Shawn Fanning's New Venture 165
prostoalex writes "We've read about Justin Frankel, but what are the other heroes of the MP3 revolution up to? News.com.com.com tells the story of Shawn Fanning's new company. SnoCap (which changed its name from Open Copyright Database) is currently developing file-sharing mechanisms that would allow the music industry to earn money."
Not well thought out if you need everyone to agree (Score:4, Insightful)
Sounds like all those well thought-out ideas to stop spam, that simply need everyone to agree on something new.
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Is it too late anyway (Score:5, Insightful)
The fundamental problem is I want to copy the music once I've paid for it. The music industry doesn't want me to do this - because if I can easily move it around, I can move it to my friends house (for visits, you understand
All I can say is, Good Luck - you're going to need it...
Simon
Re:Not well thought out if you need everyone to ag (Score:5, Insightful)
Might as well complete the quote...
The focus here is getting the peer-to-peer companies to participate. The user is going to take the path of least resistance (and money.) As long as there are free and easy to use peer-to-peer systems, projects like this do not stand a chance.
However, projects like this could easily take over... if and only if they include one vital key. The makers of the peer-to-peer software will make more money. Kazza, emule, and all the others will lay down their arms and gladly go to a pay-type system if they can make more money that way.
The problem with that is... there is not enough money to go around. For peer-to-peer to make more that means the music companies are going to have to take less. (They can't rape the artists any more than they already are.)
AC
Please don't... (Score:3, Insightful)
If anyone here thinks the RIAA should get more money please raise your hands...
Yes, yes... I thought so...
Why (Score:2, Insightful)
Why postpone the inevitable? Let the industry die.
What a bizarre plan (Score:3, Insightful)
The big elephant in the room, however, is Sean himself. It sounds like SnoCap is trying to sell a "Secure" model to the entertainment industry, from someone the industry does not trust: Sean. This doesn't bode well for the industry. This is someone the industry claims contributed to the decline of CD sales, and yet then they will turn around and work with him to prevent it? Doesn't add up. Further, if well healed security and DRM companies have not suceeded with the industry, why should SnoCap where others have failed? SnoCap doesn't even appear to have any security people on its staff, so where does it get its expertise? Can anyone say "implementation flaw"? It just doesn't add up. DRM from a company and people that don't have any experience with DRM, security or working with the entertainment industry. Yeah, they're gonna get alot of cooperation from the RIAA.
Let us not forget the fact that Sean is not well liked in the entertainement industry, nor are the former investors in Napster. These people have little hope of getting the RIAA onboard. Even if they do manage to gain some ground with the industry, its a steep climb for SnoCap to anything close to sucess.
BTW, why would you want to use a P2P client that has DRM, when you can use something like eMule, Kazaa, GNUNet or any other P2P client that doesn't? Yeah, this will do about as well as Napster would have if they had implemented DRM. Dead in the water.
Re:Napster and Shawn Fanning (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't like the RIAA tactics, but you have to admit that P2P is forcing them to change their business model. Would iTunes Music Store exist if P2P wasn't so wildly popular? Furthermore would we have access to so many portable music devices if it weren't for the popularity of napster and hence the popularity of digitized music (aka MP3 files)?
Not to mention that P2P gives me hope that one day artists will be able to directly reach their audience without the RIAA.
Fanning was really the first to let the gennie out of the bottle so to speak. You may think Fanning was an idiot for putting out a program designed only to steal music. I think he was pretty smart for putting out a program that finally allowed us to have something to fight the media giants with, and changed the way many people obtain their music. No longer do you have to record crappy quality tracks off the radio, nor do you have to buy 15 songs of crap for $18 to get one song you like.
P2P is a force to be reckoned with and it's because of napster that this is true.
Re:Hero? Give me a break (Score:3, Insightful)
If they had just said "he's a hero" and left it at that, I would agree. But they qualified the statement by saying "heroes of the MP3 revolution". Which I agree with. Within that small, contained area, they have certainly attained hero status. Without WinAmp or Napster, what would be the state of portable music today? (Assuming no on else had come along and achieved a similar status. But if that were the case, you would be arguing that [Some Guy] wasn't a hero instead of Justin Frankel.)
Re:Napster and Shawn Fanning (Score:5, Insightful)
Shawn Fanning is an idiot. This is not a troll. He releases a PTP system that is so inherently unthought out and stupidly illegal and try to make a go of it. He wrote a program in VB that was what it was because he couldn't implement anything more complex. Sure, some of the beauty of Napster was its simplicity. But this is also the reason we are in a jam with PTP systems like we are today. Without Napster we would not have the RIAA court cases. We would have Gnutella systems, Bit Torrent etc free from lawyers and everyone would be happy.
The reason we have distributed systems in the first place is due to the destruction of Napster. If Napster had never existed, I'm inclined to believe P2P would be nowhere near as widespread as it is today, or that it would even exist at all.
That said, I see no need for any software that allows the recording industry to make money. We simply don't need the recording industry anymore. All we really need are artists, and fans. Woe be to the recording industry when the likes of iRate [sourceforge.net] and CDBaby [cdbaby.com] meet. It's clear that we've got the distribution thing covered with the internet. A system like iRate handles the task of getting the artist exposure with fans who will appreciate them, and a store like CDBaby handles the obvious financial needs of the artists. That's really all the current recording industry does now.
So why do we need to include the bastards who sue 12 year olds again?
Re:OGG vs SnoCap (Score:4, Insightful)
To put it in perspective:
I know the readers of
Frankly, unlike many of the
Sean's riches have allowed him to move out of his parents' basement and get a haircut; You should worship him.
As for Ogg, audio CODECs are a dime a dozen. Listening to you geeks argue that Ogg is better than, say WMA, is like listening to audiophiles argue about which DAC sounds better in their hi-fi. Who cares?
Re:Not well thought out if you need everyone to ag (Score:3, Insightful)
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Re:What a bizarre plan (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, for starters I'd pick a P2P client that doesn't include spyware, which lets out Kazaa, at least the original. Not that DRM doesn't contain its own nasty potential for privacy violations, but I'd pick it over Gator.
Then I'd look for the biggest network, because the more people use it, the more stuff you can actually get your hands on. If this guy can make a lot of stuff available, many people might go for it, because dealing with DRM may well be less bad than 200-hour failed downloads from an illegal system. That's why people pay a buck to Apple: "free" but unavailable isn't free.
Still, in the end I dunno what this guy thinks he's going to get. P2P works only because it's free. When you pay for music, you get the privilege of a dedicated fast server with a support staff. Pay music on P2P would be trying to get other people to do the storage and network space. I'm not participating in that.
Common MIsconceptions..... (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, at the start of 2002 I ended up out of a job and managed to get a position in Napster, long past the days when they were running the full service. There was the Beta test for the pay service running as well as a few potentially groundbreaking court cases. Turns out I was the last engineer Napster hired.
Anyway, I'd studied the napster setup in great detail and I pretty much had the same opinions - I figured that Shawn was an average geek who had got lucky. I didn't expect he'd much from him, hey, I'd spent 10 years in academia, I'd spent years 'saving the world from killer asteroids' (http://szyzyg.arm.ac.uk/~spm), and....
I'd wrote and released the first mp3 radio software and then watched Justin Frankel and winamp get all the credit for 'inventing' it a year and a half later. I went to napster expecting that Shawn wasn't anything special.
Boy was I wrong, he is a genuinely smart guy, yes he was also lucky - just like I'm a smart guy who wasn't so lucky. I think a lot of technical people underestimate him and sometimes this is working to his advantage.
So, lay off the assumption that luck == stupid - smart people get lucky all the time too.
Re:Napster and Shawn Fanning (Score:3, Insightful)
Record lables/companies don't only create & distribute, but they MARKET the artists and artists' products. Every time you see an artist on tv, or hear them on the radio (which is how most artists are introduced to the MASS audience), or see their posters in stores or songs in movies, the labels spent a lot of money and effort to get that exposure. How will you replace that? I know the internet can generate exposure to an already installed fan base, but how do you get more?
The internet is ideal for distribution, and with faster/lower priced desktops and music creation software, its easy to create the music. The last step is marketing, getting that music heard by a lot of people. I think that will be the only role future music companies might need to fill.
Winamp 5 is a hog (Score:1, Insightful)
Winamp 5 really bogs the llama down.