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Music Media

Universities Begin to Ban Napster 458

Posted by emmett from the no-music-for-you dept.
Anonymous Coward writes "CNET's News.Com has a story about universities beginning to ban access for Napster users. The schools cited excessive use of bandwidth (with 5% of total bandwidth going to Napster) and the RIAA's lawsuit as reason for it. Take a look at the story here."
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Universities Begin to Ban Napster More

Universities Begin to Ban Napster

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  • It is true (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I am at the University of Victoria and they have not banned it but they do try and catch people using it, they monitored the sever for 5 minutes and caught 17 unlucky kids who got a visit from Campus Security the next day. Kinda a pain in the ass, but it's also true that its use is rampant. Everyone in our building that had a computer used napster alot.

  • You know, there's always the possibility of using Luigi Rizzo's excellent dummynet [freebsd.org]. Yes, it's for FreeBSD, which would mean changing the Linux firewall box to a FreeBSD firewall box.

    Here's some information from the dummynet home page [unipi.it]. I hope this helps!


    dummynet is a flexible tool for bandwidth management and for testing networking protocols. It is implemented in FreeBSD but is easily portable to other protocol stacks. There is also a one-floppy version of FreeBSD which includes dummynet and a lot of other goodies, see below. dummynet works by intercepting packets in their way through the protocol stack, and passing them through one or more pipes which simulate the effects of bandwidth limitations, propagation delays, bounded-size queues, packet losses, etc.

    Each pipe can be configured separately, and packets are forwarded to the appropriate pipe using the ipfw [freebsd.org] packet filter. Thus you can apply different limitations/delays to different traffic according to the ipfw rules (e.g. selecting on protocols, addresses and ports ranges, interfaces, etc.).


    --

  • My argument would be that musicians have never been able to extract pay-per-listen from people- why should that change now? Think about radio for a second. Sure, it's (literally) the same 8 songs in heavy rotation with an extended collection of older cuts to pad out the very small playlist (once it averaged nearer 'top 40', then 20, then 14, and so on...), but think again. When you turn on your radio, are you charged per song? No, you are not. Radio has pervaded the music business since well before payola, and has established the well-ingrained habit that you DON'T PAY for just listening to whatever music's there. You pay if you want to own a copy and listen to it whenever you want- or if you want a fancy copy, like the old Mobile Fidelity half-speed remasterings of rock albums- you pay for other stuff over and above just hearing the music, such as your ability to control the music or to get a better quality version.

    This is even more apropos given mp3s, as they are as 'free as radio' for all practical purposes, but they are not a desirable audio quality compared to the source material. They can be quite listenable but nobody would argue they are a fidelity improvement over the original full-bandwidth data.

    So, it's like a realworld of that AT+T feel-good ad, "One day you can watch the movie you want.... _when_ you want", only it's happening with audio first. It's like massively parallel radio- a lower fidelity version of the music is broadcast from somewhere- as a CD- and then countless people 'tune in' to the signal, and keep 'rebroadcasting' it, causing the effective bandwidth to become nearly infinite. A song released today need never die or drop off the charts- mp3 can keep it before the attention of the interested listeners for months, years. Any of those people can seek out the source CD and buy it if they like, just as if they were hearing the tune on the radio and wanted to own their own copy.

    In an age when you have stuff like the Klipsch Permedia computer speaker system sneaking formidable audio performance into people's lives by disguising itself as a home theater system- it will become more significant, this distinction between the lower quality 'broadcast' of mp3s, and the performance of CDs or audio DVDs. What the industry _should_ be doing if it wasn't corrupt, insane, and bereft of common sense, is this: encourage mp3s as much as possible, especially 128K encoded ones that really compress a lot, and discourage _other_ types of downloadable digital media which might in future deliver performance closer to the store-bought physical media. I can tell you that you can get _very_ good sound out of mp3, but there are limits- the risk is that if the industry can step on mp3s and push some encrypted higher-quality format, said format would only get cracked eventually leaving the industry with the same problem and even less incentive for people to buy the physical media.

    'Secure format' is an absurd term. Whose security is at stake? Not the consumer's, the record industry's. How secure is it? Completely unsecure- the better the format, the more of a risk it poses when it's eventually cracked and turned to 'warez', as you call it. They need to rent a clue and figure out that digital formats are like radio- and set things up so that everybody's happily swapping the equivalent of AM radio, rather than invent stereo FM radio and then attempt to build a coin-slot into all receivers which is only going to be massively defeated by the listening public.

    If you're so ready to give 50 cents to a musician you like, bless you my friend ;) and I'd rather give the music to you, and then offer you EXTRA FINE versions of the same music for if you want it to sound extra nice. That way, you can have it when you're hurting for money, but if you can afford it, then I can sell you something _real_ that you can have and do what you like with, even sample bits of it and make your own music.

  • Well, it really depends on the person. You are correct that mp3 is just audio warez for some people. If somebody downloads full albums of bands they like and then burns them to a CD-R, this is obviously simple piracy. It's not particularly an mp3 problem though - it's the exact same thing as borrowing a friend's CD and burning it to a CD-R.

    Other people actually find out about music from mp3s. I was not a Nine Inch Nails fan until a friend sent me several of their mp3s a few years back...now i have 8 of their CDs. They obviously didn't lose money from my piracy of their songs. 99.99% of the bands on mp3.com would have absolutely no album sales if it weren't for mp3. Would I have bought a Painted Blue album if it weren't for finding their mp3s there? Of course not - I wouldn't even have known they existed.

    There's also a fairly large contingent of "semi-legal" mp3s, nearly the exact same thing as CD- and tape-based bootlegs. Live shows, rare recordings, unreleased demo tapes, etc., all circulate in mp3 just as they did on bootlegs before. This is probably technically piracy, but in almost all the cases the material is unavailable from a "legitimate" source, so there is no revenue loss by the artist (or the record label).
  • What's he got to do with this?
  • >The University may cut the final check, but it's
    >the students' dime in the end.

    Uh, no. But you already knew that, didn't you?

    Of that dime, a penny or two are the students'. What students pay is dwarfed by what contributors and endowments pay at private schools, and by what governments pay at public schools.
  • The trouble with the traffic shaper is that what it does is let you create limited-bandwidth network interfaces ... but the routing table, which decides which interface a datagram should go out on, doesn't consider source addresses ... and the ipchains facility, which does consider source addresses, doesn't let you change the interface the datagram will go out on.

    In other words, shaper and route let you limit interfaces all you like, but ipchains won't let you send the troublesome hosts' packets to those interfaces instead of to the unlimited one.
  • So, by that token, you can use the College gym to have a coed naked basketball game?

    I'm betting you also get pulled over, and procceed to tell the police officer how you pay his/her salary.. ;-P
  • The Digital Millenium Copyright Act has provisions to prevent the possesion, use, creation, etc. of software and tools that have primary usage of copyright violation. So it is legal. And regardless of what the stated intent of Napster Co., an simple observation is enough to indicate that the primary use of the napster software and servers is the illegal distribution of mp3s.

    Agreed, on all counts.

    Now, prove it in court. Thanks to our lovely "innocent until proven guilty" clause in the Constitution (a Very Good Thing, by the way), you have to prove that when Napster wrote the software, he did it to promote piracy. Proof of intent is a very difficult, if not impossible, thing to do.

    If RIAA can't prove this, and I very much doubt that they can, then they have no legal grounds for pressing charges against Napster.
  • Y'know. I used to feel the same way. But because of napster our College is most likely going to have to raise tuition to pay for more bandwith (currently Napster is using a large portion of it.) Try explaining to the majority of students who don't use napster or don't have a computer, why their tuition is going up because of the few who do. Try seeing this from the other point of view!
  • I checked out their songs on mp3.com and was impressed. My only real connection with metal is through Motorhead, but this bands LotR's songs seems to fit the bill very well.

    The 2nd song 'Nightfall' is fun too, kind of a Scorpions meet Sweet and jam out at Stonehenge with Spinal Tap and a few dwarves and lots of beer sorta thang.

    The mp3 I got for LotR's sounds very distorted, which might be an intentional form of protection, or might just be the crappy 5-y-o soundcard I'm using in this machine.

    In this case, as pertains to the discussion at hand, I won't be rushing to buy their cd, but the band is solidly on my radar now, no thanks to Radio Land, Hollywood or Wall Mart!

    Gotta fscking love that.

  • Remember when people bought 45's? Some bands, the 'one hit wonders' based a successful career on a few singles. Nowadays there's no way for a band to really put out a single. You can put 2 or 3 songs on a cd, but most folks aren't that interested, and there's really no entry-level distribution for that sort of thing.

    The idea of paying a coupla bux for a single (after previewing a free, lower-quality version) is an awesome breakthrough. Sure, the song will passed around once someone buys and downloads it, but a lot of people will appreciate the opportunity to support and encourage good bands without having to go broke, and bands can worry more about writing one, two or a few good songs instead of filling up a cd with crap.

    Whoo hoo I say.

  • The environment has changed. Organisms, including musicans and the RIAA will have to adapt or die. In the short term, people will suffer to one degree or another, while in the long term they will find a way to. Kind of like when a Steel Mill closes down. Sad for some, a joyous breakthrough for others. Inevitable either way. Nothing lasts forever.

    No one owes the RIAA or any musician a living. They have to figure out how to adapt themselves and they will. The smart ones already have. The sort-of-smart ones are watching anxiously from the sidelines, hesitant to jump in.

    The Law of the Jungle has no Ethics. Somewhere, a fluffy kitten is purring. In Space, they let you eat powdered ice cream.

  • The RIAA is Nazi Germany and Eric Clapton is Hitler. Death. Mayhem. Destruction of Biblical Proportions.

    Whew! Let's go home!

  • You can shout all you want for it to stop, but chances are it won't. It's beyond your or anyone else's control. No use bellyaching. Shovel the driveway and go sledding with the kids.

  • And you are sitting ... here [riaa.org]?

    You're wrong in thinking that musicians are getting screwed. They're not. Musicians make almost no money from selling CDs anyways; they tend to get contractually raped by the same recording industry fatcats who are bitching about audio CD piracy (conincidence?). Have you heard any artists publicly complain in genuine about MP3 proliferation? I haven't. I have seen some posters where RIAA payed artists money to sign their name on an anti-piracy statement. But by and large, most artists couldn't care less.

    It's a well known and time-honored fact that music artists make far more from concerts than CD sales - anecdotally, look at who the rich rock stars are: guys who are really good live (David Bowie, the Stones, Aerosmith, arguable Ricky Martin, Madonna, etc.) A lot of well known artists seem to prefer MP3 to convential distribution, simply because they're tired of being whored by the recording industry. It's cheaper and more effective to have your singles put out electronically, especially when that means more fans paying $60 for a concert ticket that the record company doesn't get a single cent of. It seems like every day some label forces another of their artists to take down MP3s off their site (see Tom Petty, Pete Townshend, many others) in spite of that artist's protests to the contrary. What does this tell you?

    --

  • ...via MP3s, raise yer hand. *raises hand*

    I was JUST about to reply to the one person who posted "Show me a RL example of someone who bought CD's from MP3s"...specifically, around a month ago I bought "Nightfall in Middle Earth" after finding one of the two record stores in Louisville that had it at the time, and will be getting the rest of the catalogue as soon as I can get the money up to special-order the albums what haven't been re-released in the US on Century Media yet.

    I had not heard of them before hitting mp3.com, and it was largely by MP3s found on the net (plus "Into The Storm" being played on the Attitude Network on WTFX 100.5--yes, at least for two hours on Saturdays starting at midnight, real metal is still played on the air, at least in Louisville-- webpage is at www.foxrocks.com, and they MAY have started streaming by now). MP3s, including a few on Napster, were what convinced me to scare up not only the particular album but the entire catalogue (unless it's bands I KNOW I like, and half the time even then, I don't like to buy CD's unless there are at least three or four songs I like on it).

    For that matter, there's another band called Angra which I similarly discovered via MP3s on various sites, and I'm hunting down THEIR entire catalogue, too...

    Further yet, it was by previewing mp3s of songs off the latest Dream Theater album that led me to buy it (I like Dream Theater, but I also wanted to make sure it was worth shelling out $15 US for ;).

    There are other bands, like Symphony X and Strativarius, that I've been considering buying albums from largely on the basis of MP3s of their music I've downloaded, often off progressive metal sites and often from official band sites. (Other than on the Attitude Network and occasionally on the Real Audio feed of KNAC, it's rather hard to "hear before you buy" with progressive metal [which happens to be one of my very favourite genres of music]. MP3s are, at least for me, a godsend. :)

    Let's just say that, at least in my case, the existence of MP3 sites and utils like Napster have actually helped fill the coffers of Century Media, as well as the retirement funds of more than a few prog-metal artists. ;)

    As for non-prog-metal, I can list another album that I've bought because I heard the MP3s first--Metallica's "S&M" (heard one song, liked it, found the MP3s, liked it enough to buy it).

    Also, like others, I've gotten a few rare MP3s that would be considered bootlegs even in the vinyl versions (one set being a rip of a rare Motley Crue bootleg [yeah, yeah, yeah, I KNOW people will be crying blasphemy because I DARED mention Motley Crue and Blind Guardian in the same Slashdot post. You may all perform impossible acts of self-fellation, because one of my other favourite genres is hair metal. So there. Nyeah. ;P] from the Starwood show on New Year's Eve 1981--the show that led to the band actually being signed by a major label, and which includes a funny bit where Vince Neil totally fucks up "Shout At The Devil" as well as version 1.5 of "Looks That Kill" (yes, there's another version on the demos for "Shout At The Devil; if memory serves, it's been rereleased on the Motley Records rerelease CD's)...which I could probably not find outside of record-collector's conventions for less than $300 US.)

    As an aside, I'm also more likely to buy from an artist if they put MP3s up--not just because I can preview, but because I think it's damned cool they're supporting the format (instead of something like Winblows Media or Real Blah-dio or SoDoMI). Personally, I'm hoping that when Lizzy Borden's new album comes out next month that the official website posts MP3s of it; if not, I hope someone else posts MP3s from it (so I can preview--odds are Lizzy and Metal Blade will get my money anyways, but I like to PREVIEW, damnit :).

  • Effective immediately, a full and complete ban is in effect on all FUN with use of University facilities.

    Expressly forbidden is expressing enthusiasm for FUN. Also including, but not limited to, are the following: beer drinking, using a computer to download anything, or upload Shaping electrons in a suspicious manner, etc. Any violation will result in a nasty letter from the dean and suspension of computer privs. Note: we've also decided to let the RIAA on campus to go into your machines. Your continued compliance is appreciated (and not optional).

    Enjoy our NEW attitude towards higher learning!

  • I work at the University of Northern Iowa, and Napster has been banned here. Someone mentioned it to me, I ran a traceroute, the connection died at our Gateway. I contacted one of the network admins, and he told me that access to Napster was indeed blocked because:




    1. It was used to pirate copyrighted material.


    2. It was hogging a lot of bandwidth.



    I told him I thought it was rather silly, and that people would just find a way around it in time. *shrug* Wasn't really a big deal to me, since I don't live on campus, I just download my MP3's at home with the cable modem, then FTP them to my work computer for my listening pleasure.
    ---

  • Answer the question AC.
    Deal with the issue AC.

    Is it right for a university to cripple the access that people pay them for to curb activity that could be either legal or illegal.

    When do they start forbidding the downloading of JPG files? After all kiddy porn and bestiality pics could be distributed in jpg form.

    LK
  • >>* The university can get 'supposedly' into hot water with the RIAA.

    The RIAA would get their ass kicked in court by any University.

    If having MP3s of any type was illegal, you'd be right. However some bands freely distribute music in MP3 format and allow people to trade them.

    Have you ever heard the expression that "It's better to let 10 guilty men go free than to imprison one innocent man."?

    If you can't prove that any specific student is illegally copying any specific MP3, then there are no grounds for this.

    >> * They are paying for facilities for educational use.. not porn or other crap

    Education does NOT mean...
    1.Open mind.
    2.Insert knowledge.
    3.Close mind.

    Education at the collegiate level is about the free exchange of information and ideas.

    LK
  • >>I mean seriously, if you were in charge of such a network, and a chunk of it was being eaten up by a protocol that you knew was used for (more often than not) illegal activity, and condoning such activity would put you in a bad light to the students (and the parents of) who really wanted to use the net for research, what would you do?

    I AM a network admin for the company that I work for. There is one user who takes massive amounts of bandwidth by opening up 8 windows in netscape and downloading massive amounts of patches and updates. When he takes too big a slice of the pie, I reset his connection. All without leaving my desk. If I had to do it on a university level, I'd throttle all connections to insure that no one person could take too big a slice of the pie. Once someone takes on the responsibility of policing network activity, they can no longer take refuge in just being a carrier. When will the MPAA sue this school for not stopping movie piracy? If they took steps to stop music piracy, they *should* have done the same for movies. Right?

    LK
  • I would not consider four hours before a deadline to be cutting it too close.

    Some people don't consider 4 minutes before a deadline cutting it too close. What is your point?

    LK
  • I guess you have never had a hard professor in your life. I have many projects that I would start on within a few hours of receiving them and still be cutting it close. I have spent up to 120 hours in one week getting two projects done. Got A's on both.

    I have had rough assignments and rough professors. I have procrastinated as well, when I got a bad grade because I waited too long, I just started sooner next time. It would have been juvenile to blame others for something that was my fault.

    LK
  • Some legal MP3's exist - check out MP3.com, and lots of bands' sites have completely legal MP3's to download.

    But the point is, that's only part of the point. Universities pay for their bandwidth. That bandwidth is their so that students can do their research. If some students are filling the universities pipes with MP3's, then that means other students may be lacking in resources to do their school work.
  • Kano, you're shooting yourself in the foot here.

    If someone has an actual need to download Linux for their school assignment (comp sci majors), then that's all fine and dandy. They're using the bandwidth the school assignments for actual work they need to do.

    If some anthropology major decides to use Napster to examine some facate of society, then they too are within their legitamate needs.

    But if some Computer Science major decides to download tons of MP3's just because he or she can't think of anything better to do, or they're just sick of their current music collection, then that's using bandwidth that someone else may actually need.

    Imagine if you'd been at class all day, then at the library til 9, then you got back to your dorm room and your assignment for the night was to download the Linux kernel and compile it before 8AM. You think "Oh that's easy...." only to try to download it and find that you're not getting much better than .3K/Sec.

    Great... you just flunked your homework because some kids are downloading MP3's all night.
  • Using Napster is only legal if:

    You already own the CD's and are too lazy to convert them to MP3's. You can't distribute MP3's of your CD's to people unless they have those CD's already.

    or

    You are only sending and receiving MP3's of songs that the artists and/or labels have specifically authorized.

    Since those are probably both rarities, it seems sensible that universities would ban it if it were causing problems with other student's connections and work. They don't need to ban MP3's, just Napster connections.

    You want an MP3 of this bands song? Go download it fromtheir site.

    Oh, you already have the CD? How long does it take to convert it to MP3? Sometimes it takes considerably shorter to convert it than to listen to it. Or you can just convert it as you listen.

    ----

    I really think it's time for you to jump off of your sinking ship...
  • @Home is not guarenteeing you bandwidth. They're putting you an a segment of their network and saying "Be a good boy and share this with your neighbors". If you decide to hog it to yourself, then you're violating their terms of service.

    If you want for them to be more accomodating to you, then you'll have to find a provider that actually wants you. That'll mean, of course, paying for your actual usage. Then you'll just wish for the day that you were using @home or another cable provider.
  • Yes it does matter why. If it was because of the computer science majors using the bandwidth for legitamate needs, and that bandwidth turned out to be not enough, then the University could budget for that, raise tuitions a hair and have a paper trail as to why they needed to do so (3000 people are going to be required to download Linux this semester.... 1/4 of them will need to get it during this week, and we need to know that we'll have the bandwidth to handle that.)

    Now, try explaining why they need more state funding or higher tuitions when it's because of Napster. "Yeah, our bandwidth is clogged from all this MP3 traffic. No, it's not because of any course requirement, our students just like it. Yes, other students complained they couldn't get their coursework done because of all that Mp3 stuff. But we need more money please."
  • That reduces your bandwidth charges, but you're still using the same network that people are using to download napster and whatever else. Caching it locally does nothing to address the fact that the pipes are stuffed full. It just moves the bottle neck elsewhere.
  • Another aspect of this problem regarding bandwidth is that quite often it's not the students of the university that are reaping the benefits of having Napster running on a school's high speed connections. Here at Ohio State University, we found a 100 to 1 ratio of outgoing to incoming traffic in regards to Napster. Quite often, students would start the program to look for a particular piece of music, then "close" the program, not noticing that Napster does not stop it's server when the window is closed.

    This server, open to all the world on a high speed connection is a prime canidate for non-university people to choose for quicker downloads. The main reason most universities are choosing to block Napster is not because of traffic generated by students (who would have gotten nearly as many mp3 before and after through other means) but because of the high amount of outgoing traffic which benefits no one at the school.

  • I saw this in meta-moderation. Nobody is likely to see my response, but I'll write it anyway! :-P

    Please enlighten me...just HOW is this MP3 craze really helping artists?

    Like many other people, you've been misled. You think that "MP3" must always mean "copyright infringement". It does not mean this. Or at least not always.

    So how does MP3 benefit the artist today?

    • Legally distributed MP3 files on mp3.com [mp3.com] give exposure to new artists who aren't played on what passes for radio stations these days. I've bought music from mp3.com artists. I'll continue to do so.

    • It's free advertisement. I've downloaded files over Napster for artists who I've heard of but not heard. Sometimes I find that the music does nothing for me. Other times, I find that I really like it. If I like it, I'll probably go buy an album. (I have yet to do so myself, but I've only been using Napster a short time.)

    From where I'm sitting, MP3 is just another word for WAREZ, plain and simple.

    Is that bad?

    I used to be a "software pirate" when I was younger. (The term "warez" wasn't in vogue back then.) I played a "pirated" version of Sid Meier's Civilization on lab PCs. I couldn't have afforded to buy a copy of it, and I didn't have an x86 box to play it on (I was an Atari ST user). But it was a great game.

    Later, I graduated from college, got a job, etc. I bought a copy of Civilization. And Civilization II. And Civ:CTP (for Linux). If/when Loki finishes the rumored SMAC port I'll probably buy that.

    Sid Meier (and Brian Reynolds, and their companies, and Activision, and Loki) are slightly richer because I played a "pirated" copy of Civilization when I was in college.

    What a lot of people don't seem to realize is that warez kids grow up. We become engineers, scientists, techies, lawyers, doctors, and so on. We're generally on the right-hand side of the IQ bell curve, so we have money. (No, I'm not rich, but I make enough money to buy my fill of music and software when I think it's worth buying.)

    When the warez and MP3 kids of today (or the DVD kids of tomorrow?) grow up, what do you think they're going to do with all of their discretionary disposable income?



  • Kinda sad, isn't it.

    Apparently, this university has no problem funneling gigabytes of Usenet porn through its network every night, yet, with something as simple as kids trading music, they throw a fit. I'm surprised they dont ban the sale of casette tapes on campus -- My lord, they could begin commiting similar crimes, like recording songs off the radio, or recording NFL games for later viewing! Before you know it, they'll begin ignoring the FBI warning at the start of their Blockbuster rentals, and tear the tags off their mattresses! Oh, the humanity! Please God, deliver us from such acts of anarchy!


    Welcome to the 21'st century..More idiots per square mile than ever before.


    Bowie J. Poag
    Project Manager, PROPAGANDA For Linux (http://propaganda.themes.org [themes.org])
  • If you watch the TLC Behind the music on VH1, you'll see the kind of shit the artists get served with. They had a contract for something like 5 points (5%) of record sales. so they sold like 16 million records, and after paying their record company, agents, family, etc, they ended up with about $300,000 for the whole group, split 3 ways is $100,000 for each member. And when you're a big rock star, people (family) expect you to help them, send them money, etc. plus you have to keep up the rock star image. So $100,000 is not that much. That's why tlc was virtually bankrupt.

    I'm not saying we're helping them with MP3, but we listen to radio for free, and I doubt they make tons off that either, so how is MP3 really going to hurt them? I would assume artists really make most of their money from touring, and mp3 could be considered free publicity for the tour. or not. But don't pull that "oh, we're hurting the artists!" crap, because they're already so hurt by the record company's huge cut that our horrible mp3s (of songs many of us would never have bought anyway) really don't make much difference in the end (to the artists).

    ______________________________________
    um, sigs should be heard and not seen?

  • Are they just banning access to Napster's website, or are they actually keeping people from connecting to the service?

    ______________________________________
    um, sigs should be heard and not seen?

  • I bet if you took your Technology Fees, and Housing fees elsewhere, you could barely afford a 56k dialup. By combining the collective fees of all the students for a combined purpose, universities are able to provide higher bandwidth for everybody. That "combined purpose" is educational usage (that is why you're at school).
  • Indeed, Oregon State University is part of NERO [nero.net], which is a big reason why they pay less for bandwidth.

    They also have a pair of T1's to MCI for backup, but the NERO connections aggregate to 100Mb/sec, so it's not like they have a small pipe.
  • Yeah- I remember when I was just a little net tyke and I thought everything was free. "Yay!" I thought- "nothing costs anything anymore, no one has to pay for anything!" Then I took economics, and wised up fast. If nothing else bandwidth is very pricey, even at schools. Most kids at college just don't realize this because they get unlimited T1 access. But it ISN'T unlimited and it ISN'T costless- as many schools are discovering. I remember back in the day when I was running a 64kbps 32 user shoutcast server. Even the lazy as fuck student school admins had to stop snorting cheez-whiz to tell me to cut it out...
  • Its the student's dime, but...

    * The university can get 'supposedly' into hot water with the RIAA.
    * They are paying for facilities for educational use.. not porn or other crap


    ---

  • The North American Automobile Manufacturerers Association has announced a lawsuit against 1 million people who carpool. "This infringes upon our copyrights", according to one spokesperson. When you purchase an American made vehicle, you have made an agreement with the N.A.A.M.A. that you will not share your vehicle with anyone else.
    The goal of the N.A.A.M.A. is for everyone to purchase their own vehicle. You also will never actually own your vehicle, just a license to use it. The N.A.A.M.A. reserves the right to revoke your license at anytime.
  • I explained this whole thing to some outsiders (ya'know, those folks that DON'T have high speed access 60/24/365, and don't know what /. means) and at the end they told me, "You're one of the good guys, fight the good fight" (or something similar).

    I said thanks, we drank some more beer, yadda blah blah, g'night.

    Resistance is not futile. It is fruitful.
  • Sure, the music industry sucks ass and don't deserve the cash, but ultimately by pirating MP3's and filling your CDR's with them doesn't help the individual artists one bit. Musicians are already getting screwed by the industry at large, they DON'T need to be doubly screwed by people pirating their music this way.

    So, we shouldn't try and fight the people who are screwing the artists, but should instead support them in their screwing activities? I've seen too many "Where are they now" and "Behind the Musics" to think that I'm *helping* Britney Spears by buying her super-duper album.

    So you're left with a choice, wait a sec, Choice. How much Basement Jaxx do *you* hear on the radio? I'd never heard them before. I'm sitting in a bar with a friend and he mentions them. What do I do? Go home type "Basement Jaxx" and start listening to some cool music. Now, pray tell, how is this bad? How much more likely am I now to buy their CD? I never would have heard *of* this band, much less had an oppurtunity to listen *to* them, without more effort on my part. Well, I'm a lazy consumer. There are lots of lazy consumers. Most just buy what they hear on the radio, or MTV, or what their immediate friends have. Now we have a chance to get exposed to the full spectrum of musical talents, and love more music.

    I don't believe that I need to pay $16 dollars for a CD when I KNOW that $5 went to make sure I heard about it over and over again, $7 went to some guy because he had the other $5 to tell me about it, $1 pays for all the stuff it comes in, $2 goes to the company that stole, err, owns the rights to the song, which is the only way the artist (who gets some of that last dollar, minus taxes) could get the $5 to tell me about the song. Thats fscked up.

    Oh, and, for your "you can't make any money giving away music" b.s. whining. I give you this link [tunes.com].
    75,000 people at $175 a piece, that's real money. How? LIVE MUSIC. It's really the only music worth paying for, espcecially, (and this is important) since the Internet reduces costs of reproduction and distrubution for the producer to zero.

    I make a conscious choice to support MP3, I think it's a great way to share music. And nobody gets hurt (unless you think it hurts artists for more people to pay attention to them). Hell, nobody has to do anything, but me and my anonymous benefactor. Artists make most of _their_ money from live shows anyway (at least real ones), music is a live art form. NO method of recording will ever replace being there, but, new technologies can change the real world value of things, often reducing thier usefulness to zero.

    Oh, and by not blindly believing the people who stand to lose billions when people turn to MP3, you might end up with more cool stuff like this [umn.edu] (a rebroadcast of all 14 hours of music from the other link). I'm not saying all bands can do this, but some can. And here is a very definite "Yes, you can make money by giving away music. You just have to keep making it, and do it very well."
  • Doesn't matter if they are connected and it doesn't matter if you change the data port (which is what that option provides for.) All the network admins must do is block access to the napster.com domain. Or if they want to allow mail and such to napster but not the client, just block the ports which go to the central servers which are a well known list (otherwise you couldn't connect to them.)

    This is a good thing. I've seen one of my friends slurp down 30% of our outgoing 20 mbps line. If the napster software and their users can't learn to be good network neighbors, then they don't really deserve to be on the network.
  • At first glance, I agree with you. The students are most likely paying a technology fee (or something similarly titled), so they should get the bandwidth. Then again, *all* the students are paying the fee, not just those who use Napster, so it's not really fair to let one group "hog" the bandwidth.

    My knee-jerk reaction to a University banning students from doing this or that on their computer systems is probably worse than most people's. As a student, I worked as a systems admin at my University. I watched them buy 2 SGI Origin 2000s *to use as webservers* and then turn around and tell the students they'd have to pay $12/month for dial in access (no extra email acct, no web space [for undergrads], nothin' but dial up in that price) because they couldn't afford to maintain the modem pool. (The Origin 2000s, btw, were not the only overly-expensive purchase made without clear intent for their use.)

    Anyway, I just hope that this University's tech stuff is better managed than mine was. However, when it comes to @Home, that's just plain stupid. If the customer wants to pay for more bandwidth, sell 'em more bandwidth.
  • It is a key part of a strategy for the artist to take control of their own destiny and start running things themselves.

    This is absolutly true. I'm not an artist, but I do know that other forms of art (like comics) have done pretty well in the transition to the internet. The two things making the online comics successful are (1) direct connection between artist and consumer (i.e. people visit you page) and (2) the inherent visualness and interactivness of the media (a web page), but there is nothing keeping us from doing this with music too: Ideas:

    a) We need a way to get back to the artist from the music. Currently you could put a little blurb in the end of all the songs you put on mp3 sites asking people to come get a longer version of the song without the blurb from your site, but this kinda sucks. I think the only real solution is going to be to change the mp3 players to support attaching web shit to be attached to the song (a button to launch netscape would show up if there was such content). This would allow the artists to include visual art, lyrics, links to buy stuff (shirts, CDs, special mp3s), and advertising (people would not delete the attached content because they would want to keep the useful part of the attached information. Eventually, a good chunk of that money people spend on radio adds could be going directly into the artist's pockets via banners).

    Hell, the equipment companies should be willing to give good internet artists equipment in exchange for advertising now!

    b) We need to promote the idea that music is a service and not a produce (sounds like maybe sunscream is doing this). Real fans would happily visit the site (or pay) for services like "mix of the day/week" and good artists can turn out a lot of music with is good just because you don't lissen to it a lot (like live versions and good jaming). Face it lissening to the same thing over and over gets boring!

    Also, we need a better system of promotion like mp3 radio and ways of finding artists (another aspect of the service philosophy). I have not been to impressed with mp3.com and I think the artists could do MUCH better by promoting themselves if we develop the "infrastructure."

    The bottom line: there are MASSIVE marketing oppertunities for music on the net. All it requires is someone who can make music, write code to take credit card orders, and run a buisness all at once.

    Jeff
  • It matters because the bandwidth is not there to make the students happy. It is there to satisfy the desires of those who pay for the university, which include taxpayers either directly, or through government research grants, scholarships, low interest loans, etc, etc. Those desires usually boil down to:

    1) Educate students.

    2) Conduct research.

    Downloading linux or bsd could possibly satisfy either of those. Downloading music almost definitely does not.
  • Some things never change. Back in my day, it was talk and rn that got banned. Fortunately, they banned it by removing execute permission from the files. (We only had terminals in those days.) Fortunately, those of us in the know had made personal copies.

    No one ever noticed that the execute bit was set on a couple of core files. :)
  • Excuse me? Do you think that colleges do this out of the kindness of their hearts? What do you think that tuition is for? Technology Fees? Housing Fees?

    You forgot tax money. Most colleges are partially funded by taxes. So it isn't just your dime we are talking about, but mine as well. (As an old-fart taxpayer.) I know that my old school (UCSD) got about 3/4s of its income from sources other than tuition and student fees.

    Now personally, I don't mind if someone listens to music, plays half-life, downloads porn, whatever over those lines, however, I mind very much if those doing so clog the bandwidth so much that students trying to use the thing for real work, or others trying to use it for real research, can't get done what they need to get done. Remember, if you live in my state, it is my dime too.

    On the other hand, if you are at a completely private school like Harvard or something, go wild.
  • Hell, try explaining to the average taxpayer why they need to pay more to the public universities so that students can download music instead of buying CDs.
  • Did it ever occur to you to work with your users (and yes they are the users of the system) instead of acting like you were god? Or do you think you are?

    Students pay for the access as part of their fees. Now when a few are going overboard the better method is to work with them not get into wargames with them. Which is basicly what you're doing. They will start circumventing your DHCP pools next then start pulling from others systems and basicly working around you. If you contacted them and just nicely asked what they were doing and if there was any way that they could throttle the usage just a bit or do it in strange off hours you'd probably get not only a positive effect but may just have support from them.

    I'm a network administrator now myself but I remember my college days. The more the admins tried to squeeze me the more I fought back. I finally ended up just self descructing most of the network to point that everything had to be turned off and the switches code reuploaded to them. All of which untraceably enough to me so they couldn't do a thing to me. But they knew they had pissed a student off bad. Next time around they were much more, shall we say, less ham fisted toward the student population. They got better results that way I assure you.
  • ...It was only a matter of time before this started happening.

    Back when I was in college at NCSU, they shutoff access to all the nettrek and federation servers because because they were taking 40% bandwidth.

    Someone is paying for this bandwidth (the colleges) and I don't think they're paying all that money so that people can collect MP3s.

    --Ruhk

  • So you block connections to the offending sites, as soon as the more significant services become known.

    Somebody's sharing a full video clip of the entire "Phantom Menance" movie? Revoke their connection based on terms of service. Somebody's consuming vast amounts of bandwidth, and it turns out that most of these connections are to servers for pirating MP3s? Ban 'em, and block the routes to those servers.

    It's not so much the *protocol* that necessarily is banned entirely the *content provider*; if people abuse an ftp server with hordes of W4r3z, then you route away from that server, not ban ftp.
  • It depends upon your university's policy.

    For instance, Carnegie Mellon's Network Group: ResHall and Remote Access Guidelines [cmu.edu] has the following paragraph: (typos theirs...)

    It may not remain feasible to provide unlimited connectivity for systems which are not strictly serving the
    University's missions. Beacuse of this possibility, we reserve the right to request that users reduce the amount
    of traffic being caused by their service, or where necessary, to remove such systems from the campus network.
    In all but extreme cases, we will contact the owner of the system before removing it from the network.

    It also has a clause specifically relating to copyrighted music files, specifying revocation of connection for a semester as the minimum punishment.
  • "What does it matter WHY the bog down takes place? If everyone is downloading *BSD, Linux, or whatever and they have a "legitimate" reason for doing it, and your connection suffers because of it are you going to bitch to the admins to ban *.*linux*.* and *.*bsd*.* connections from being made? "

    It does matter because of the simple fact hundreds of students downloading pirated mp3s is illegal, and downloading linux isn't, espically if its for a legitimate educational reason.
  • My school (Tufts University) blocked Napster way back in November when it first started getting popular. I just started using CuteMX as a replacement (which I found at download.com [download.com]), but unfortunately, it doesn't have as many users.

    The new Napster beta circumvents the obstacles our network administrators put up, so they went and blocked access to the Napster website [napster.com] completely! Well, using our good friend the Anonymizer [anonymizer.com] we have managed to download the new version anyway and spread it around campus. What will the network folk come up with next? Suspensions for all Napster users?

    Anyway, the whole trial and tribulation has been documented on our online underground newspaper [rumorsdaily.com]. You should read it - it's rather funny.


    -----------------
  • what a retarded way to share/move a file. this is what happens when the web tries to make everything idiot enabled. usenet binaries solved this years ago but even today some acumen is still required (of the user).

    of course it takes more bandwidth to be stupid than it does to be smart, especially if want to connect LOTS of stupid people.
  • ... are the "We go to school here and we have the right to our bandwith" and the (IMHO more sane) "Bandwith is bandwith, don't suck it up".

    This sounds like the infamous (well at least to me) (l)user vs. SysAdmin debate. I have arguments about this everyday (with mostly script kiddies a W@r3z d00dz). They always fall behind the argument that "If I were doing legal things you would have no right to shut me down..." BUZZ! Wrong! In the net I administrate if you suck up the T1 day after day with anything whether it be Porn, Mp3s, Warez, Linux Distros, Games, I will tell you to stop, if you don't stop Kiss you IP address goodbye. The user has no right to the Network. It is a privilige. If all my users suddenly start using napster and my Quake games are slow as hell (Tounge planted firmly in cheek in that example :)), I'll ask them to stop, if they dont't, then its up to me whether I be a total meanie and kill the DHCP server, or just block the Napster ports. On my campus network its no different. They are absolute fascists when they block ports (No SMTP,SSH,POP, UDP completely blocked). I look at it as I am on their network and I am blessed to have such a speedy connection. If I want to download the new Slackware Distro, or something else extremely large, I am considerate enough to do it overnight, as not to upset anyo other users. If they suddenly decide to ask me to stop, I will say "Yes sir Mr. NetAdmin sir, I will stop downloading Files like that, is their anything else?". Why? Why don't I pull a "Hey man! I pay your salary! You shouldn't tell me what to do! and re-enable my ports!blahblahblah..." Because it THEIR network, Not mine, not my dormmates, not Napsters. They run it they want to. I may have complaints, I have asked politely for them to open up Port 22 and such, and they were kind enough to write me a couple of paragraphs on why they have it blocked ("Might be able to compromise security on a machine outside the network, etc" *shrug*)

    Hmmmm... This might be considered a Rant, but I am able to look at it from both sides of the coin. So people really have no "right" to the net. Just count your lucky stars that you have any access at all.

  • > If having MP3s of any type was illegal, you'd be
    > right. However some bands freely distribute
    > music in MP3 format and allow people to trade
    > them.

    Actually copyright law explicitly allows the
    copying of audio recording. In fact, it is
    vague in a way that there is debate over
    whether it is legal to make copies for
    friends.

    The law in this area of personal copying and
    trading is about as grey as law gets.

    In any case...legality of mp3 trading is
    bayond the scope of network administration
    (that is the realm of lawyers). Napster eats
    bandwidth to the point that it does effect
    other users ability to use the system. That is
    legitamite reason to ban it, which of course
    leaves people still able to use ftp and http
    and get all sorts of MP3s.
  • > When you live on campus, for 9 months out of the
    > year, that IS your home. They pay tuition,
    > technology, and housing fees. They've paid for
    > it, they can use it as they see fit.

    I agree with you...for a student, campus IS home.
    (temporary but home none the less).

    However, the network is a shared resource. when
    the net is so saturated that real work can't be
    done, there is a problem, and a problem that
    can have a negative impact on other peoples
    education.

    Yes, they pay for network connectivity, however
    so did everyone else. Here, our student network
    was very saturated with napster before we blocked
    it.

    Yes, I am usually the first person to advocate
    free speach. Yes, I hate copyright laws and think
    it is generally right for people to break them.
    However, people need to live and work together,
    hogging all the bandwidth is unacceptable when
    others have real work to do.

    Of course, I had no say in my employer (a
    university) blocking napster as I am not in
    charge of the routers and firewall, but I think
    they made the right decision for the circumstances

    From what I have heard (never used napster myself)
    napster uses ALOT more bandwidth than it really
    should, its probably a design flaw. I doubt it
    was designed with the idea that multiple people
    on 1 segment might run it at the same time.
  • The "CD's cost too much so I will steal the music instead of buying it" argument holds absolutely no water whatsoever. By the same argument, you can justify that it is OK to go steal some big AlphaServer systems from Compaq because you think they are overpriced. There are ways to deal civilly if you think a company is ripping you off, e.g. boycott (and, no: stealing instead of buying a product does not constitute a boycott). Theft is theft, and it is NEVER justifiable to steal from a private company in a free market.
  • Its very simple. Napster, when it starts up, takes over port 6969. Most of the schools (at least, my school) know this is the port (because the people who use Napster are also the ones who are banning it). So if its using Port 6969, simply change it to 21, 8000, 89....something other than 6969, then they won't recognize its there.

    That will be effective if the university blocks off *.napster.com. You can just change the domain name to get around the firewall! [sigh]

  • Universities should be the last place this kind of thing happens. University has traditionally been a place of free-thinking etc. etc.
    Also, as mentioned in the article, the RIAA is peddling the usual rubbish "that Napster helps foster a black market for illegal copies of digital music".
    The whole point of any communications protocol is that date can be copied for free (unlike a concrete thing like food) and very easily.
    So they be trying to ban all communication (including normal speech!) because you can copy music/films etc. with them.
    The should be sueing anyone making webservers if they find one copy of an illegal mp3 on it.
    Companies making Ethernet cards should be sued if they don't have mp3-blocking features built-in etc. etc.
    Basically,t he same as VCR's and the like, Napster can be used legally so RIAA should get off their back and universities should stop censoring (although i suppose the uni does have a point about bandwidth been wasted when others are doing genuine research etc.
  • Its very simple. Napster, when it starts up, takes over port 6969. Most of the schools (at least, my school) know this is the port (because the people who use Napster are also the ones who are banning it). So if its using Port 6969, simply change it to 21, 8000, 89....something other than 6969, then they won't recognize its there. This may only work in my situation, because the admin, well, they're not especially bright, but it might work for the rest of you who have already been banned for using it.

  • All CampusJust Dorms
    Input138GB(13Mb/s)70GB(7Mb/s) Output473GB(44Mb/s)338GB(31Mb/s)
    and 15 of the top 20 hosts by traffic on campus are in the dorms.

  • i'm a student at oregon state, the university the article is about
    i'm not sure the actual methods they use, but essentially, the napster.com domain doesn't resolve any longer. its not dns, because it won't resolve no matter which dns i use (even localhost).
    from reading some of the posts further down, it seems possible they might have firewalled it or blocked it on the routers. i don't know enough about networking to know exactly how it might be done, though.

    personally, though, during the times they hadn't banned napster (at the beginning of fall term, and for some reason for a few days during dead week), i noticed no bandwidth problems. i could use napster and get 300k/sec, or i could download from kernel.org at 500k/sec. it didn't matter. i get the same speeds now, when its blocked
    also, to get around the napster problem, i simply use a shell account on another computer with another isp, and ftp the mp3s over every couple of megs.

    and by the way, i'm the kind of person who has bought most of his cd's because of sampling bands via mp3s online. i don't see much difference between mp3s and recording what you hear on the radio and keeping it. i don't redistribute it, or anything

  • Ever hear of a little band call the Grateful Dead? That band allowed fans to record their concerts and trade them freely and rose to become the top grossing band on tour year after year.

    The Dead started a movement in music that is very similar to the open source movement, and readers of /. would be wise to know about it as it offers parallels to the software industry. The model is now being followed by literally hundreds of "jam bands" (see JamBands.com [jambands.com]).

    The model is simple: play lots of concerts, improvise so every concert is different, allow people to freely record and trade your concerts. You get free publicity, and if you are any good people will buy tickets for your shows and buy your albums.

    Another band called Phish used this same model. Without any radio or MTV play and no hit singles this band now regularly sells out 20,000 seat venues. They just sold 75,000 tickets for the new years show where they were the sole performers (they could have sold more but the place wouldn't hold any more). These guys are all millionaires and people trade their MP3's all day (and DAT's and CD-R's through the mail too). They have an official policy [phish.com] regarding MP3 trading since they even have their own MP3's available for download for fee!

    You wanted to know how many other bands encourage the trading of their music, look at this, the bands that allow taping list [enteract.com]. Note that these are bands that allow fans to record their live concerts and trade the recordings. Some of the big bands on this list are Perl Jam and Dave Matthews Band. There are many other small bands that are using MP3 for publicity that don't explicitly allow fans to record the live concerts.

    This site, Sugarmegs [sugarmegs.org] is devoted to trading MP3's of live concerts and is fully condoned by all of the bands. The bands traded are Grateful Dead, Phish, and many other bands that allow trading of their music under the same model such as Widespread Panic, Medeski Martin & Wood, Moe., and others.

    There is a lot of free music out there and it's not all hippie jam bands. There are many jazz artists that allow recording and trading such as Branford Marsalis, John Scofield, Medeski Martin & Wood, Bill Frisell, and Ken Vandermark. Almost all bluegrass is tradeable and some of the major bluegrass festivals have special sections for people to setup microphones (Merle Watson Memorial Bluegrass Festival, for instance).

    There is a movement in free music (and subsequently free promotion of artists!). Much like free software, not all copying of music is copyright infringement!

    Burris

  • "The music industry needs to rethink copyright laws and the ownership of music," he added. "The industry is behind the times, so people are taking matters into their own hands. But I do think people would start paying for (MP3s) if they are reasonably priced and available."

    I really don't think that as long as there is a "Free" method to getting the content that has a relatively low risk of getting in trouble for having, people would pay for the content. The copyright laws need to be modified to better reflect real life. This seems to keep boiling and boiling, sooner or later it will explode and the rules will change.

    Never knock on Death's door:

  • You think 5% of total bandwidth is bad? Try up around 20%! Northwestern University in Chicago banne d access [dailynorthwestern.com] to Napster because it was sucking up nearly 20% of their bandwidth. My college, the Illinois Institute of Technology, never had a problem w/ the bandwidth usage, but the RIAA did come in and threaten to sue if the school didn't shut the student-run MP3 servers down. There's now a special rule that expels any student who runs an MP3 server on the campus network. Hmm, I wonder if the RIAA considers Napster an MP3 server.
  • A lot of people on this thread seem to think this is some sort of 'freedom' issue. Its not. If it were, the Universities would likely have banned Napster long ago.

    If you worked for the IT department of any majorish college, you'd realize that napster usage is growing at an insanely exponential rate and it is totally saturating the bandwidth available to all students. Such Universities HAVE to ban it -- the fact that its downloading mp3s is mostly irrelevant....If it were perfectly legal game-playing (or pretty much anything not DIRECTLY related to school-type education) that was causing the bandwidth saturation, they'd have to ban that too..There's only so much bandwidth to go around when you have thousands of users with local ethernet speeds into your outsider router.

  • embee23 said...'Although I may personally use it at home, it has no place on an academic network.' I say...When you live in residence the academic network IS your personal access... Besides I thought one's tuition and monthly residency fees subsidised the IT infrastructure... Do your job, supply demand through innovation not CENSORSHIP.
  • Why not implement a bandwidth cap that only is applied to traffic going OUT onto the internet from the dorms? And inside the dorms, have 100 Mb switched ethernet.

    At the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, each dorm port (serving 2 computers) has a maximum bandwidth usage of 500 MB/day. That isn't so bad except that the network admins will switch off your port the next day if you go over that limit, and the limit applies to traffic going ANYWHERE, including to the room next door! Also, there is no way to tell how far you are into that 500 megs.

    Frankly, the top reason why most people have gone over (and I know at least 30 people who have been shut off), is not something like Napster--it's sending a few hundred megs down the hall to burn a CD (or someone downloading a gig worth of stuff from their local network Windows file share). And the other common reason is that the school gives out hubs to people with multiple computers, so even traffic inside the room gets counted in that 500 Mb/day limit!

    Most students hate this policy, especially engineers who have 2-3 computers in their room. The main reason seems to be that people are getting their ports shut off by the overly strict enforcement of a bandwidth policy (send 501 megs, and your port is off the next day) which is undoubtably intended to catch people running giant public warez servers.

    I believe that the network admins would have far fewer headaches and the students would be far happier if only outgoing traffic to the internet was limited (and it could even be a stricter limit than 500 MB/day), as this is the major cost to the university--internal bandwidth is basically free once the lines are installed.
  • You're absolutely right that a large amount of bandwidth can be used downloading an ISO, but how often does that happen...once....maybe twice a month. And JPEGS are small files...hardly of any concern to a network admin. A group of 10 people surfing would have a hard time generating the amount of bandwidth used by a single napster server. Granted, napster is a great idea, and it does have its place, perhaps the university should have an internal napster server, and not allow access to the external ones, using the "free" 100Mbs bandwidth on the LAN. Bandwidth is an expensive thing, and single users screwing it up for the rest of the users because they want to set up their own private radio station is not condusive to a learning environment. If these users want to do this, then maybe they should invest in a DSL. Then they can pay for the amount of server that they want to run, without having to worry about the other people on the network being affected. -Z
  • Perhaps they should not ban napster at all.

    Could they not just route napster (or any bandwidth hogging packets) through a separate gateway? Could the offending network IPs (i.e.. seen connecting to a napster server) not be moved to another gateway, which would eventually choke down to a molasses like crawl.

    This would enable the legality issue to be skirted, and penalize network disrupters.

    Or the network admin could just face reality, and upgrade their network to cope with increased use.

    I don't ever envision the day when we won't be plagued with bandwidth bottlenecks. I am sad. That is until the world net will be taken over by the sort of AI "Matrix" portrayed. They will have the sense to overbuild the damn thing to encompass any possible network sortcomings. At least they will be able to trade mp3s & frag to their cold-heart's content.

    Minty Toothbrush

    .oo.
    ..

    If an infinite number of monkeys typed at an infinte number of

  • Re:Rewrite the equation (Score:3)

    by Frater 219 ( 1455 ) on Friday January 21, 2000 @09:56AM (#1350880) Journal
    Do you know any good tools with which to do this? Our firewall is a Linux box with ipchains; it's fine for blocking the abusers, but I haven't found any good tools to simply limit them. I had hopes for the "traffic shaper" kernel module, but it doesn't seem to be the Right Thing either: it's good for creating a limited-bandwidth network interface, not for limiting the bandwidth of one host over an interface.

    What I suppose I'd like is an extended version of fair-queueing. Fair-queueing is a mechanism used in gateways which prevents transmitting hosts from bogging down the gateway machine with too many datagrams (as in the case of an over-enthusiastic TCP implementation). The trouble is, it only deals with the originators of traffic, not the recipients; further, it doesn't directly deal with the sizes of the datagrams, only their number.

    (Fair-queueing is described in RFC 970. It's very interesting reading. A quote:
    We would like to protect the network from hosts that are not well-behaved. More specifically, we would like, in the presence of both well-behaved and badly-behaved hosts, to insure that well-behaved hosts receive better service than badly-behaved hosts. We have devised a means of achieving this.
    There's a good deal of material in there about applying game theory to network overloading.)

    I'd like to be able to take the fair-queueing model and throw a choke on each host's queue tighter than the "natural" one imposed by network and gateway load. But so far I haven't seen a means to do this. Ideas?

  • Re:Wrong there buddy (Score:3)

    by mangino ( 1588 ) on Friday January 21, 2000 @11:23AM (#1350881) Homepage
    This isn't at all like your landlord saying you can only have sex in the missionary position. It is more like your landlord saying you can't run a hotel or a business from your residence, or that you can't use your residence as a homeless shelter. All of these things go against the intended use of the facility, and against the agreed use of the facilities.

    You have rights in your own house only as long as you aren't infringing on other peoples rights. If I start a homeless shelter in my house, I can be thrown out for being too loud or violating my agreement with my landlord. If you use napster and cause the network to slow down, you should be kept from using napster.

    Personal liberties are great, as long as you realize that your personal liberties don't take precedence over mine.
    --
    Mike Mangino Consultant, Analysts International

  • Total elimination of piracy isn't the point (Score:3)

    by kdoherty ( 2232 ) on Friday January 21, 2000 @08:57AM (#1350882)
    There seem to be an awful lot of posts here along the lines of "blocking napster won't stop piracy, we can still use FTP", etc. The point here is not total elimination of piracy. Of course there's always going to be piracy, and don't think the RIAA doesn't know that. The situation they want to prevent at all costs is a majority of people actually pirating when they might otherwise buy music.

    Yeah, you can put your mp3s up for ftp and such, but it's not going to be nearly as convenient as searching on napster. Napster provides a very simple and easy interface to piracy. People who might otherwise not spend their time searching though banner-ad laden warez sites and obscure sites with poor bandwidth for a few choice mp3s can now go out and grab most things they want with ease, and without having to pay for it. Napster is within the threshold of effort most people are willing to put forth to get free music. That's what the RIAA dreads. Not piracy, but rampant piracy used in place of legitimately paying for music.

    College dorm students are a special case which is even more inclined towards this behavior, as they tend to have very little spending money in general, and access to large amounts of bandwidth through school.
    --
    Kevin Doherty
    kdoherty+slashdot@jurai.net

  • Re:I hate to admit this... (Score:3)

    by Millennium ( 2451 ) on Friday January 21, 2000 @03:20PM (#1350883)
    They can easily prove they wrote it, since they claim to have done so.

    True, but for this kind of suit that fact is meaningless.

    To shut them down all they need to do is prove it is used for piracy as a primary purpose.

    Not quite. You cannot hold a manufacturer responsible if someone intentionally misuses its product. RIAA has to prove that Napster wrote it specifically for pirating MP3's. Check Napster's documentation; it's chock-full of warnings that Napster is not meant to promote piracy. There's even a warning or two in the program itself. Simply put, Napster does everything it can reasonably do to prevent its illegal use. That's a big point against RIAA. Frankly, I don't see what RIAA can legally do about it.

  • Re:getting around ban (Score:3)

    by Skip666Kent ( 4128 ) on Friday January 21, 2000 @10:36AM (#1350884)
    Try renting an outside apartment and then getting some kind of DSL or cable access. You can call it 'Napster Phi Delta' and throw wild parties. When the school superintendent wakes up with a pile of Michael Bolton cd's in his bed, he'll know who to blame...

    "NAAAAAPSTER HOUUUUUUSE!"

  • Re:Considering Napster's setup... (Score:3)

    by Lord Kano ( 13027 ) on Friday January 21, 2000 @08:14AM (#1350885) Homepage Journal
    >>Someone is paying for this bandwidth (the colleges) and I don't think they're paying all that money so that people can collect MP3s.

    Excuse me? Do you think that colleges do this out of the kindness of their hearts? What do you think that tuition is for? Technology Fees? Housing Fees?

    The University may cut the final check, but it's the students' dime in the end.

    If it's my dime, I can spend all day searching for and indexing AC "Naked and petrified/grits down the pants" posts if I want to.

    LK

  • Re:That just happened here... (Score:3)

    by Lord Kano ( 13027 ) on Friday January 21, 2000 @08:16AM (#1350886) Homepage Journal
    >>Although I may personally use it at home, it has no place on an academic network.

    When you live on campus, for 9 months out of the year, that IS your home. They pay tuition, technology, and housing fees. They've paid for it, they can use it as they see fit.

    LK

  • Re:Ok, so tell me... (Score:3)

    by Lord Kano ( 13027 ) on Friday January 21, 2000 @08:29AM (#1350887) Homepage Journal
    "MP3" and "WAREZ" are not synonyms. I have a few hundred mega od MP3s and I own the CDs. I use MP3 to play music on my computer(s) without shuffling through stacks of CDs for the one song that I want.

    I have d/led MP3s off of the net and if I like what I hear I'll buy the CD. If not, It's deleted. I don't have an ethical problem with that.

    MP3s *COULD* help artists if they weren't prevent by their contracts from directly selling them on the net.

    I'd rather pay $2-3 each for the songs that I want instead of $18 for a whole CD when I only like 3 songs.

    MP3 has the ability to reduce the RIAA's power. Instead of 5 year 6 album deals, artists would only want 2-3 year 2 album deals to get their names in the public eye then switch to online music distribution. The RIAA knows this and this is why they fight MP3.

    Go to MP3.com you'll be able to hear music from bands whom you'd never know about if this were 4 years ago.

    LK

  • Re:Bandwidth (Score:3)

    by NMerriam ( 15122 ) <NMerriam@artboy.org> on Friday January 21, 2000 @08:41AM (#1350888) Homepage
    Or this university pays less for access because they have more to offer than a community college in terms of infrastructure. if they provide half of the bandwidth available for their region, they'll get significant discounts on the charge for bandwidth outside their region, in excange for those outside the region getting access to their local bandwidth.

    It's like a news feed -- UUnet doesn't have to pay anyone for their news feeds because they are the biggest provider themselves. Everyone wants to peer with them to get the content and banwidth they offer. It's the small guy who has to pay cash for the bandwidth -- the larger ones provide the cable...
  • There was a time when the college I was attending took this to an extreme that had very negative side effects.

    Now imagine that you wanted to block all game, non-school related ports. 5190 (everquest), 26900 (quake), etc... you'd end up with hundreds, possibly thousands, right? Now say you grab some of the common dcc ports, add in irc ports, etc. You end up with this huge list of ports.

    Now, to be sure you arn't getting any non-school related data, you block it on both sides.

    Wow, that's strange, all of a sudden only 1 in 5 attempts at going to a web site actually works! You end up with it constantly trying to get a tcp connection, you hit stop a couple times, it tries on some new tcp connections, and you finally get through. ftp's are usually fine, as once you get connected, you don't have to disconnect. but web was just horrible.

    The reason? The destination port might be port 80, but the source port changes with whatever OS you were using (AIX didn't have a problem most of the time, but windows sure did!). hence, you were using a source port that some non-school related app might have been using! and this is why they were timing out.

    After presenting this arguement to the community network at school, the network admin would not admit this was the problem, but he did agree to lift all but the major ports. and wow, the problem went away.

    So, if you hear about these kind of problems at other institutions, remember that for every tcp connection, there's a source and destination port. The destination port is stable, and with some programs (like quake) the source port is stable, but others use the OS-defined TCP sequence port. (Which, nmap uses to do OS fingerprinting). And it's excellent reasoning to do prohibitive routing against specific programs, not everything.

    Of course, at home, we have port 5190 routed to 127.0.0.1 so.... `8r) No nEverQuit at our house!

    --
    Gonzo Granzeau

  • Amen (Score:3)

    by Weezul ( 52464 ) on Friday January 21, 2000 @03:40PM (#1350890)
    All in all, mp3's are pretty cool for those of us who are artists.

    I'm not an artist, but I do know that other forms of art (like comics) have done pretty well in the transition to the internet. There are a few things holding online music back a bit:

    a) We need a way to get back to the artist from the music. Currently you could put a little blub in the end of all the songs you put on mp3 sites asking people to come get a longer version of the song without the blurb from your site, but this kinda sucks. I think the only real solution is going to be to change the mp3 players to support attaching web shit to be attached to the song (a button to launch netscape would show up if there was such content). This would allow the artists to include visual art, lyrics, links to buy stuff, and advertising---people would not delete the attached content because they would want to keep the useful part of the attached information. Eventually, a good chunk of that money people spend on radio adds could be going directly into the artist's pockets via banners.

    b) We need a better system of promotion like mp3 radio and ways of finding artists. I have not been to impressed with mp3.com and I think the artists could do MUCH better by promoting themselves if we develop the "infrastructure."

    c) We need to promote the idea that music is a service and not a produce (sounds like maybe sunscream is doing this). Real fans would happily visit the site (or pay) for services like "mix of the day/week" and good artists can turn out a lot of music with is good just because you don't lissen to it a lot like live versions and good jaming.. and some artists will find this more fun then the normal production thing (I think TMBG had a song of the day phone thing for a while).

    Jeff

  • Bandwidth (Score:3)

    by Zeni ( 52928 ) on Friday January 21, 2000 @08:22AM (#1350891)
    From the article: The university has an annual budget of $75,000 for bandwidth.

    I was just at a _community college_ board meeting, and they have a monthy bill of almost $10k.

    Either this Uni has a severe lack of bandwidth, or someone isn't giving the whole truth.

    Zeni

  • Is bandwidth the scapegoat for copywrite ??? (Score:3)

    by redelm ( 54142 ) on Friday January 21, 2000 @08:25AM (#1350892) Homepage
    I can use up an aweful lot of bandwidth downloading Linux/*BSD isos to burn. Similarly, a big grab of JPEGs or other big files will eat bandwidth. Do the Universities want to stop this too? Maybe any graphics-intensive website should be blocked.

    Or is bandwidth the scapegoat, and they are really worried about the RIAA and copyright issues?

  • Why ban it when you can make money? (Score:3)

    by yesthatguy ( 69509 ) on Friday January 21, 2000 @08:22AM (#1350893) Homepage
    Being able to use the campus network to surf the internet from your dorm, as well as other benefits, at a university is a privilege. Why then, don't they allow students to use clients such as napster, but make the student pay a nominal fee. If Napster truly were a problem on the level they say it is, the fees would easily pay for a boost in the connectivity, reducing the hit the network takes from Napster users, and fairly distributing the costs of this expansion to those who will actually be using it.
    ---------------

  • That just happened here... (Score:3)

    by embee23 ( 85877 ) on Friday January 21, 2000 @08:04AM (#1350894) Homepage
    I work at a fairly large university in Florida (UCF), and I can definitely say that napster has been causing problems with our online network..

    We just killed the DHCP connections for 25 people in our dorms for this... though we couldn't find a way to definitively say the users were using napster, it was very obvious from the packets flying back and forth.

    We have a multiple t3 connection to i1 and a 45 mbit link to i2.. and napster users *still* slow down the network. Although I may personally use it at home, it has no place on an academic network.

  • Re:Stop it! (Score:3)

    by bhirt ( 95181 ) on Friday January 21, 2000 @08:33AM (#1350895) Homepage Journal
    I agree, the software [Napster] is totally offensive. It's designed in such a way that it practically prevents you from controlling who and what is downloaded from your machine.

    First off, you cannot turnoff downloads from your machice when you are connected, you MUST by design allow people to download. The best you can do is allow 1 download connection at a time.

    Second, there are no tools that allow you to manage your library of files for download. Your only tool is to include a directory, or exclude a directory. If you have all of your MP3's under a common directory, you are pretty much shit out of luck, unless you want to compensate for the lame software by changing you filesystem layout.

    Third, search for virtually any copyrighted material on Napster and you WILL find it available for download. This software was created for one thing and that is copying software illegally. The only other explanation is that the programmers of the software put such little thought and effort into creating a true program for sharing music that the pirates all flocked to this piece of trash.

    I have no problem with Universities banning the use of software like this. To claim that it's a right you have and this is censorship is crazy.

  • > Any type of download "eats" bandwidth away from
    > other users. If 20% of the university is
    > downloading *BSD or linux ISO images, that will
    > prevent others from having full access to the
    > total bandwidth.

    Very true...and if that became an issue we would
    need to find a way to deal with it. That has
    not yet happend.

    > The administrator angle is a red herring to
    > cover up the fact that the universities are
    > pussying out in the face of the RIAA.

    I can only speak from what _I_ have personally
    witnessed, and what I see says that is utter
    bullshit.

    I may not be in the network group, but I see EVERY
    complaint the RIAA sends us about ftp sites etc
    (the adress it goes to forwards to a bunch of
    people in various groups)

    There have been _NO_ RIAA complaints to us about
    napster. In fact, I have seen 0 complaints from
    them in over a month and a half now.

    Hoever I do remember the day one of the network
    guys came in telling the story of how the student
    segment was completely saturated and, after much
    digging, were able to figure out that napster was
    the cause of the saturation.

    I don't see how we can be "pussying out" when
    the RIAA hasn't even sent us a single complaint
    about it.

  • It's THEIR equipment (Score:3)

    by VAXman ( 96870 ) on Friday January 21, 2000 @09:33AM (#1350897)
    The issue of a university banning Napster has nothing to do with whether MP3's are illegal or not. It's their equipment and they can put whatever restrictions they want on using it. They can ban all access to MSNBC.COM or even SLASHDOT.ORG if it is wasting too much bandwidth - that would be prefectly legal. Just because you pay a service fee does NOT mean they have to provide you with full service. They offer you with what they want to, they do not offer you what you want. If a single program is using that much bandwidth (especially relative to its academic value), it only makes sense to ban it. If you don't like it, you can set up your own T1 and use it however you want.

    Napster users especially need to consider the needs of the other students. 5% bandwidth is a LOT and Napster users are slowing down the efficiency of people who are doing legitimate work. You don't own the connection just because all of that bandwidth is available to you.

  • Re:Stop it! (Score:3)

    by VAXman ( 96870 ) on Friday January 21, 2000 @09:23AM (#1350898)

    The whole point of any communications protocol is that date can be copied for free (unlike a concrete thing like food) and very easily. So they be trying to ban all communication (including normal speech!) because you can copy music/films etc. with them.

    Patently fallacious.

    What if someobody started a server with YOUR credit card numbers, YOUR social security number, your phone numbers, your home address, your birth date, etc., etc. and offered it for the world to see? Is that stuff "just data"? Would you be happy when the adminstrator of the site put the site down, or would you like to see all of your information made freely available, in order to promote your ideals of "free communication"? What if Netscape sent all of your credit card information you entered through it to some central server? Free communication right? It's just bits? How can you possibly argue? You may respond that Netscape doesn't have the permission to take your credit card number. But you don't have the permission of the music companies to take THEIR material, so you will be contradicting yourself if you use this argument.

    There is all sorts of stuff which is "just data" which should not be freely distributable. How about classified government reports? Should it be legal to post those on any web site? Instructions on how to build nuclear bombs? Blueprints for proprietary items? Music falls under this category, and is owned by the owener; it is not freely distrbutable. It is NOT free communication if you do not have the permission of the owner of the material to distribute it.

    This is not a technical issue. It is a legal issue. It does not matter if it is "just data", as I have demonstrated above. It is a matter of illegally pirating copywritten material. The fact that many Slashdot readers ball this up as a technical issue shows how little they understand the principles involved.

    Most slashdot readers are also highly contradictory on the issue. Most Slashdot readers are up in arms if they find out Quake sends the name of their video card to some central server (which is "just bits"), but freely promote theft of copywritten music under the justification that it is "just bits". At least take a consistent stance on the issue please, and stop switching between whichever one is more convenient for YOUR OWN self interests.

  • Rewrite the equation (Score:3)

    by Gunther Dull ( 119567 ) on Friday January 21, 2000 @09:22AM (#1350899)
    If most of the argument on the colleges side of the story has to do with bandwidth usage, why not limit bandwidth to each host from the external network? My cable company does this to me and all of thier other customers on a continual basis. If the schools could come up with a way to do this, it wouldn't matter what the students were doing on line; they would only have a limited pipe to do it with. Problem solved.

    Gosh I like being right.

  • Ok, so tell me... (Score:4)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 21, 2000 @08:14AM (#1350900)
    I know Slashdot is a big MP3 proponent but I'm just DYING to know how you people with GIGS of mp3's on your hard drive can justify ripping off musicians this way. How many musicians have given permission for their stuff to be freely downloadable like this?

    Sure, the music industry sucks ass and don't deserve the cash, but ultimately by pirating MP3's and filling your CDR's with them doesn't help the individual artists one bit. Musicians are already getting screwed by the industry at large, they DON'T need to be doubly screwed by people pirating their music this way.

    Please enlighten me...just HOW is this MP3 craze really helping artists? I don't want to hear any 'theoretical' answers either, about how musician A 'could' distribute their music with MP3's and avoid the record companies...I'd like to see some REAL EXAMPLES of it and see if the artists are REALLY PROFITING from MP3's. All I've heard so far is lame excuses and pontifications about 'freedom' of speech.

    From where I'm sitting, MP3 is just another word for WAREZ, plain and simple.
  • ...is whether rampant mp3 proliferation will help artists LOSE MONEY LESS QUICKLY than they do with the industry!

    'Some of your friends are probably already this fucked' [arancidamoeba.com]

    Check _that_ out- a balance sheet for a typical major act _success_ on the order of 3 _million_ dollars of sales selling a quarter million copies.
    Gross profit, $710,000.
    Artist Royalties, $351,000.
    Actual artist _income_ after all items on balance sheet and recouping of advance- $4,031.25!

    That's right- after paying for the studio, mastering, video budget, processing+transfers etc, after the tour (earning 50,000 gross on expenses of 50,875 not counting manager or agent's cut), the band that got a 'quarter million dollar' advance to pay for all the tech toys and tours and professionals, the band that made THREE MILLION dollars of business for the record company, have each earned about 1/3 as much as they would working at a 7-11, but they got to ride in a tour bus for a month.

    You're crazy if you think almost anything wouldn't be an improvement. I don't know, maybe I can't satisfy you that mp3s can help artists. How exactly is mp3 exposure going to cost the artists _more_ than pay to play in LA and all that crap? At what point does mp3, free-as-spam-but-less-annoying distribution start to make artists capable of doing better than the industry- say, earning them _half_ as much as they'd make working at 7-11? You have no idea how fucked musicians actually are (to use Steve Albini's apt term for the condition...). Are you a musician? I am, and I'm building a studio- I've already talked with one slashdotter about recording him free for the purpose of making mp3s, and I've been talking to another artist I recorded who's currently living in Lithuania, about putting some of his back catalogue out there. Exposure is life- but there's something more important that that, and it's control and cashflow.

    When artists don't have control over their own businesses, they're hosed- and that's what happens with the normal industry, it's 'Let us take care of it!' and the results are a damned wasteland. mp3 does not directly make artists money- but guess what? It is a key part of a strategy for the artist to take control of their own destiny and start running things themselves. Some might be tour-minded, and build on their talent and a popularity in mp3 to travel the world on a shoestring, paying their way by booking small gigs, saving up for their own PA and equipment and RUNNING THE BUSINESS effectively. They might make a bit more than working at a 7-11! But they'd be living their dream and not paying to play. Some (I like this option) will do extensive studio work, to become able to create amazing high-fidelity sonic experiences in music- and would give away the mp3s forever, but if you want to help them, BUY A CD. Not even an mp3.com cd (interestingly, mp3.com does not go for exclusive rights like a record label does), but a homegrown CD. First few, burned off a CD-Rom burner, and then it's time to save up and have a crate of CDs burned professionally- there are loads of people who can do this and throw in 1, 2, 3 or 4 color process inserts, even shrinkwrap, having the whole thing done to a 'mainstream' quality level. Of course if you're in it for the long term you set yourself up with the physical plant, printing your own art or pressing your own CDs in industrial duplicators... and so it goes.

    Yeah, it's hard work, but you can earn money through hard work, and you can't really earn money with the industry, so why not? And mp3 is one very important thing- it is promotional material that YOU DON'T HAVE TO PAY FOR! You don't have to PAY people to distribute mp3s of your work. They will anyway, particularly if it's any good! What you do from that point will illustrate who you really are, and whether you deserve to earn anything...

    Go read this: Major Labels: some of your friends are probably already this fucked [arancidamoeba.com]. Think about it. One part of Tim Yohannon's intro article is particularly telling, I think:
    1.It doesn't really matter what you say or what you sing, but how you conduct your business and what your motivation for doing it is.
    2.It is only by being completely separated from governmental and corporate sponsorship, collusion, or connections that one can really claim to be "alternative" or "independent".
    3.Unless there is an ongoing class consciousness to one's communication and expression, then it is inevitable that you will be assimilated into mainstream values, no matter how culturally "hip" you attempt to be."

    This neatly sums up what I want to do with my abilities as a musician and sound engineer. It's not _about_ what style I use or what gear I can offer in my studio- it's about why I'm doing it and where I'm going with it.

    For a long time, I didn't know what I wanted to do with that side of my life. I knew that the dream of being a musician for money was a fantasy, but I didn't have what you might call the radical consciousness to come up with any alternative. I sort of wanted to work with the tech side of things, but to what end? To be signed to a corrupt machine and help con other people and probably spend all my own money doing it? To languish obscurely playing with mixers? Who's listening? What would I be doing it for?

    I think I have a better handle on these questions now. I'm siding with the punks, the indies, freaks like Zappa (the greatest independent music businessman ever, long live Zappa!). I am dedicating myself to giving people access to tools and information they need to do this kind of work and produce this kind of art themselves, rather than thinking they need to buy into the industry game to get it done. Sometimes I'll make money. Sometimes I'll spend it. Right now I'm in debt and am sorting out the hopped-up ADAT I'll be basing the studio around. (tweaker alert- Alesis LX-20 is a _beautiful_ machine to soup up, all the audio circuitry is on a daughtercard you can remove and tinker with! And there's loads of clearance for substitute parts, and you could shield the whole audio daughtercard. Sweeeeet).

    So, highly-scored AC, you may say MP3 is just another word for warez to you- I say you don't sound like a musician yourself, and are not qualified to pass judgement on this. I am, and I've done more homework than you- and I would say conclusively that MP3 is the new radio, and furthermore it is a breakthrough in public access to production of media that's equal to open source and Internet collaboration on software. There are many similarities.

    You don't directly make money on mp3. You don't directly make money on commercial music publishing either, you can play rock star for a few months if you're lucky and end up in debt for thousands of dollars. The difference is that with mp3 YOU GET TO CONTROL your business- if your music doesn't have a business, don't expect to make money, but if you do, even something as random as selling band mousepads or nerf guns imprinted with the band logo or pet rocks, you get to totally control your mp3 output, use your own mixes, sell your own merchandise and hire your own people and run all this yourself, taking whatever profit there is for yourself.

    Do you really think major label acts get to choose their own mixes (hint: Nirvana was not allowed to use their own mix for "In Utero", you think you'd get more clout than Nirvana circa 'Smells Like Teen Spirit'?), manage their own expenditures (bands are legally required to produce things like videos under contract, but it is the band that pays for ALL aspects of this, not the label) and so on?

    It's not so different from open source. It's really not. Power is being able to control YOUR OWN situation. Using mp3 as a promotional tool is an important part of being able to control the other aspects of your own music business- you give it away but you're not signing yourself over to any contractual requirements, are not waiving your rights to your own material or signing it over to the corporation outright. This is incredibly powerful.

    Or would you rather go and personally try to buy space for your single on Top 40 radio?

  • Purpose of bandwidth at colleges (Score:4)

    by adam ( 1231 ) on Friday January 21, 2000 @08:15AM (#1350902)
    Well, in theory, the whole purpose of wiring dorms with high-bandwidth connectivity is to promote _academic_ use, not for commercial/business purposes. At Stanford, for instance, students pay like $80 for a _year_ of 10/100BaseT connectivity to the campus backbone. That's subsidized for academic reasons, not so students can share MP3s. So the situation is even a little different from that with @Home.

    But the fact is, you give high bandwidth to a bunch of people who generally don't have a lot of money (as most students don't), you're going to see a lot of piracy: software, games, music, videos, whatever.

    Interestingly, a student I know told me just last night that apparently the academic version of Office 2000 sends a serial number to Microsoft over the net, and if you disconnect from the net on installation, it requires you to call an 800 number before it lets you install the software. This is apparently not true of the non-academic version. This is obviously to prevent an entire dorm from just copying one copy of the academic version of O2K.

    Adam

  • I hate to admit this... (Score:4)

    by Millennium ( 2451 ) on Friday January 21, 2000 @08:46AM (#1350903)
    ...but the bandwidth concerns are legitimate. Bandwidth is an expensive thing, after all. Of course, colleses should be upgrading to 100BT at least; these networks are meant to be used for research but I've noticed that 10BT networks seem to get clogged very easily at colleges (recently there hasn't been a night where I could do almost anything on the Net because RIT's network, and that of its chosen ISP, were down or choked with who knows what). Research cannot be done with a clogged network.

    This is a troubling issue. Censorship shouldn't happen at universities. But this isn't censorship (see below for my explanation oh why it's not). And hogging significant portions of a campus network's bandwidth just so you can get MP3's is very inconsiderate, if not outright rude.

    I remember the old days, when people didn't rely on Napster to get their MP3's; those methods work just as well today as they ever did before. Even if Napster is banned, that doesn't mean you'll be unable to get your music fix. Banning Napster is certainly a Bad Thing. But you can't deny that Napster is a bandwidth-hog by its nature, and it's clogging up very expensive networks that were never meant for this purpose.

    Now, the RIAA lawsuits are another matter entirely. I hold that the RIAA has no legal grounds for suing Napster, since the software does not itself infringe on any copyrights, and even states that it's not meant to be used to infringe on them (OK, so everyone knows that it is meant precisely to infringe on copyrights, but thanks to our wonderful legal system only that which is written down has any legal bearing at all). Frankly, I think the RIAA's going to spend millions of dollars on a suit which they'll lose out of technicalities.

  • Real Example (Score:4)

    by Sloppy ( 14984 ) on Friday January 21, 2000 @10:04AM (#1350904) Homepage Journal

    Please enlighten me...just HOW is this MP3 craze really helping artists? I don't want to hear any 'theoretical' answers either, about how musician A 'could' distribute their music with MP3's and avoid the record companies...I'd like to see some REAL EXAMPLES of it and see if the artists are REALLY PROFITING from MP3's.

    Oh, this is so easy, it's like shooting fish in a barrel. You want concrete examples? Here, take this one...

    In 1998, I found out that the world is a hell of a lot bigger than I thought. Why? Well, I'm a metalhead. I love metal. Unfortunately, I (mistakenly) thought that metal was just about dead. Turn on a radio or eMpTyV, and you will see very little evidence of metal. There's some industrial rapcore shit (e.g. Limp Bizkit, Korn) that is being labelled as "metal" by The Media, but of course, this type of music is rarely of interest to real metal fans. (Oh, and I guess they pay lip service to has-beens like Metallica and Megadeth, who have indeed made great metal in the past, even though they've switched genres over the last few years.)

    So I wasn't buying much music at the time. I couldn't find anything good.

    Then I heard about something called MP3 that would let me listen to music from the Internet. Also, at about that time, I heard that Peter Jackson was making a 'Lord of the Rings' movie, and someone commented that they wished Blind Guardian would do the soundtrack. Alas, like most Americans, I had no clue who the heck Blind Guardian is. Guess what I did? I grabbed an MP3 player from Aminet, and I downloaded a Blind Guardian MP3.

    At that moment, I discovered that Metal is alive and well. Healthier and better than it has ever been, in fact. It simply isn't covered by the American media companies. But it's out there. Now I have found and previewed hundreds of bands that will never, ever be played on any radio/television station in America, and have bought somewhere around 400 or 500 CDs from online shops, recorded by bands that most people have never heard of. I think about 8 of those CDs are by Blind Guardian.

    Many of these are expensive imports, but it's worth it. Oh, but there's North American bands in there too. Yep, believe it or not, You Can Still Rock in America -- but only the Internet people know that you can.

    I'm guessing that it has all added up to about $6000 so far. (This is a rough estimate.) That's $6000 in sales to one single customer (me), which never would have happened if it weren't for MP3s.

    Hope this helps.


    ---

  • As a college network administrator ... (Score:5)

    by Frater 219 ( 1455 ) on Friday January 21, 2000 @08:42AM (#1350905) Journal
    I am the primary network administrator for a small college. Last term we had a serious problem here with one student consuming huge quantities of bandwidth moving bootleg movies in VCD format, so we've been doing a lot of thinking about this issue.

    Let me tell you this: I have zero interest in wasting time blocking you just because you happen to be bootlegging. I won't even notice that you're bootlegging unless you're being a bandwidth hog in doing so: one FTP session looks much like another from the outside.

    If you are being a bandwidth hog, you're harming your neighbors, and I will stop you from doing that. Everyone on campus should be able to get a fair share of the bandwidth, and if you and your pals are hogging it all, I don't care if you're moving VCDs or Linux ISO images; I'm going to raise a fuss and, if necessary, happily shut you down.

    If I get a note from the RIAA saying you're bootlegging, I'll do what's necessary to keep them from suing the college's pants off, because it's damn cold in Massachusetts right now and we can use all the pants we can get. But if you're bootlegging without hogging, I honestly don't give a damn.

  • Do you have any clue how TINY the percentage of profits a musician actually makes off of the sales of his/her album?

    I think most musicians, even a lot of the big-name stars who have the most to lose from mp3 piracy (as opposed to freely releasing an mp3 themselves), support the mp3 revolution. Tom Petty and (in a big way) David Bowie come to mind as examples of people who have really embraced the new medium.

    For a brief, freakish time, recordings as a medium were intensely profitable for a very few musicians (but never so much for them as for record companies). Those days are over. MP3s represent a brand-new way to use recordings for their original purpose -- a marketing tool to sell either the live performance or the sheet music.

    The beauty of it is the beauty of the internet -- I no longer need to grease the palms of radio DJ's, I no longer need to get an "in" with a major label -- many of the barriers that formerly blocked new musicians from "making it" are now gone, and a band can even be from Midland, TX [mp3.com] or The Netherlands [mp3.com] and a guy like me could stumble across them. Or even Italy [mp3.com]. (Just three of my favorite bands that I never would have heard of through the standard radio play / movie soundtrack / local bar circuit methods.)

    The recording industry is corrupt. (Duh.) Most of us musicians, even those of us who are in the system, have seen it as a necessary evil. MP3's are a way around them!

    (Braveheart mode on)
    FREEEEEEDOOOOOOMMMMMMMMM!
    (Braveheart mode off)

    One band [sunscreem.com] I know of is even using mp3's to give fans who are musicians the opportunity to make their own remixes!

    All in all, mp3's are pretty cool for those of us who are artists. Most musicians are NOT whores to the music industry (much as they've tried to be) and lose almost nothing; many of those who are tied in with big labels have already embraced the new medium.

    MP3's aren't going anywhere, and those who fight against them will only lose their money in the end.

    just my 2 zorkmids

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