alternatives are available via Napster; plus there are various value add-ons from having a physical copy like a CD--something you can hold in your hand, convenience and sound quality (for now, at least), cover art, etc. Some will be completely new business models, like that "ads on MP3's" story earlier today (not that I want this model to succeed, but it's an example).
In any case, the vast majority of musicians barely support themselves from the sale of their recordings under the current system anyways: most live out their careers in debt to their record companies, who force them to pay back all of their costs out of a measly 5% or so royalty from their album sale revenues. Imagine a system where all recordings were available for free, but the artists respectfully requested that their fans support them by paying for the privilege of their music, especially if they really enjoyed what they heard. Of course, the fact that distribution of new songs would be totally unrestricted would mean that many more people would get to hear a given album, and thus enlarge the pool of those who feel it's worth paying the artist who created it; let's say this makes the initial pool three times as large, although I'd say the actual effect will be much more than that. Now let's say that only 1/4 of them bother to pay for it--again, I'd bet more than that will, but we'll be conservative instead. And let's say that the going rate for these direct-to-the-artist donations is 1/3 the cost of a CD.
Even with those assumptions, the artist makes about 5 times as much money under this model than under the current one. When you say Napster is "only a means of distribution", you reveal how little you understand about the current industry model. The only reason artists have been shackled to the record companies for so long is that the record companies used to control the only means of distribution for recorded music. Yes, there are indie labels, but they can't buy the promotion and shelf space at record stores that the Big 4 labels can. By providing artists with a free means of distribution, the Internet allows perhaps an order of magnitude more people to enjoy an artist's music, and allows the artist to reap the complete fruits of their labor, rather than having 95% sucked up by record companies as a perverse sort of "distribution fee". Even allowing for lower prices and people who choose not to pay for their music, artists will be able to earn far more money, and, more importantly, reach many more listeners.
Think of it this way... if you take the NY Post into your local library and copy an article for your friend, are you breaking the law? Sure but not on any grand scope. Now take this SAME article, scan it and put it up on your Geocities account, then get it linked from/.... are you breaking the law then? You're damn right you are, regardless if you intended for hundreds of thousands of people to utilize your illegal distribution of copyrighted material.
This is why your argument for "non-commercial" duplication and distribution is deemed to fail, it's a brave new world out there were the individual has gained a tremendous amount of publishing power, more than anyone could have ever dreamed... now it's time for folks to step up to the plate and realize that with this power comes accountability, regardless of your intent to be "non-commercial".
Luckily your argument is completely without any legal merit. According to the 1992 Audio Home Recording Act, any non-commercial sharing of music is in fact perfectly legal and not copyright infringement at all. The method, scale, or "impact" of the copying has nothing to do with it. Period. So long as there is no fee or other quid pro quo exchange, trading music on Napster is not infringement.
What's more astonishing is how your argument is so completely...well, to be fair, so completely based on ethical norms which are opposite mine. You realize that the Internet has moved us into a "brave new world" of content distribution, where, amongst other things, music is no longer a scarce good (like, for example, a car) but a potentially nonscarce good (like air). According to any economic theory (especially free market Capitalism), goods only need to be controlled and sold for profit when they are scarce; once a good is ubiquitous, it ought to be freely available. It has nothing to do with how much the good is worth to someone--after all, air to breathe is undeniably worth more than any other possible good, but any economic system which suggested that air should be charged for would be both unconscionable and plain dumb.
The fact that our technology has partially moved music from the scarce category to the ubiquitous category should be cause for celebration, not handwringing and worry. Napster and programs like it are providing a positive service for humanity (or at least that portion with Internet access), and so are those who, like the poster you responded to, choose to share their music with others.
Yet you apparently don't see it this way at all. You view the "brave new world" the Internet has moved us all into, which allows everyone to (just in this example) share in all the world's musical art, as a negative to be handled with some extra-legal sense of "accountability"--which, by the tone of your post, apparently means "ignoring the possibilities inherent in the Internet".
Perhaps you cling to this view out of the mistaken idea that non-commercial sharing of music is illegal (it isn't) or that Napster is somehow "stealing" money from musical artists (click here to find out who's really stealing money from artists). Maybe you somehow believe it would be a bad thing if the record labels had to undergo actual competition to their monopoly-abusing business model; but even there you would be misinformed, because not only are both CD sales and the outrageous average selling price of CD's up for the past year, but studies show that most Napster users buy more CD's after Napster than they did before, and that their use of Napster is primarily as a sampling tool to try out songs before they commit to buying an album. (This is covered under the fair use doctrine of copyright law, BTW.)
I don't know. But I'm choosing to believe that you're simply misinformed or haven't thought the issues through completely rather than that you're against people being able to listen to more music, against economic progress through new technologies, or are just a record company shill.
So get informed: Napster's legal brief (PDF file) is a wonderful place to start. Of course, many people do disagree on this issue; still, I'd request that you at least read the brief through before making up your mind.
also, how do you figure that Macs are any less "desinged for this" than x86 boxes?
Because Macs--and yes, even your "quality-built" G4--are terrible at the most important factor for web-serving performance: memory bandwidth. "Apple's systems generally have had only about 60 to 70% of the effective memory bandwidth of contemporary x86 systems. This is due to Power Mac configurations that run the system bus at lower clock rates than comparable x86 PCs, and the simple fact that Apple's system ASICs cannot match the technical excellence of the best x86 chipsets like the 440BX." (source: Paul DeMone's Mac performance article at realworldtech.com)
Furthermore, as you'll learn if you read the rest of that article, Apple refuses to submit any Macs to any standard, fair benchmarking organizations, and in particular to SPEC, instead preferring to use decade-old discredited benchmarks incorrectly (BYTEmark) or make up their own. I wonder why?
the G4 is a damned powerful, quality built piece of equipment--better than most x86 boxes slapped together at some cheap ISP.
First off, it's OEM, but I'm sure that was just a typo. More serious is your perception that the OEM does anything which impacts the performance of the computer other than pick the components. The only thing that could possibly make a computer "quality-built" by an OEM would be making sure everything is screwed in tight. What matters is that the components themselves are quality-engineered. And in the case of chipsets--again, the most important part of a good web server--a plain old Intel 440BX knocks today's Mac chipsets silly.
And let's not even get into the x86 chipsets which are actually built to be used in web servers. Apple simply doesn't have anything to compete.
And there's no reason why they should. Apple has never ever pretended their boxes make good web servers. And considering all the things Apple has pretended over the years, that fact alone should clue you in that they probably don't.
If those 98% of all musicians out there even made a dint in the Napster traffic, then maybe Boies' would have a good argument. Otherwise, it just looks like the primary use for Napster is not as a medium for small artists to push their stuff, but rather as a way for people to acquire quality music of their choice from the big label artists for free. Too bad for the little guys, because Napster might have really made a difference.
If you read the brief all the way through, you'd find that the RIAA's own survey of files shared on Napster found that only 87% had names which corresponded to RIAA signed artists. In other words, 13% of Napster traffic is clearly non-infringing--more than just "a dint", if you ask me!
But even that doesn't include cases when those 87% of files with "infringing" names are actually of live recordings, etc., which bands often expressly allow to be redistributed and whose copyrights certainly don't belong to the RIAA labels in any case. Looks like that dint is even bigger.
Furthermore, it doesn't matter if all the traffic on Napster consisted entirely of Britney Spears and N'Sync; it still doesn't infringe copyright law if the way it is used falls under fair use provisions. Examples of ways one might use download an RIAA-copyrighted song off Napster for Constitutionally protected fair use include:
1) "Previewing" a song/album by downloading the MP3 and listening to it before decided whether it's worth getting gouged $18 for the CD. According to a survey, 91% of Napster users engage in this particular form of fair use.
2) "Space-shifting," the practice of downloading a song/album one already bought in CD/tape/vinyl/8-track format so that one can listen to it on one's computer/on one's Rio/at work/etc.
But I saved the best for last:
3) "Noncommercial use"--that is, downloading any song without paying the person you got it from in either money or some quid pro quo trade. Interestingly enough, this fair use was expressly granted, for all time and with regards to all future technologies which might crop up, in the Audio Home Recording Act of a few years back. Yes, this does in fact mean that almost any conceivable use of Napster is non-infringing and completely legal. Indeed, it means that all music-sharing over the Internet is completely legal, except for ratio sites and must-click-on-banner-ad sites. (No, this fair use does not extend to warezing software, only music; however, contrary to popular belief, however, it does extend to both digital and analog music recordings). Thus your dint is now fully 100% of all Napster traffic!!
But wait: there's more. It turns out that by the standard set up by many previous cases (amongst them the Sony Betamax case) it doesn't even matter how big or small the dint is. The only thing that matters is that Napster is "capable of substantial noninfringing uses." That's not just a quotation from the brief (page 8; page 9 of the PDF), but a direct quotation from the Supreme Court decision in the Sony case! (Emphasis added by Boies and kept by me.)
So after all this gnashing of teeth on/. over the previous months about the degree to which Napster is actually used to trade unsigned artists' recordings, it turns out that it doesn't matter one single bit. All that matters is that Napster is capable of it!
And furthermore, the standard for what is "substantial" is not "substantial in comparison to Napster's overall traffic" but rather "substantial in comparison to the ability for unsigned artists to distribute their work without Napster."
In other words, it's sort of ironic that you ended your pessimistic comment with the statement "Too bad for the little guys, because Napster might have really made a difference," because according to the standard set by previous cases, that's precisely all that's needed!
If you really, as you stated, read through the entire brief, I suggest you read it again. You might be pleasantly surprised at how utterly it demolishes the RIAA's case.
This must be the absolute stupidest cryptographic idea I have ever, in my entire life, heard of. Seeing as how they're mathematicians at an Ivy League university and they've apparently actually presented a paper at a major cryptographic conference on this protocol, one would think that the people who came up with this would know more about crypto than I do. Just looking at how this works, though, I'm really not so sure...
For those who don't know, the basic idea behind cryptography is that there are some mathematical functions that scale linearly in complexity when run forwards (i.e. multiplying large numbers, generating elliptic curves) but scale exponentially when run backwards (respectively, factoring very large numbers and finding integral algebras from a given elliptic curve). In other words, multiplying two 20-bit numbers together to generate a 40-bit key only takes twice as long as multiplying two 10-bit numbers together to generate a 20-bit key; but factoring the 40-bit key takes 2^20=1 million times longer. (This is an oversimplification both of how real cryptographic algorithms work and of how multiplication in a computer scales with complexity, but close enough.) The point is, a cryptographic cipher is only a cipher when it takes longer to undo it than it took to do it.
If you've been following me so far, then you ought to be realizing why the idea of encrypting each second of music seperately is so blindingly dumb. If you encrypt each second of a 3 minute song with a different key, then you have a cipher which takes 180 times as long to crack and 180 times as long to decrypt properly; in other words, it takes just as long to do it as to undo it (as far as the each-second-independently thing goes; obviously there is also some real cryptography going on here, but these guys didn't invent that). By the most basic definition of cryptography--an imbalence in forwards complexity vs. backwards complexity--this is not cryptography.
Another way to look at it is this: over the course of an entire 74 minute CD's-worth of music, this approach only makes the music 4440 times harder to crack. One might think this is about as good as adding 12 bits to the key length (2^12=4096), albeit at a much higher cost to decryption time than, well, just adding 12 bits to the key length. In fact, that's not even the case, because adding 12 bits to the key length not only means the calculations to crack it take about 4440 times as long, but that they require 4440 times as much memory; obviously that is not the case when all 4440 encryptions can be cracked seperately.
But to get a real idea of how ass-backwards this scheme is, it helps to know a little about how real ciphers work. In any modern cipher, the work is split up into several smaller algorithms called rounds; this is done to keep down memory requirements, keep all the numbers involved small enough to fit in the registers of the machine doing the decryption (often commodity 8-bit chips), and keep cryptanalysis simpler so one can be reasonably sure a new attack won't surface after the cipher has gone into use. The reason the many-rounds approach is (theoretically) as secure as the discredited all-in-one-big-round approach is based on the assumption that the attacker has no way of knowing what the intermediate results of each round are.
In fact, perhaps the most powerful type of attack on a cryptographic implementation, known as "side-channel attacks", happens when the attacker is somehow able to guess at some of this intermediate information. Luckily, this is usually quite difficult to do (although with some early smart cards all it took was an oscilliscope) and doesn't yield complete information. And that's why this new multiple key idea is so outrageously bad. It's essentially like doing all the work of a very powerful, many-rounds cipher (i.e. one "round" per second), but yielding up complete side-channel information for every round! This is like a very powerful cipher which has already done 99.9999% of the cracking for you!!
In conclusion, this is just stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid.
And furthermore, it's completely unnecessary. Even a 20 year-old, 56-bit cipher like DES is good enough to take a modern computer a good long while to brute-force; it took a special purpose machine plus a supercomputer almost a day to do it in the last DES challenge, and they got lucky. Plain old obsolete vanilla DES would be more than secure enough to make it worth anyone's while to pay a dollar or two for the song instead of cracking it. Or to get it via Napster/scour/iMesh/Gnutella/FTP/CuteMX/university LAN/Hotline/ripping a friend's CD/burning a friend's CD/AIM/ICQ...
That is, I'd say the significance of this is approximately zero.
Course, I could be wrong. Comments welcome if I am...
What's even more surprising were the reports i heard later on that the mac IE development team was dissolved - who knows what the reasoning behind that was.
Apparently they've just been reassigned to overhaul the web browser for WebTV. Supposedly this was the plan all along, which makes sense considering they can reasonably leave the Mac version alone for a while.
Of course, I'd much rather they'd been reassigned to the Win/Unix IE ports, which could use their help (especially the later, of course). Amazingly, not only is Mac IE 5 cleaner looking and much more standards-compliant than any other browser, it also renders pages noticably faster than even IE 5 for Windows (based on my observations).
On the other hand, hell if I could spend all day browsing the web with a one-button mouse...
2) Trademarks Vs. Free Speech? With 63 characters for a domain name now, you can fit an opinion in. 2600 is getting sued by Version because they registered versionsucks.com and Version thinks that infringes on the Version trademark. What about wethinkverisonsucks.com?
Amazingly enough, 2600 is getting sued for registering verizonreallysucks.com; in a sign of confidence in their new conglomerate, Verizon had already registered plain old verizonsucks.com! The funniest part about the suit is that the cybersquatting laws require that the challenged domain "dilute" the intent of the real trademark holder by being "confusingly similar" to their own legitimate uses of their trademark.
In other words, Verizon is suing on the grounds that "Verizon Really Sucks" is something they would likely be saying about themselves!
Thanks for the info. If I had $1 for every time someone on/. said something like "If you don't like paying a lot for CDs, order through Columbia House, BMG, etc; that way you don't rip off the artist," I'd have... 12 x "a lot" CDs.
Once again we see that legal != moral. If a reasonable, fairly priced method of paying for high-quality MP3s directly from artists ever arises, I'll use it in a second. Until that time, what I'd like to see more than anything is a list of addresses where I can send personal checks to artists thanking them for the enjoyment I've recieved from songs of theirs I've downloaded.
if I read this correctly, MP3-sharing via Gnutella is OK, but MP3-sharing via Napster is out because Napster is making a profit from advertising to its users.
No, MP3-sharing via Napster is currently ok, because Napster does not make any money from anything yet. If Napster started advertising to its users, then it would become not-ok. So far the only business model Napster has is attracting VC money...
Ace's hardware ran the test against a K7 athlon, a PIII, a celeron, and an UltraSparc II... Thunderbird kicked ass, of course, it's not exactly fair to match a 1 Gz thunderbird against a 733 PIII.
Ace's intent wasn't to provide a fair benchmark, but rather to generate a graph which would clearly show the way differing cache architectures affect Linpack results at different data sizes. Frankly, it's a brilliant graph and a perfect example of how a well constructed benchmark run can show what's really going on inside a processor. What it wasn't meant to do was to say "Athlon beats PIII" or anything like that.
In any case, this benchmark shows just how misguided the parent to this thread is. In fact, Linpack doesn't show "real FPU" performance, but rather data bandwidth. Depending on the size of the data set one chooses, you can "show" that an Athlon "Classic" 750 is 1.5x "faster" than a PIII 733 (data set = 64k), or that it's 1.5x "slower" (data set = 180k). Or you can "show" than an UltraSparc II 400 is 3x "slower" than that PIII 733 (data set = 180k) or that it's almost 2x "faster" (data set -> infinity).
The point is that Linpack, while useful as a synthetic benchmark, must be taken as a whole graph, not as a single number, and that it is at least as dependent on cache and memory bandwidth than on CPU core. Furthermore, it has almost no relevence on the performance most people (i.e. anyone not running scientific models) can expect with the way they use their computers.
Quake 3, on the other hand, is a marvelous benchmark, which can be easily understood, yet tuned to test most major bottlenecks in a PC. Most importantly, it much better models some of the conditions that most PC buyers put their computers through.
Um...when was it that she won 4 Grammies (including Best Pop Album), and was nominated for Album of the Year and Record of the Year? Oh yeah...1999.
Now Metallica, Dre, and Eminem I can do without...but this is aggravating. Happily, it looks as if "she" (i.e. Time Warner) is only pissed about the unreleased track, not about mp3s off of released discs. On the other hand, while I don't particularly care for him, Eminem's album just broke the single-week sales record or something, so it's a bit difficult to support the notion that he objectively sucks either. Frankly, I think your argument is absolutely wrong.
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Sorry about my combative tone in the previous post. I was fed up with seeing the same misconceptions repeated over and over as fact, and I decided to pick on you. And I got a bit carried away, in that while most of what I said is undebatable fact, there is certainly some leeway in the way the AHRA can be interpreted. That is, it explicitly makes all non-commercial copying of recorded music legal, but elsewhere in the Act it places an automatic "RIAA-tax" royalty on blank recordable media--DAT at that time, and some CD-R's now.
The implicit assumption was that this way, at least the RIAA wouldn't lose any money on non-commercial copying. (It does, however, blow away any argument you and Lars may have that copyright entitles you to know and control exactly what happens to your music at all times.) The "problem" is that in the digital world, all media are created equal. That is, we no longer need a special medium built just to carry recorded music--anything which accepts 1's and 0's works equally well. Thus, since the RIAA couldn't possibly ask for royalties on hard drive sales, since hard drives can be used to hold anything, including music, then the tradeoff they thought they engineered into the law goes away. IMO, this in no way negates the fact that the law explicitly states that all non-commercial copying of recorded music is fair use, but there are those who would disagree.
So, to answer your question, the law at issue is the 1992 Audio Home Recording Act. ( 1008 is particularly relevant.) If you asked any Constitutional copyright law expert, they would probably tell you that was not a "change" but in fact a codification of existing copyright law--that if anything, the AHRA was a setback for consumer fair use rights, because of the assuption that non-commercial copying could only be "bought" in exchange for a tariff on blank media, and that it was only legal for recorded music and not all copyrighted materials. Of course, if you asked a corporate copyright attorney they'd probably tell you the opposite.
the fact remains that distribution of someone's art without their permission is wrong. If you believe otherwise, you truly belong in Stallman's academic socialist cults.
Ever been to a public library? Do you think they're morally "wrong"??
You do realize that a public library redistributes the work of thousands of authors without their permission and without compensating them, don't you??
Yes, there is one inherent difference between a library and Napster: when you take a book out of a library, you only get to read it once before you have to return it; with MP3s, you get to choose to keep the recording on your computer for as long as you want. Of course, the way people use books is totally different from the way they use songs--they usually read a book only once; if they do reread a book, they only do so after many years (and you can always check a book out of the library again and reread it later).
The end point is that a library performs exactly the same function as Napster--it allows one person who has purchased a copyrighted work of art to non-commercially donate it so that many people can use it for free in the way that such works of art are traditionally used by those who buy them. For all the same reasons as why libraries have not hurt sales of books, Napster will not and has not hurt sales of CD's. And for all the same reasons as why donating your books to your local library is an good deed and a benefit to your community, ripping CD's and sharing the MP3's on Napster is a good deed and a benefit to the worldwide community of Internet users. (Or is donating a book to the library only a good deal to those of us in "socialist cults"?? Hee hee hee.)
I damn well better have a way of making sure that I'm not losing CD sales to kids on fucking Napster. You may care less if the artists whose work you steal starve,
As I'm sure you've read, numerous studies (here's one) confirm that Napster use has the effect of increasing CD sales. Images of musicians starving in the streets due to MP3 trading really have no place in this discussion.
ask any professional musician what they think of the idea, and they won't like it.
Why don't you ask the Smashing Pumpkins what they think of it? Or Limp Bizkit? Or Chuck D? Or the Offspring? Or Courtney Love? Or Ben Folds Five? Or Eve 6?
I suppose Neil Young and Radiohead aren't professional musicians??? Nor the Greatful Dead??
All these musicians and more are on the record pledging support for Napster. Of course, many musicians are on the record as being against Napster as well. (Metallica, Dr. Dre, Eminem, Alanis Morrisette, etc.) The point is, just as none of these professional musicians can pretend to speak for each other, you or the RIAA very most certainly cannot. If you ask me, it matters much more what the Constitution and the Supreme Court record say, and it chooses my side over yours; but the point that even professional musicians (who, I might add, might be very reluctant to publically go against the RIAA even if they do support Naptser) are split on the issue ought to tell you something about the recording industry you're so desperately trying to ply as a moral good.
[If you rip a CD and share it on Napster]...you're just a lowly pickpocket.
Well, no. If your analogy made any sense, then to be correct it would be "you're just like Robin Hood"--that is, you're "stealing" something for the purposes of selflessly giving it to others.
Disregarding that, I have trouble believing that you cannot understand the difference between true theft, which involves taking a scarce good which cannot be replaced, and "unauthorized" copying, which involves making more of a non-scarce good without taking anything from anyone. (As for the argument that it takes away "sales", see above.)
To anyone who makes a living from the music industry, Napster is the digital equivalent of the LA riots.
Come on. If by "anyone who makes a living from the music industry" you mean a recording label executive, then I'd say it's the digital equivalent of the Boston Tea Party, if not the Montgomery Bus Boycott. If by "anyone who makes a living from the music industry" you mean a musician, then the suggestion that having your art spread to thousands more people than was otherwise possible is equivalent to having the corner market in which you have invested all your savings and decades of your life looted and burned is patently ridiculous and extremely insulting.
In the meantime, I'm going to go investigate the validity of your statements, and if what you say is true, today is a grim day for The_Messenger.
This is what really bothers me about your approach to this issue: you truly believe that creating something gives you the right to control every possible way that thing is ever used. Luckily, our intellectual property laws are not founded on such a ludicrous and unworkable premise.
And so I ask you: why on earth would such a day be so horribly grim??
From what you've told us about yourself, you're a musician; I'm going to assume, then, that you're also a music lover. Taking each position in turn, then...
As a musician, whose songs might be traded on Napster: Are you signed by a recording label?? If so, my sincere congratulations--only a small fraction of professional musicians are. Even if you are, though, I'm assuming that you're not one of the several-dozen-artists-per-year who is actively promoted to the mainstream public through label-directed radio play. Thus, by having your songs traded via Napster, you gain an incredible free promotional service which was never before available. Indeed, before Napster many up-and-coming artists had to buy copies of their own CD's to give them away in promotional record "clubs" like BMG and Columbia House (yes, the artist, not the label, pays for those copies)--now with Napster many more signed artists can reach many times more people for free! Plus, unlike a record club, someone who downloads your song from Napster and likes it is very likely to buy your entire CD; with a record club, they already have the CD, and usually have no idea that they are taking money from the artist's pocket instead of the other way around.
If you're not signed, then (should your recordings somehow find their way to Napster without your permission) you obviously have nothing to lose. You probably won't make any money off the deal, but you will have the satisfaction of spreading your art to thousands and potentially even more people, which ought to be the main goal of any real artist. Incidentally, in this case you ought to look into putting your music on something like mp3.com--it probably won't make you too much money, but it'll get you some income, expose your music to a huge listener base, and do so without putting you in debt for life to a recording label, which a record contract would most likely do.
As a music lover: Suddenly, you have access to Napster, the world's largest collection of music--perhaps the world's largest collection of art in history. Why don't you try it out? Download the software, fire it up...search for an artist you particularly love. Maybe you'll find live recordings you'd never have heard otherwise. Maybe you'll find out about an album they did that you'd never heard, or find remixes they'd done to others' music/had done to theirs.
Now, click on a user who has one of their songs and add them to your hotlist; then go to your hotlist and browse their shared library. Maybe you'll find songs you'd heard before and maybe even wanted to purchase but had forgotten to. Almost certainly you'll see lots of songs and artists you've never heard of. Download a couple. Try them out. Maybe you'll like them, maybe not.
Maybe you'll discover a new band that will speak to you. Given a few attempts at this, you probably will. Search for more of their stuff. Maybe you'll want to buy their CD, so you can listen to it on a real stereo. If you're a musician and appreciate sound quality, you probably will. Either way, if the music is really good you should ensure that the artist earns some money off of your enjoyment (no, buying the CD does **NOT** do ensure anyone gets any money except the label): donate $5 or $10 to them at fairtunes.com.
Suddenly you'll realize that today wasn't a grim day after all: you'll realize that it maybe changed the way you listen to music, maybe opened some new doors. Maybe slightly changed your life for the better.
And then that's when you'll start sharing the music you love with other people on Napster, so that they might search through your music library and find something that speaks to them like it speaks to you. That's when you'll realize that using Napster isn't about greed or whining or rationalizing, but is about sharing art, about finding new artistic experiences.
Let's face it: stealing is easy. If they wanted to, anyone with half a brain could steal (say) a Porsche a lot more easily than they could earn even a portion of the money it costs. The point is, most people don't steal if there's an alternative.
On the other hand, people don't like being taken advantage of. But that's what they are under both the current music-obtaining model, in which they are forced to pay $18 for an album, without getting the chance to listen to it first, even if they only want one song off it (if they want a digital copy of it so they can listen to it in their Rio, or upload it to their computer at work, they have to rip it themselves or they're out of luck), or under any new model which will pass the RIAA's SDMI requirements.
People like to reward things which impact their lives, which is why I think sales of unfettered MP3's for fair prices would take off if they were as convenient and centralized as Napster. And which is why I think fairtunes.com will grow tremendously in the meantime. I know I've already remunerated several artists whose MP3's I've had for a while and really enjoyed, and I plan on giving more soon.
Given the horriffic way artists are treated by the current system, I have a hard time imagining why anyone cognizent of the proven positive impact Napster has on people's willingness to pay for recorded music could view it as anything but a boon to music lovers everywhere. So why don't you explain to me why you're so against it?
the legal, ethical, "right" thing to do, which is to jump through the music management industry's hoops and use controlled distribution, management, and playback mechanisms.
Huh??? The ethical thing to do is to get your music from Napster (or copy the CD if you need higher quality), and then directly pay those artists whose music you really enjoy via something like fairtunes.com. That way, you get to exercise your fair use right to try-before-you-buy, and a $5 donation via fairtunes is over 5 times as much as the artist would get in royalties had you spent $18 for the CD. Plus, you can do your part by sharing the music which is important to you with the rest of the world.
Happily, because of the AHRA this is every bit as legal as doing what the RIAA would have you do: buy all new devices to pay-per-listen to lower quality music which denies you your Constitutional fair use rights, all in the name of perpetuating the RIAA's obscene profits and stranglehold over the distribution of music they had no part in creating. I think it's pretty obvious which approach is the more ethical one.
To a musician, making their recorded, copyrighted work available to others at no charge is tanamount to theft of their livlihood and art.
/. participant interested in the truth, a citizen interested in my fair use rights and right to non-commercial sharing of recorded music, and a music lover interested in sampling as much new and worthwhile musical art as possible, I find...rather annoying to say the least.
So if I make a musician's recorded, copyrighted work available to others at no charge by playing my new CD for a room of my friends, that's theft?
Or if I make a musician's recorded, copyrighted work available to others at no charge by making a mix tape (or mix CD-R) out of CD's I own, that's theft?
Well, so maybe that wasn't meant to say. But I bet you think what you meant to say was something like, if I make a musician's recorded, copyrighted work available to others by offering my computer's services to send them a copy of it at no charge, monetary or otherwise, then that's theft. Right? Cause then you said:
And yes, it's illegal.
Well no, it's not.
All three of the above activities were explicitly made legal by Congress with the 1992 Audio Home Recording Act. The last was specifically reaffirmed in the 1998 Digital Millenium Copyright Act, which had the opportunity to change the rules regarding non-commercial copying of (copyrighted) musical recordings, but instead just chose to redefine "non-commercial" to include any explicit quid pro quo exchange. Notice that that means the sort of activity which goes on on Napster--that is, "making a recorded, copyrighted work available to others at no charge--is explicitly protected by the law.
I think the difference between the Napster debacle and something like alcohol prohibition is that prohibtion took a legal product (alcohol) and made it illegal.
Is that what you think. The actual fact is that the Napster case...err, "debacle" is precisely akin to suing someone for serving alchohol in the years prior to prohibition. Indeed, just a few weeks ago Congress took what would be the first step towards making the trading which takes place on Napster--which, again, is currently legal pursuant to the AHRA--and making it illegal. They held hearings on the matter, thus giving the RIAA the opportunity to try to buy their 4th (by my count) major anti-constitutional extension of copyright law in the last decade. Happily, current indications are that Congress has decided 3 laws bought and paid for was enough for now. Maybe it's just that even today 20 million constituants are worth more than 20 million dollars.
So, nice try, but no cigar. Of course, your insistance on emphasizing that these aren't just any recordings, but *COPYRIGHTED!!* recordings, should have been the first tipoff that you have absolutely no idea what you are talking about. Guess what: copyright means a great deal less than you must think. And thank god it does, because *every* recorded utterance--whether it's the Post-It note I jot down, my answering machine message, or (heh heh) the playlist I just made in Winamp--is automatically copyrighted. That's right: that time I recorded myself farting into my computer's microphone is afforded exactly the same precious copyright protections as Lars and James' latest post-structuralist masterwork. Even though Metallica's may be a creation of perfect beauty, symmetry, strangeness, originality and moral truth and mine might just be loud repetitive ass-noise.
To wit: no one is allowed to **sell** (this means for a charge) either of our recordings without our express permission. That's about the extent of it.
Well, ok, so there's more: but it's all bad for you. So it turns out people actually *can* sell derivatives of Lars' new magnum opus (or of recorded flatulence)--provided the derivations fall within the various allowed "fair uses" of copyrighted material. That means Dr. Dre can sell a record which samples Lars' new drum solo without his permission, so long as the resulting work is more than just a simple repackaging of Lars' peerless musical artistry. It also means academians the world over can include as much of the original as they need to support their insights as they rush out their breathless analyses of James Hatfield's latest lyrical and historical tour-de-force.
Whether you go out and buy the CD the next day is completely irrelevant if you were never given permission to copy the work in the first place. Think of it this way: if you steal $50 from someone, and send them a check for $500 the next day, you're still guilty of theft.
Oh please. The difference, obviously, is that in your ridiculous analogy, the person a) cannot use those $50 until they get a check several days later and b) knows they were stolen from and thus feels less secure in their person/bank account/however the $50 was stolen in the first place. (Well, the difference is that taking money is theft and sharing music isn't, but I digress.) If there were a way to guarantee that the person who got the money "stolen" from them would always have at least their original amount of money any time they checked and/or wanted to buy something, then it's actively doubtful whether such a practice would be illegal or not. Incidentally, the normal operations of both our banking system and stock markets are predicated upon exactly such a system...
In any case, it is established fair use that you can listen to/watch/read/whatever a copyrighted product before you purchase it to see if you want to spend your money on it, so you're entirely wrong in yet another way!!
The law doesn't care if the victim is better off in the end. The law is the law.
Sorry kiddo--you're 0 for...well, how ever many this is. Amazingly, you got this one DOUBLE wrong!!
1) In order to bring a suit in this country you must have some claim of demonstrable harm. This is one of the most basic principles of law.
2) It turns out that copyright law cares even more if the "victim" is better off in the end. Indeed, the copyright law on the books makes a special point of exempting apparent infringements of copyright as fair use if they end up causing no harm to the "victim". So whereas for most "harmless" civil crimes, the law would technically be broken but the "victim" just couldn't legally sue over it, in the case of copyright law, "harmless" infringement is a legal non sequiter.
If you don't like the law, stop whining and do something about it. Organize, demonstrate, and vote.
ROFL!! So I guess you and all the top-level RIAA executives are going to stage your own little 36-man-and-one-woman-march on Washington???
No, I'm betting you'll all just keep whining. Although at least they're spending millions on lobbyists and bribes, which is more than you can say for yourself.
I agree with Lars wholeheartedly, and I think it is the duty of mega-bands to take a stand, because while Metallica won't feel the pinch of lost CD revenue, less successful musicians will.
I'd be rolling on the floor laughing again if the real situation weren't so tragically pitiful. The fact is that "less successful musicians"--by which I mean the bottom 90% of the lucky perhaps 2% who even get signed by a major label in the first place--never ever see a penny in album royalties. The only money they ever make to live on (from their music jobs at least) comes from pre-album advances.
Unfortunately for them, in the extraordinary event that their measly 5% or so royalty is enough to pay off what they "owe" the record label for studio time, producer time, studio supplies, promotion, marketing, "promotional CD's" like those at Columbia House etc. (yep--those come directly out of the artist's pockets. Hope you feel good about yourself for buying from music clubs now...), tour scheduling, tour equipment, tour promotion, etc. (they "owe" the record companies for all this stuff even though the record company gets to divvy up the remaining 95% of the money)...they even need to pay off the amount of their advance before the band can finally make a cent in royalties. And all the debt from previous, less successful albums follows them until they get out of their contract or go bankrupt (a not uncommon occurance).
Metallica, in rather sharp contrast, keeps something like 80% of the profit from their album sales, because they essentially have their own record label. Now guess who's the ones standing up for the $18-for-a-$1-CD and locked-down-monopolistic-distribution-model way of doing things? Err...I mean, uh, standing up for the, um, for the little bands...
In the end, Napster users are just whining because they want something for nothing, at the expense of artists.
No, Napster users aren't whining at all. They're busy sharing perhaps the largest collection of art ever indexed in one place. They're busy using the Internet up to its true promise--to spread art and ideas effortlessly throughout society, against the wishes of those who have profited by keeping ideas bottled up.
In case you hadn't noticed, it's the RIAA which is bitching to the media, suing everyone in sight, lobbying Congress for unreasonable extension of copyright privileges beyond anything envisioned in the Constitution for the 4th time in 9 years, raising the price of CD's even in the face of a free and superior distribution channel, and dragging their feet on providing a way for fans to both get music in a reasonable digital format (which almost certainly will not include support for fair use rights) while still compensating their favorite artists.
And it's you who's whining (quite ignorantly, I might add).
Which, as a musician, I find absolutely disgusting.
Which, as a
Meanwhile, for everyone who wants to help break musicians free of a monopolistic model which steals artistic, promotional and distributional control of their art and steals the profits of their labor, you might want to check out fairtunes.com, which will forward your money directly to artists whose work has moved you, rather than lining the pockets of RIAA executives who have done nothing but sue Napster in an effort to stop you from exercising your Constitutional fair use rights. Even if you only contribute $5 for that CD you burned/downloaded, that's approximately 5-7 times as much as the artist would get had you paid $17 for the CD in the store--and plus it's money they can use today, not once their record label "debts" are paid off, if ever.
Exactly. They have a discussion on one of the main Gnutella sites about doing exactly this, and you've pretty much got it right. Still, it is theoretically quite easy to set up your own Gnutella "Intranet" and connect it to the main Gnutella-web through a Gnutella "proxy server" type thing. I think you'd have to hack around the client a bit to do this, though...
The point is that before the Internet made another distribution mechanism possible, the record labels had a monopoly on the only possible way to distribute your music to a lot of people.
The Internet is changing all that. But because their business model relies on the obscene shares of album sales which come along with a distribution monopoly (most artists get under 5% of album sales as royalties...and they don't see a penny of that until they pay off the record company for every single service they've given them, including recording costs, studio time, producers, album art, marketing, promotional CD's...) all the RIAA can do is try to sue the Internet out of the music business.
So, artists *will* be able to get better contracts...but only if mp3.com succeeds, only if Napster wins this suit and continues to promote new artists; only if the RIAA loses their effort to keep their monopoly business model by suing all competition out of existence.
This post is probably going to end up big and fuzzy, and contain lots of little issues for all you copyright nazi's to nitpick me on for days on end. And I know that a preliminary injunction is not a preliminary-injunction-sustained-on-appeal is not a verdict is not a verdict-sustained-on-appeal, and that the end of Napster is not the end of peer-to-peer file sharing; that indeed, nothing this or any judge or government can do can ever erase what Napster has wrought.
/. and Metallica parodies and debates over whether the current record label business model is more like indentured servitude or outright slavery and cover articles of every PHB-oriented PC rag in the biz on how MP3 is revolutionizing...something! (sidebar: copyright law and you)...what will happen on Friday afternoon is that the largest art museum in history will be closed up, maybe for good. And that's sad.
But I'm writing this tonight because I'm genuinely saddened by this ruling--saddened even though I have no doubt it'll be overturned soon, and no doubt it won't really affect anything in the long run. I'm sad because, when you take out all the hype and special reports at ZDNet and Wall Street Journal attack jobs and photos of Lars Ulrich testifying in the Senate Chambers and YRO flamewars at
The largest art museum in history??? That's a new one! But it's true--that's precisely what Napster is: a big place where one can go in, browse, and enjoy a decent portion of the musical art recorded on the planet. If you disagree, then it must be because you don't actually think music is an art form--in which case, well, you either have different tastes from most of humanity or you just haven't come across the music that really speaks to you yet. But rest assured, that music exists, and it's available for your perusal somewhere on Napster.
But...Napster's can't be an art museum! Napster is all about stealing, and pirates, and ripping off artists! See, at an art museum--unlike Napster, ho ho ho!--every time you look at a painting the artist is compensated by... Oh yeah--they're not. Indeed, it's not such a bad analogy after all... But at a museum the artist is the one who *decides* whether *their art* is shared with the public or not! Absolutely wrong. The typical painting available for free public viewing at an art museum is donated by a private donor, who has bought the painting from the artist. The typical recording available for free public listening on Napster is donated by a private donor, who has bought the CD from the artist. The artist has no say in either donation--which is arguably a bad thing. However, what cannot be argued is the fact that the free public sharing is a great benefit for all of society. And furthermore, just as common sense tells you that free public art museums stimulate rather than inhibit public consumption of paintings (and thus help out the oftentimes actually "starving" visual artists), study after study confirms that Napster stimulates public consumption of RIAA music--which, incidently, helps the record labels far more than the artists, although it does help the artists use their piddling royalties (we're talking under 5% of album sales, people) to pay off the hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt they have accrued with the record label.
Yes, the shutting of Napster's doors would be a great public loss indeed. Now, of course, people will argue that Napster is just one of many peer-to-peer file sharing protocols, and that one can always get whatever music recording one wants via an OpenNap server using Napigator, or via Gnutella, Scour, iMesh, Hotline, IRC, FTP, the web... And they're right. But they're missing the point. While Napster may not be clearly the most technologically advanced of the peer-to-peer communities, it has (to my mind, at least) what none of the other options can quite match--a combination of convenience and community building features which make possible a truly new, and in some ways superior, way of getting one's music.
That is, using Napster (on a broadband connection) can sometimes evoke in me that singular experience which harkens back to the halcyon days of the web: surfing. While most of the other methods of getting music off the Internet only help if you know what you're looking for, Napster actually makes if easy (or reasonably easy; it could still stand some improvement, but then again, Mosaic and Netscape 0.9 had some kinks themselves, but in some ways they only added to the charm) to browse the MP3 collections of anyone on the system, searching for new artists and new music that you would have never otherwise heard. Just as a quick drill through the listings on Yahoo! (or a search on altavista once Digital brought it online) used to provide a starting point for my winding surfs across the nascent Web, a search for an artist I like but want to hear more of can provide a point of departure as I look through the shared files of those who already have that artist's music, finding new songs, live recordings, and artists new to me--both similar and entirely different from the one I started out searching for. Yeah, it's a tad cumbersome at the moment to start downloading something I've never heard of, fire up Winamp and stream the incoming song, and decide if I like it and want to look into more of this musician's work; but it often works alright, and it's certainly introduced me to some stuff which, while not quite earth-shattering, has been marginally life-enriching.
Unfortunately, it seems pretty difficult to imagine any for-pay model which could preserve and improve the wonderful surfing aspect of Napster. Or rather, it's not that difficult to imagine; it's just difficult to imagine the industry agreeing to a fair model for distribution--say, the first 3 listens of a particular song are free, then the song costs a cent/minute per listen for another 10 listens, after which point the user owns the song. (Cost for a typical 55 minute album, $5.50--a reasonably fair price, IMO.)
But no, it is difficult to imagine, because music is free now: Napster has made it free. Or really, the Internet made music free, just like it has made newspapers and encyclopedias free (note that you don't see the New York Times or Encyclopedia Britannica suing to shut down the Internet like the RIAA and MPAA are), just like it has made long-distance communications and negotiation buying free, just like it will make movies free, and hopefully (and already has to some degree) make political news and speech in oppressed countries free. Free music is considerably less important than some of these benefits (although arguably more important than others), but that's not the point: the point is that all of them and many others are inherent in what the Internet IS--a medium by which any human being can communicate with any other with no marginal cost.
The RIAA and others can whine all they want, but they won't be able to change the fact that the fundamental nature of the Internet, combined with a good idea some kid at Northeastern University had less than a single year ago, has broken their monopoly on recorded music forever. What they can do, however, is buy unconstitutional laws and gum up the US court system trying to get them enforced, using the power of US law to obtain injunctions against grass-roots Internet art museums left and right. To be fair, I was always a bit squeamish that Napster was desperately trying to think up a way to make money off its service--not because I don't think the service isn't incredibly valuable, but because it's just one of those things which inherently ought to be free, like an art museum. (I know many if not most public art museums aren't free. They should be, though.)
The ironic thing about all this is that a court win for the RIAA will probably be the worst possible outcome for their member labels in the long-run. It will only give the RIAA complacency they cannot afford, drive users to noncorporate peer-to-peer services like Gnutella (try getting an injunction against that!), antagonize the general public (20 million people already use Napster, and according to the RIAA itself, 70 million would have by the end of the year had the case not gone forward--that is, a very very substantial portion of Internet users and society as a whole) and inevitably delay the time when the record labels do what is obviously necessary: digitize their entire catalogs, and sell them, in open, standard, non-access-controlled MP3 format, for a fair price. As it stands now, I doubt I will ever pay an RIAA label again for recorded music, but many Internet users will be less idealistic or more forgiving than me. I would pay a fair fee direct to the artist to download his or her musical art in a heartbeat. (I'd sample it for free off Napster to see that I wanted it first, though.)
But all of that is for the future. Frankly, I've sort of had it with MP3's for a while--the sound quality out a pair of computer speakers isn't horrible, but it's not great either. I've been planning on getting a good stereo for a bit now (at the moment my only CD player is in my computer; dorm life...), and I suppose I'll go ahead with that anyways. Too bad I'll probably have to burn my own CDs. But for now I'll just go on exposing myself to as much music as possible, and mourning the potential end of one of the most incredible uses of the Internet for the betterment of society which has come around so far.
Perhaps Napster will end up like Netscape after all--gone but not forgotten, a company which changed the world for the better but then made the fatal flaw of trying to charge for something it had already made free, its spirit carried on in a community-owned open-source extension of its original promise.
I can't find resources for pro-Napster resources on the web. Can you?
If you mean pro-Napster legal arguments and such, try going here.
Of particular interest is the Opposition to RIAA's Motion for Preliminary Injunction (182 kb PDF).
This is wrong. The consumer level version of the chip is poor (not terrible) for general purpose use, but this is because it needs to be in a $299 device. So, for example, there's only 8K of data cache and 16K of instruction cache, and the clock speed is a "slow" 300MHz.
Have you read the articles I linked to?? I'd guess not.
If you did, you'd find that the EE is very strongly optimized for SIMD and not at all for general purpose computing. In effect it's sort of like an AltiVec latched onto a 68030 core instead of a G3/G4.
Hmmm...re-reading the above I find it humorous that a 300MHz chip isn't treated with reverence.
I wasn't dissing the clock-speed. Indeed, I wasn't dissing the chip at all--I was defending its ability to go up against SGI machines, for cryin' out loud! I was simply pointing out that it was designed to handle 3D graphics, not as a general purpose chip. If you think that's an insult against the EE, then you don't know very much about it.
One of these links has already been posted above, but if anyone wants a well-written, easy-to-understand-but-plenty-technical introduction to why the Emotion Engine is cheap to produce and a terrible general-purpose chip, but an amazing design for high-quality low-latency 3D graphics, assuming programers can figure out how to take advantage of it...
start with these excellent articles from ArsTechnica:
Emotion Engine overview
Comparison of the EE's rendering process to that of a typical PC + graphics card
The second article is, IMO, the particularly interesting and relevant one, since the approach to rendering taken by today's high end graphics workstations from SGI et. al. is more similar to the PC + graphics card way of doing it than the EE way of doing it. Or rather, the PC + graphics card way of doing it was copied from the workstation approach. Of course, the major problem spot of the PC + card approach to rendering--the horrible bandwidth from the motherboard to the graphics card (the AGP bus is a joke compared to what would be required to actually stream textures into the graphics card in real-time; as it is now, entire levels must be loaded into the graphics card memory and stay there until the next level is accessed)--is not such a problem on a high-end workstation. It'll be quite interesting to see how this GScube thing compares, but the specs are there for it to make a very inexpensive and powerful alternative to the standard SGI stuff.
You're completely missing the point. This has nothing, absolutely positively nothing, to do with open-source, Free software, RMS, or even revealed-source.
This only has to do with Linux being able to play Sorensen encoded video. Basically, there are two ways this can be accomplished (note that neither has anything to do with open-source):
1) Apple can release Sorensen from their exclusive contract, allowing them to license (for a fee and without releasing any source code) their codecs to xanim, just like nearly every other video codec has been licensed to xanim.
2) Apple can port (without open-sourcing their code or anyone's codecs) Quicktime to Linux, just as they have to Windows.
Either would be acceptable to nearly everyone. Neither has to do with revealing any of Sorensen's source code. The first would require the compliance of both Apple and Sorensen, but Sorensen has already publically stated that they would agree to it. The second is entirely in Apple's hands.
Having exhaustively proven you completely wrong, I'm going to consider any further responses trolls.
What part of "Apple does not *OWN* all of the codecs" do you people not understand???
/.? Get your facts straight.
Almost EVERY time Apple is mentioned here, some fool will bitch about "no Quicktime on Linux".
...You wanna bitch to someone? Go talk to Sorenson, et al.
As has been pointed out many times before, the only reason the Sorensen codec is not licensed to any other video player is because Apple paid Sorensen to give them an exclusive license. What part of "EXCLUSIVE CONTRACT" do you not understand???
Guess what--it's not Sorensen's call. If Apple would permit them to license their codecs for a Linux-based player, they almost surely would. Or if Apple would just be half as charitable as MS and come out with a slow, buggy Quicktime player for Linux (to match the slow and buggy QT player for Windows), everyone'd stop complaining.
You wanna be rude and condescending on
Note that it's dual processor.
Note that it's not.
And how are they supposed to participate in this market? By selling MP3s which one person buys and then distributes to everyone else? How do you make money doing that? Everyone says they want digital music, but they only want it in MP3 format. Why? Because what they really want is FREE digital music.
They are supposed to realize that digital information is, by its very nature, infinitely reproducable and sharable. Then they should get over it. Then they should make their digital information available for unencrypted sale just like everyone else.
There's nothing to stop one person from buying the software which a software company sells and then distributing it to everyone else. And, of course, this still occurs to a degree. But it's a small degree, and it most certainly doesn't interfere with successful software corporations' ability to make obscene profits. After all, MS rose to being the most valuable company in the entire fricking world (by market cap.) selling nothing but copyrighted digital information which anyone could distribute to everyone else for free. (Sure, there were dirty tricks, serial numbers, Windows taxes and wheel mice along the way, but the point still stands.)
In any case, "copyright protections" are inevitably circumvented, inconvenient for users who never try to copy anything, and inherently act as "fair use preventions" just as much as "copyright protections." As such they ought to be ruled prima facie illegal, and I wouldn't be surprised if that's how the Supreme Court will rule once the DMCA, DVD CSS, and their ilk finally wind their way up there.
Rather than try to insult their already-ripped-off consumers with "copyright protection" schemes which harass uses and take away their constitutionally-guaranteed fair use rights, perhaps the RIAA might have managed to prevent the ubiquitous rise of free (beer) digital music had they just sold their wares as MP3s those long years ago. It's not like it would have increased the number of MP3s in the "infringing" distribution channel (actually, according to the Audio Home Recording Act, trading digital music recordings noncommercially isn't infringing at all); anyone can, and always will, be able to just rip the CD. Instead, it would have simply provided a convenient way to meet the demand for high-quality digital music--a demand which went unmet until Napster. (While you could always get a large music collection via IRC and FTP, it could never have competed in convenience from a fast, central, fairly-priced, online store selling all RIAA recordings.)
But the RIAA didn't want to do that; they would rather keep their monopoly over an outmoded form of distribution, and try to abuse the legal system to curtail any new, more efficient ones which they could not completely control (and nevermind the implications for free speech, privacy and anonymity rights, fair use, or the growth of the Internet). If it'd worked, it would have been a great justification for an antitrust inquiry. Indeed, it still may.
But instead, technology won as it always does and always will, and the RIAA needs to go to Washington to cry about it. Thank god the Senate (except Dianne Feinstein--who also wants to outlaw mention of illegal drugs on the Internet, BTW) is too smart to let them.
Napster does not make music a non-scarce good; it makes music *recordings* a non-scarce good. Luckily there are plenty of other ways for musicians and songwriters to make a living creating music. Some are already around--concerts, t-shirts, etc. Some will be modifications of the current pay-for-recordings model--it will likely turn out that most fans will be willing to pay their favorite artists for songs they enjoy, even if free alternatives are available via Napster; plus there are various value add-ons from having a physical copy like a CD--something you can hold in your hand, convenience and sound quality (for now, at least), cover art, etc. Some will be completely new business models, like that "ads on MP3's" story earlier today (not that I want this model to succeed, but it's an example).
In any case, the vast majority of musicians barely support themselves from the sale of their recordings under the current system anyways: most live out their careers in debt to their record companies, who force them to pay back all of their costs out of a measly 5% or so royalty from their album sale revenues. Imagine a system where all recordings were available for free, but the artists respectfully requested that their fans support them by paying for the privilege of their music, especially if they really enjoyed what they heard. Of course, the fact that distribution of new songs would be totally unrestricted would mean that many more people would get to hear a given album, and thus enlarge the pool of those who feel it's worth paying the artist who created it; let's say this makes the initial pool three times as large, although I'd say the actual effect will be much more than that. Now let's say that only 1/4 of them bother to pay for it--again, I'd bet more than that will, but we'll be conservative instead. And let's say that the going rate for these direct-to-the-artist donations is 1/3 the cost of a CD.
Even with those assumptions, the artist makes about 5 times as much money under this model than under the current one. When you say Napster is "only a means of distribution", you reveal how little you understand about the current industry model. The only reason artists have been shackled to the record companies for so long is that the record companies used to control the only means of distribution for recorded music. Yes, there are indie labels, but they can't buy the promotion and shelf space at record stores that the Big 4 labels can. By providing artists with a free means of distribution, the Internet allows perhaps an order of magnitude more people to enjoy an artist's music, and allows the artist to reap the complete fruits of their labor, rather than having 95% sucked up by record companies as a perverse sort of "distribution fee". Even allowing for lower prices and people who choose not to pay for their music, artists will be able to earn far more money, and, more importantly, reach many more listeners.
Think of it this way ... if you take the NY Post into your local library and copy an article for your friend, are you breaking the law? Sure but not on any grand scope. Now take this SAME article, scan it and put it up on your Geocities account, then get it linked from /. ... are you breaking the law then? You're damn right you are, regardless if you intended for hundreds of thousands of people to utilize your illegal distribution of copyrighted material.
... now it's time for folks to step up to the plate and realize that with this power comes accountability, regardless of your intent to be "non-commercial".
This is why your argument for "non-commercial" duplication and distribution is deemed to fail, it's a brave new world out there were the individual has gained a tremendous amount of publishing power, more than anyone could have ever dreamed
Luckily your argument is completely without any legal merit. According to the 1992 Audio Home Recording Act, any non-commercial sharing of music is in fact perfectly legal and not copyright infringement at all. The method, scale, or "impact" of the copying has nothing to do with it. Period. So long as there is no fee or other quid pro quo exchange, trading music on Napster is not infringement.
What's more astonishing is how your argument is so completely...well, to be fair, so completely based on ethical norms which are opposite mine. You realize that the Internet has moved us into a "brave new world" of content distribution, where, amongst other things, music is no longer a scarce good (like, for example, a car) but a potentially nonscarce good (like air). According to any economic theory (especially free market Capitalism), goods only need to be controlled and sold for profit when they are scarce; once a good is ubiquitous, it ought to be freely available. It has nothing to do with how much the good is worth to someone--after all, air to breathe is undeniably worth more than any other possible good, but any economic system which suggested that air should be charged for would be both unconscionable and plain dumb.
The fact that our technology has partially moved music from the scarce category to the ubiquitous category should be cause for celebration, not handwringing and worry. Napster and programs like it are providing a positive service for humanity (or at least that portion with Internet access), and so are those who, like the poster you responded to, choose to share their music with others.
Yet you apparently don't see it this way at all. You view the "brave new world" the Internet has moved us all into, which allows everyone to (just in this example) share in all the world's musical art, as a negative to be handled with some extra-legal sense of "accountability"--which, by the tone of your post, apparently means "ignoring the possibilities inherent in the Internet".
Perhaps you cling to this view out of the mistaken idea that non-commercial sharing of music is illegal (it isn't) or that Napster is somehow "stealing" money from musical artists (click here to find out who's really stealing money from artists). Maybe you somehow believe it would be a bad thing if the record labels had to undergo actual competition to their monopoly-abusing business model; but even there you would be misinformed, because not only are both CD sales and the outrageous average selling price of CD's up for the past year, but studies show that most Napster users buy more CD's after Napster than they did before, and that their use of Napster is primarily as a sampling tool to try out songs before they commit to buying an album. (This is covered under the fair use doctrine of copyright law, BTW.)
I don't know. But I'm choosing to believe that you're simply misinformed or haven't thought the issues through completely rather than that you're against people being able to listen to more music, against economic progress through new technologies, or are just a record company shill.
So get informed: Napster's legal brief (PDF file) is a wonderful place to start. Of course, many people do disagree on this issue; still, I'd request that you at least read the brief through before making up your mind.
also, how do you figure that Macs are any less "desinged for this" than x86 boxes?
Because Macs--and yes, even your "quality-built" G4--are terrible at the most important factor for web-serving performance: memory bandwidth. "Apple's systems generally have had only about 60 to 70% of the effective memory bandwidth of contemporary x86 systems. This is due to Power Mac configurations that run the system bus at lower clock rates than comparable x86 PCs, and the simple fact that Apple's system ASICs cannot match the technical excellence of the best x86 chipsets like the 440BX." (source: Paul DeMone's Mac performance article at realworldtech.com)
Furthermore, as you'll learn if you read the rest of that article, Apple refuses to submit any Macs to any standard, fair benchmarking organizations, and in particular to SPEC, instead preferring to use decade-old discredited benchmarks incorrectly (BYTEmark) or make up their own. I wonder why?
the G4 is a damned powerful, quality built piece of equipment--better than most x86 boxes slapped together at some cheap ISP.
First off, it's OEM, but I'm sure that was just a typo. More serious is your perception that the OEM does anything which impacts the performance of the computer other than pick the components. The only thing that could possibly make a computer "quality-built" by an OEM would be making sure everything is screwed in tight. What matters is that the components themselves are quality-engineered. And in the case of chipsets--again, the most important part of a good web server--a plain old Intel 440BX knocks today's Mac chipsets silly.
And let's not even get into the x86 chipsets which are actually built to be used in web servers. Apple simply doesn't have anything to compete.
And there's no reason why they should. Apple has never ever pretended their boxes make good web servers. And considering all the things Apple has pretended over the years, that fact alone should clue you in that they probably don't.
If those 98% of all musicians out there even made a dint in the Napster traffic, then maybe Boies' would have a good argument. Otherwise, it just looks like the primary use for Napster is not as a medium for small artists to push their stuff, but rather as a way for people to acquire quality music of their choice from the big label artists for free. Too bad for the little guys, because Napster might have really made a difference.
/. over the previous months about the degree to which Napster is actually used to trade unsigned artists' recordings, it turns out that it doesn't matter one single bit. All that matters is that Napster is capable of it!
If you read the brief all the way through, you'd find that the RIAA's own survey of files shared on Napster found that only 87% had names which corresponded to RIAA signed artists. In other words, 13% of Napster traffic is clearly non-infringing--more than just "a dint", if you ask me!
But even that doesn't include cases when those 87% of files with "infringing" names are actually of live recordings, etc., which bands often expressly allow to be redistributed and whose copyrights certainly don't belong to the RIAA labels in any case. Looks like that dint is even bigger.
Furthermore, it doesn't matter if all the traffic on Napster consisted entirely of Britney Spears and N'Sync; it still doesn't infringe copyright law if the way it is used falls under fair use provisions. Examples of ways one might use download an RIAA-copyrighted song off Napster for Constitutionally protected fair use include:
1) "Previewing" a song/album by downloading the MP3 and listening to it before decided whether it's worth getting gouged $18 for the CD. According to a survey, 91% of Napster users engage in this particular form of fair use.
2) "Space-shifting," the practice of downloading a song/album one already bought in CD/tape/vinyl/8-track format so that one can listen to it on one's computer/on one's Rio/at work/etc.
But I saved the best for last:
3) "Noncommercial use"--that is, downloading any song without paying the person you got it from in either money or some quid pro quo trade. Interestingly enough, this fair use was expressly granted, for all time and with regards to all future technologies which might crop up, in the Audio Home Recording Act of a few years back. Yes, this does in fact mean that almost any conceivable use of Napster is non-infringing and completely legal. Indeed, it means that all music-sharing over the Internet is completely legal, except for ratio sites and must-click-on-banner-ad sites. (No, this fair use does not extend to warezing software, only music; however, contrary to popular belief, however, it does extend to both digital and analog music recordings). Thus your dint is now fully 100% of all Napster traffic!!
But wait: there's more. It turns out that by the standard set up by many previous cases (amongst them the Sony Betamax case) it doesn't even matter how big or small the dint is. The only thing that matters is that Napster is "capable of substantial noninfringing uses." That's not just a quotation from the brief (page 8; page 9 of the PDF), but a direct quotation from the Supreme Court decision in the Sony case! (Emphasis added by Boies and kept by me.)
So after all this gnashing of teeth on
And furthermore, the standard for what is "substantial" is not "substantial in comparison to Napster's overall traffic" but rather "substantial in comparison to the ability for unsigned artists to distribute their work without Napster."
In other words, it's sort of ironic that you ended your pessimistic comment with the statement "Too bad for the little guys, because Napster might have really made a difference," because according to the standard set by previous cases, that's precisely all that's needed!
If you really, as you stated, read through the entire brief, I suggest you read it again. You might be pleasantly surprised at how utterly it demolishes the RIAA's case.
IANAC. But...
y LAN/Hotline/ripping a friend's CD/burning a friend's CD/AIM/ICQ...
This must be the absolute stupidest cryptographic idea I have ever, in my entire life, heard of. Seeing as how they're mathematicians at an Ivy League university and they've apparently actually presented a paper at a major cryptographic conference on this protocol, one would think that the people who came up with this would know more about crypto than I do. Just looking at how this works, though, I'm really not so sure...
For those who don't know, the basic idea behind cryptography is that there are some mathematical functions that scale linearly in complexity when run forwards (i.e. multiplying large numbers, generating elliptic curves) but scale exponentially when run backwards (respectively, factoring very large numbers and finding integral algebras from a given elliptic curve). In other words, multiplying two 20-bit numbers together to generate a 40-bit key only takes twice as long as multiplying two 10-bit numbers together to generate a 20-bit key; but factoring the 40-bit key takes 2^20=1 million times longer. (This is an oversimplification both of how real cryptographic algorithms work and of how multiplication in a computer scales with complexity, but close enough.) The point is, a cryptographic cipher is only a cipher when it takes longer to undo it than it took to do it.
If you've been following me so far, then you ought to be realizing why the idea of encrypting each second of music seperately is so blindingly dumb. If you encrypt each second of a 3 minute song with a different key, then you have a cipher which takes 180 times as long to crack and 180 times as long to decrypt properly; in other words, it takes just as long to do it as to undo it (as far as the each-second-independently thing goes; obviously there is also some real cryptography going on here, but these guys didn't invent that). By the most basic definition of cryptography--an imbalence in forwards complexity vs. backwards complexity--this is not cryptography.
Another way to look at it is this: over the course of an entire 74 minute CD's-worth of music, this approach only makes the music 4440 times harder to crack. One might think this is about as good as adding 12 bits to the key length (2^12=4096), albeit at a much higher cost to decryption time than, well, just adding 12 bits to the key length. In fact, that's not even the case, because adding 12 bits to the key length not only means the calculations to crack it take about 4440 times as long, but that they require 4440 times as much memory; obviously that is not the case when all 4440 encryptions can be cracked seperately.
But to get a real idea of how ass-backwards this scheme is, it helps to know a little about how real ciphers work. In any modern cipher, the work is split up into several smaller algorithms called rounds; this is done to keep down memory requirements, keep all the numbers involved small enough to fit in the registers of the machine doing the decryption (often commodity 8-bit chips), and keep cryptanalysis simpler so one can be reasonably sure a new attack won't surface after the cipher has gone into use. The reason the many-rounds approach is (theoretically) as secure as the discredited all-in-one-big-round approach is based on the assumption that the attacker has no way of knowing what the intermediate results of each round are.
In fact, perhaps the most powerful type of attack on a cryptographic implementation, known as "side-channel attacks", happens when the attacker is somehow able to guess at some of this intermediate information. Luckily, this is usually quite difficult to do (although with some early smart cards all it took was an oscilliscope) and doesn't yield complete information. And that's why this new multiple key idea is so outrageously bad. It's essentially like doing all the work of a very powerful, many-rounds cipher (i.e. one "round" per second), but yielding up complete side-channel information for every round! This is like a very powerful cipher which has already done 99.9999% of the cracking for you!!
In conclusion, this is just stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid.
And furthermore, it's completely unnecessary. Even a 20 year-old, 56-bit cipher like DES is good enough to take a modern computer a good long while to brute-force; it took a special purpose machine plus a supercomputer almost a day to do it in the last DES challenge, and they got lucky. Plain old obsolete vanilla DES would be more than secure enough to make it worth anyone's while to pay a dollar or two for the song instead of cracking it. Or to get it via Napster/scour/iMesh/Gnutella/FTP/CuteMX/universit
That is, I'd say the significance of this is approximately zero.
Course, I could be wrong. Comments welcome if I am...
What's even more surprising were the reports i heard later on that the mac IE development team was dissolved - who knows what the reasoning behind that was.
Apparently they've just been reassigned to overhaul the web browser for WebTV. Supposedly this was the plan all along, which makes sense considering they can reasonably leave the Mac version alone for a while.
Of course, I'd much rather they'd been reassigned to the Win/Unix IE ports, which could use their help (especially the later, of course). Amazingly, not only is Mac IE 5 cleaner looking and much more standards-compliant than any other browser, it also renders pages noticably faster than even IE 5 for Windows (based on my observations).
On the other hand, hell if I could spend all day browsing the web with a one-button mouse...
2) Trademarks Vs. Free Speech? With 63 characters for a domain name now, you can fit an opinion in. 2600 is getting sued by Version because they registered versionsucks.com and Version thinks that infringes on the Version trademark. What about wethinkverisonsucks.com?
Amazingly enough, 2600 is getting sued for registering verizonreallysucks.com; in a sign of confidence in their new conglomerate, Verizon had already registered plain old verizonsucks.com! The funniest part about the suit is that the cybersquatting laws require that the challenged domain "dilute" the intent of the real trademark holder by being "confusingly similar" to their own legitimate uses of their trademark.
In other words, Verizon is suing on the grounds that "Verizon Really Sucks" is something they would likely be saying about themselves!
Thanks for the info. If I had $1 for every time someone on /. said something like "If you don't like paying a lot for CDs, order through Columbia House, BMG, etc; that way you don't rip off the artist," I'd have... 12 x "a lot" CDs.
Once again we see that legal != moral. If a reasonable, fairly priced method of paying for high-quality MP3s directly from artists ever arises, I'll use it in a second. Until that time, what I'd like to see more than anything is a list of addresses where I can send personal checks to artists thanking them for the enjoyment I've recieved from songs of theirs I've downloaded.
if I read this correctly, MP3-sharing via Gnutella is OK, but MP3-sharing via Napster is out because Napster is making a profit from advertising to its users.
No, MP3-sharing via Napster is currently ok, because Napster does not make any money from anything yet. If Napster started advertising to its users, then it would become not-ok. So far the only business model Napster has is attracting VC money...
www.oldmanmurray.com/images/cgw.gif
Ace's hardware ran the test against a K7 athlon, a PIII, a celeron, and an UltraSparc II... Thunderbird kicked ass, of course, it's not exactly fair to match a 1 Gz thunderbird against a 733 PIII.
Ace's intent wasn't to provide a fair benchmark, but rather to generate a graph which would clearly show the way differing cache architectures affect Linpack results at different data sizes. Frankly, it's a brilliant graph and a perfect example of how a well constructed benchmark run can show what's really going on inside a processor. What it wasn't meant to do was to say "Athlon beats PIII" or anything like that.
In any case, this benchmark shows just how misguided the parent to this thread is. In fact, Linpack doesn't show "real FPU" performance, but rather data bandwidth. Depending on the size of the data set one chooses, you can "show" that an Athlon "Classic" 750 is 1.5x "faster" than a PIII 733 (data set = 64k), or that it's 1.5x "slower" (data set = 180k). Or you can "show" than an UltraSparc II 400 is 3x "slower" than that PIII 733 (data set = 180k) or that it's almost 2x "faster" (data set -> infinity).
The point is that Linpack, while useful as a synthetic benchmark, must be taken as a whole graph, not as a single number, and that it is at least as dependent on cache and memory bandwidth than on CPU core. Furthermore, it has almost no relevence on the performance most people (i.e. anyone not running scientific models) can expect with the way they use their computers.
Quake 3, on the other hand, is a marvelous benchmark, which can be easily understood, yet tuned to test most major bottlenecks in a PC. Most importantly, it much better models some of the conditions that most PC buyers put their computers through.
Madonna sucks/is past her prime?
Um...when was it that she won 4 Grammies (including Best Pop Album), and was nominated for Album of the Year and Record of the Year? Oh yeah...1999.
Now Metallica, Dre, and Eminem I can do without...but this is aggravating. Happily, it looks as if "she" (i.e. Time Warner) is only pissed about the unreleased track, not about mp3s off of released discs. On the other hand, while I don't particularly care for him, Eminem's album just broke the single-week sales record or something, so it's a bit difficult to support the notion that he objectively sucks either. Frankly, I think your argument is absolutely wrong.