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Posted 27 Jul 2000 at 14:34 UTC by jschauma  |
I know this will be on /. in a matter of hours, but I would rather follow a less-cluttered discussion on this matter here at advogato: As you all probably know, there was a ruling that might shut down Napster.
Following that ruling, Napster must stop "distributing" copyrighted
material. This means that they will still be able to offer their service
for non-copyrighted material, but since Napster can't distinguish
between those files, this might be the end of Napster (as we know it?).
The internet is not just the USA, but this is an american
ruling - could Napster just move to, say, Danmark somewhere, or
maybe to Sealand
and thus stick it to the RIAA? What does the ruling mean for
international artists?
Is this all Metallica's (Dr.Dre's) fault? Do you see a way of
keeping Napster up and running? Clearly, this ruling will not have any
effect on services like gnutella - or will the RIAA try to shut them down, too? If so,
could they?
~
If the executives of Napster move its servers offshore then they would still be guilty of Contempt. They could evade this by moving out of the USA themselves, but would be arrested if they set foot within US juristiction at any point in the future. In short, its exile or nothing.In theory another company could set up a Napster-like server, but AIUI the central Napster server is proprietary. The legal situation if Napster did something like licensing this to an offshore company is a bit more complicated, but I'd imagine that they could be found in Contempt on the grounds that this was merely an arrangement to evade the ban.
OTOH this leaves Gnutella and Freeserve untouched, and almost untouchable because of their decentralised nature.
Paul.
RIAA's blowing up the only chance they have at making money off of the Internet by destroying Napster-- I think it's the most hilarious thing in the world. I have heard numbers of something like 70 million Napster users projected by the end of this year-- and they want to scatter that collection of eyeballs to the far edges of the Internet.
Those eyeballs are going to find all the alternatives to Napster, the alternative napster servers and communities, and the Gnutella network, and eventually Freenet. RIAA doesn't understand that nowadays, enough people know how to write distributed and anonymizing software so that it will be impossible to collect information on their "userbase" after the dissolution of Napster.
I don't think that Napster's sequel, AppleSoup, has a chance to succeed if Napster's userbase is alienated by RIAA. No one is going to want to depend on centralized authoritah for anything if clients with large legal budgets go around hiring super-lawyers to pee in everyone elses lemonade while complaining about their client's useless lemons.
Napster was conceived and deployed as a music-sharing service, and most of the music was copyrighted. The Napster execs knew that, but tried to blow sunshine up the judge's butt. She wasn't having it, and slapped them down. Simple as that. It bugs me a lot to see Napster being hailed as some kind of hero in this -- I'm certainly no fan of RIAA, but the simple fact is that Napster is primarily a tool for facilitating copyright infringement. I think Gnutella and services like Scour will probably render copyrights meaningless in the digital world, and we have no good substitute in place to protect the rights of the artists.
... but organized piracy. Who cares if they get shut down.
Let's rather spend the efforts crying about the trouble companies like mp3.com goes through to change the music industry and still get the artists paid.
- ask
Sure, napster *was/is* just organized piracy, but napster made people think about copyrights, I believe. And with the internet, it seems to me that copyrights need to be reformulated, restructured, revolutionized. I believe that napster just triggered this discussion, I don't see napster as a hero or a defender of the internet (we all know, that's netzero ;).
Due to napster, people might come to view music as art: it can be free, it should be free, and it's worth a lot. Think about museums and their artwork - you can easily find replications of anything for cheap, you can find art exhibitions for free, but people still pay to see the original. Music is an experience that is completed not by just listening to it over your stereo - if that was so, the radio/cassette-player would have put an end to the whole thing.
Music is experienced in many ways, and yes, I think music should be free.
I don't care much for Napster, but I do not approve of the "Big 5" and the RIAA. Ever listened to the radio in the past 20 years? (perhaps more; I'm not that old). Other than a few college/university campus stations, no one is playing any new music.
I would feel much better giving my money directly to the band than going and buying a CD. If only a few big bands would do what Stephen King is doing...
To quote (well, paraphrase) someone who's name I can't remember: "The music execs have spent 30 years turning music into a commodity. Now they're crying because no one repects their music as art form."
I find the whole Mp3 kafuffle somewhat mystifying. Ever listed to an Mp3 on a stereo system? I've got a low-end audiophile stereo system that I've connected to my computer system that has an SBLive card. I mean, the sound quality is acceptable but it's nowhere near as good as a CD itself (hmm..maybe it would be better if I had a more expensive sound card? But I digress...).The point is, the recording industry could have circumvented the whole mp3 issue by developing and propagating new technologies that would blow current CD-audio out of the water. Something so good that if you closed your eyes you would swear the musicians were playing in your room. Make it so that this technology is PHYSICALLY IMPOSSIBLE to do straight digital copies (or that the bandwidth for a single song would be horrendous...but given the ever accelerating capacities for speed and storage, this is not the best way to go).
If they managed to get this new technology out and in the mass market, people would turn their noses up at mp3 recordings as they would at something that was playing from a tinny AM radio.
Well, that's what I would have done if I was in their position...
After seeing and reading about all the bullying tactics napster has used in the past few months, I have come to determine that Napster(tm) is just another bloody corporation.
We all know the story about how Shawn(sp) Fanning wrote the code and how it blew up overnight into millions of people sharing their hard drives, but napster is different than that now.
They are another VC funded corporation (hee hee, I sound like a commie buster from the vietnam war era). Shawn Fanning has a tiny part in it now.
Salon Magazine has a very interesting article about it, which links to Courtney Love's press conference a couple weeks ago.
jschauma, okay you think music should just be free. Tough argument. The best analogi I can come up with to your "Napster made people think about copyrights" is that burglars makes people think about doorlocks and security systems. Try reading the Ten myths about copyright document. Copyrights are good. Not that I like the RIAA; I just dislike this copmany that provides a service that's not good for anything but stealing.
zeevon, if I'm not mistaken then one of the things companies like mp3.com and amazon are doing is to make it easier for the artist to sell to the consumer with out the big expensive link.
ribozyme, geez, how naive is that? Even if they did make some 500MB per song technology and put the music on DVD then you would probably still pirate it and live with the only 192Kbit/sec or whatever rather than buy a new stereo. I bet you could get much much better sound out of your cd's than you do now by getting a real hifi stereo. Also, when people are playing music on their computers on lousy small speakers, do you really think they care that much about sound quality?
They're much more portable than CDs, for instance. I keep a couple gigs of MP3s on my hard drive so I can have music during work. They go to a set of decent headphones and while they aren't as good as the CD, they're acceptable and a whole lot easier than carrying a few dozen CDs to work.That said, I've never seen the point of Napster. I rip all my MP3s straight from the CD (which I own). Even neglecting the copyright argument (which I don't) it's the only way to ensure that you have good copies to your specifications for bit rate and encoding quality. Sure, you can _also_ find new songs from bands which want their songs propagated over napster, but you can find those on their websites, and be sure that they want them distributed.
ask: I fail to see how my suggestion that the recording industry supercede current digital audio technologies is at all naive. Also, I specifically qualified my 'high bandwidth' strategy as non-viable, so why do you bring it up again?All I'm saying is that the industry can sidestep the problem *if* it has the capability of forcing a quantum leap in recording technology and having it gain mass-market acceptance. Is that so hard to envision? Didn't that already happen with the transition from vinyl LP's to compact discs? Why do you assume that the next breakthrough technology has to be based in the digital realm anyway? We have a smug tendency these days to assume that digital technology is the be-all-and-end-all no matter what it's applied to. There's plenty of research going in in holophonic sound reproduction that in no way relies on digital delivery. Who knows where new technologies like blue lasers and nanotech will take us?
Also, when you say 'you would probably still pirate it', I certainly hope you're using 'you' in the rhetorical sense since I, for one, scrupulously respect copyrights.
MetallicaI really don't understand Metallica's position in the Napster debate. I thought I did, but then I saw an interview with Lars Ulrich where he stated that they (Metallica) encourage bootlegging. It seems to me that they're just upset because someone figured out a way to bootleg more than they thought possible.
Napster
I don't know really know anything about Napster. Just what I hear in the media and on the Internet. From what I can tell, they host servers that people can upload music to for redistribution and that's the wrong side of the line. That makes them distributors of copyrighted material whenever someone uploads a copyrighted song. But like I said, I don't know anything.
It could well be that Napster (the software) is nothing more than a bastardized IRC daemon that has the additional ability of allowing people to upload a file listing to the server and let's the users negotiate file transfers among themselves (via DCC of course). But somehow, if this were the case, I don't think that Napster would have lost.
Anyway ... I think Pandora's box is open and there's nothing the music industry can do about it other than find a way to ride the waves.
ask:
Of course copyrights are a good thing. After all, they ensure that open software stays open and can't be made closed software. But I think it is important to not just accept laws that were made under certain cirumstances as written in stone and to see if it may be neccessary to overthrow them. Since the internet is such a big public space by now people will get more and more used to the idea of getting things for free off of the net. That may be against the law (like downloading copyrighted music from napster) and even morally wrong (depending on your personal ethics), but if it becomes the de facto standard, people will have to rewrite the laws.
Note: I do not say that just b/c "everybody does it it's ok to do it". All I'm saying is that a society has to be flexible enough to see that new technologies might lead to the need to rethink certain things. One of them being the copyright of an artist and how (s)he can make a living with his/her art.
duff:
Metallica are the biggest phonies ever. It's no surprise that somebody actually sold "Metallica's Integrity" on ebay (they took it down pretty soon, but it was there,for sale ;-): back when they were a small band they announced on all concerts that fans should please bootleg the concerts and teh records and distribute the recordings. That's how they became known and big. In an interview back then Lars Ulrich said (I lost the link to thatinterview, sorry), when being asked if he minds that people made illegal copies of their music, that he doesn't "give a fuck".
Now they have money up the yingyang and are greedy and the argument Lars Ulrich gives is: "By downloading the music for free, it is degraded from the art that it is to a commodity."
Needless to say that the opposite is the case. (OT: Did anybody else notice that sentences that start with "Needless to say" are redundant by definition?).
And I agree: Pandora's box is open and there's nothing the music industry can do about it other than find a way to ride the waves.
Frankly, I have to agree with mrorganic. Napster was a neat idea from a technical perspective, but essentially promoted copyright infringement. I'm not saying our current IP system is the best, but I also don't advocate breaking the law either. Now, if you want to come back and share copyrighted works as a form of nonviolent protest, great. Just have a clearly stated purpose and don't be surprised when someone sues your butt off.
Napster, however, is not the real loser in this flurry of RIAA lawsuits. I'm still mad that MP3.com got smacked over their BeamIt software. I am a big fan of MP3.com (bought 2 DAM CD's and getting ready to order a couple more) and I think their idea of allowing users to have music that they already purchased be streamed to them is a great one. If it isn't supported by fair-use law, it should be. That's the area where the RIAA abused their power.
Of course, the Napster case will probably improve the RIAA's image. They can use it as a smoke screen to show how much they care about their artists while they rob them and their listeners. Grr. More of the $6.00 I paid for a Steve Lamar CD went into the artist's pocket than the $15 I paid for a Kenny Chesney CD.
duff:
Napster doesn't host the files. Your local machine does. Napster just is a search engine for the currently connected user's folders that are made available. When you download a song, it comes from another user's hard disk and not any of Napster's servers.
The RIAA should be sueing the users of Napster for copyright infringement, not Napster itself.
The RIAA and MPAA are doing what they have done forever. Use fear because they want total control rather than inovention.Remember drive-in theaters? Motion Picture companies fought them for a long time by restricting what movies were made available. The theaters prospered by creating a new market for "B" movies. Eventually the whole thing wound up in court and companies were forced to offer drive-ins the same opportunities that theaters had for pictures. The industry eventually dies because the public lost interest, especially when sound systems improved.
When cassette recorders appeared, the recording industry tried to stop them claiming that giving the general public the ability to record material would encourage copyright violations and piracy. Why would they buy recording when they can make their own? Sound familiar? They lost that fight, and yet managed to survive.
When Video tape and tape rentals came out, the MPAA fought it claiming a loss of revenue, increase of piracy, and the death of the movie theater.It went to congress. Years later, it is seen what it really is, another opportunity and revenue stream. It's part of the overall plan for movie release and there are even direct-to-video only releases.It's diversification. Even Disney's rebound is credited with releasing their collection of movies to video.
They still hate the fact you can record from TV. Let's put little bitmap logos in the corners.
When CDs first came out, we were told the high price was because they were more expensive to make. And that they would lower the price in a few years. They loved the fact that everyone would need to replace records and rebuy everything. But when selling used CDs started to appear, they didn't like that similarity. The RIAA tried to stop it claiming they wanted a piece of this "perpetual income" and told their distributors that if they sold used CDs they would be in violation of their marketing agreements. Obvious nonsense. Now, years later, the price of CDs is still the same, even though blank discs are under 50 cents.
Then DVDs came out, and the MPAA forced macrovision into everything, and some companies tried to force DVIX on the public. The public refused it. Now DVDs are a major source of income, eventually to replace tapes. But some, Speilberg for one, still are at odds with it. And piracy? Macrovision serves more to interfere with high-end audio equipment (like line doublers) rather than pirates because pirates can buy professional equipment. The average american doesn't mass produce videos because they have to be made in real time (i.e. it takes hours to record a movie).
When CDRs came out, the RIAA panicked again, and created an audio CD recorder alternative to protect themslves. And like the appearence of video tape, now the whine is "but these are DIGITAL recordings, that's very different than before".
Then, of course, there came MP3 and downloading. Another RIAA panic, although studies show that people who really love music want to own original source material if they afford it. Studies also show that if CDs were more affordable, people would buy them more. Whny do people buy Linux even though you can download it? Because convience has value. Why spend money and effort on a copy when an original is only $2?
The DVD encryption was cracked, another panic. Yet they still manage to find it within themselves to release new DVDs each month. Then the MP3/DVD/CD players tried to appear. And then disappeared. Then Apex player appeared, then disappeared.
The RIAA claims that they are protecting recording artists. If they don't get paid for their work, then what is their incentive? How about the fact that people do art just for the sake of creating it? How about recognition? How about being more inventive about income source? How about concerts? How about cutting down on your obscene profits?
I'm tired of both of these organizations! When are they going to make it their job to stay on top of the technologies (and plan to use them rather than fight them)? The open source movement is not limited to software; the internet and personal recorders are forcing these industries to deal with multiple revenue sources, multiple advertising advantages, and diversification. 50 years ago, the emphesis was on invention and inovention. For the last 30 years, it's been on restriction and control.
Will the concept of napster die? No. Will piracy stop? No. Is the best way to stop piracy to restrict the general public's ability? No. It never has before. Stop using the government to force your unfair or outdated practices on the public. The Postal Service still exists because it is a legal monopoly, even though eCommerce studies show that 85% of all customer complaints involve the postal service over other delivery services. Why is it still alive?
MP4 is coming....DVD recorders are coming... Get ready for MPAA's turn again.
The key benefit of Napster wasn't the ability to easily violate copyright. Personally I would have been happy to pay a reasonable price for each track I downloaded and kept. (Earth to RIAA: $18 per track isn't reasonable.)
It was instead the means to easily grab music one's looking for and make use of it on one's own terms. With Napster gone, these benefits aren't available anywhere, at any price.
The truth is that this legal action won't increase the recording industry's profits at all. And probably the bright minds over there are well aware of that. They're doing it because they can, and because no one ever got fired for filing an IP lawsuit.
With Napster gone, these benefits aren't available anywhere, at any price.
Not quite - there are a lot of alternatives. Aside from all the OpenNap servers, there' still gnutella, which I personally use a lot more than napster. There's nothing the RIAA can do - people will continue to download music from the web.
Dear Advogators:
Tonight (July 29) Mojo Nation will be announced at DefCon in Las Vegas.
Mojo Nation is a highly distributed general purpose network file sharing system with integrated micropayments.
The Mojo Nation file sharing system works on any type of file, including web pages and multimedia files. It is intended for the sharing of legitimate content which is added to the system by the legal rights holders, and the integrated micropayment system will be used to enable "tipping", in which consumers of content voluntarily contribute a small amount to the content provider.
Mojo Nation is an open source project, available under the LGPL. MojoNation.net or SourceForge.
Regards,
Zooko
P.S. The Mojo Nation architecture rocks. Check it out. Strong crypto, redundant (M-out-of-N) shares, firewall transparency, bandwidth throttling, hash-based namespace, automated reputations, WWW integration...
P.P.S. Mojo Nation is written entirely in Python except for the performance intensive bits which are open source C/C++ libraries.
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