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Interview With The Creator of Napster on ZDnet 192

Posted by Hemos from the interesting-background dept.
Carnage4Life writes, "Here's an interview with the creator of Napster on ZDnet where he talks about various issues including designing Napster, what plans he has for Napster and the growing number of bans on Napster in college campuses due to the fact that it is a bandwidth hog." Beyond the issue of "bandwidth hog," something that more colleges/unis are being threatened with is lawsuits from the recording industry because of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. You'll be seeing some more on the DMCA from us this week.
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Interview With The Creator of Napster on ZDnet More

Interview With The Creator of Napster on ZDnet

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  • Napter is a great util (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I think if he wants to cure the bandwidth problem he should have the program close when people click the x button! Not minimize to the bottom right hand corner and fool every newbie.

  • Re:interesting person (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Out of curiosity why didn't he initially release a *nix client to begin with rather than buying a book and struggling to learn how to program the API under windows?

    Because he realized that there a lot more windows users than unix users.

  • Re: Pornster? :-) (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    (Score: +1, Obvious)

    :-)
  • Wrong- from wwwebster, look at #3

    Main Entry: piracyain Entry: piracy
    Pronunciation: 'pI-r&-sE
    Function: noun
    Inflected Form(s): plural -cies
    Etymology: Medieval Latin piratia, from Late Greek peirateia, from Greek peiratEs pirate
    Date: 1537
    1 : an act of robbery on the high seas; also : an act resembling such robbery
    2 : robbery on the high seas
    3 : the unauthorized use of another's production, invention, or conception especially in infringement of a copyright

  • Can anyone recommend the best Linux Napster tools. It's been a few months since I've tried, but a few months ago all the linux Napster stuff I tried was woefully inadequate. If there are decent Napster tools out there, then I'll forego the http access at http://www.mp3smuggler.com/ [mp3smuggler.com].
  • Isn't it ironic how Puff Daddy is quoted defending the RIAA, since his music is ripped from other artists... :)
  • I'll second gnapster, it works VERY well here. In fact I think it works a LOT better then the official windows version behind a firewall.. course that could be Linux vs windows.. hmm...
  • And come on people, be honest... Everyone who has never ever ever downloaded one song from napster which they did not already own, raise your hands high above everyone elses so we can call you liars.

    Raises hand. I've never run napster. I'm pretty sure the only tracks I have downloaded (using ftp, or rcp, or Netscape) that I don't own the CD of are from two CDs that arn't available in the USA (plus stuff from MP3.com). One I have on order, but Wax Tracks keeps pusing the US release data back The other is H2SO4's Imatation Leather Jacket (I think). I havn't been able to find it anywhere.

    I even spent about $200 buying all the import singles of my faverote band just so I didn't have to steal them.

    More intrestingly, my avg. spending on CDs from 1993 to 1998 was about $0. In 1999 I spent at least $500 on them. (all from listening to a legal CD archive at work, and partly because my new car has a CD player)

  • I would hardly describe any point in the past as being a utopia. However, I understand what LeSwoosh means.

    There was definately a time in which large businesses were very rare. Shipping concerns were the largest privately owned businesses, and corporations were quite rare and tied closely to the government (e.g. the East India Company)

    So although the marketplace was smaller due to there being less trade and communication as there is today, virtually any individual could go into virtually any business easily and through dint of hard work, good prices and luck be just as successful as his competitors.

    Nowadays though, while the market is larger, there are typically several large concerns which overshadow any market. Rather than accept the positive aspects of capitalism (you are likely to improve yourself by having someone to compete against; it's better for everyone in general to have competition all across the board) with the bad (if you can't actually have a better business than your competitor you're doomed; competition all across the board means for you too) the modern day corporation is usually anti-capitalist.

    By this I mean that they do not wish for there to be a fair fight in the marketplace. They do not wish to risk their standing even if they will improve themselves. The number one goal of most modern corporations is to keep themselves at the forefront of their market, even if they don't deserve to be.

    Basically capitalism works out well for everyone in the end, although any one business may find that its fortunes rise and fall drastically. Corporatism works out well for the large businesses on the top but poorly for everyone as a whole because things do not improve as well as they might have otherwise.

    Note that in computing every advancement I can think of has come from research labs and academics unconcerned with making money, or from small startup companies and entrepreneurs. Large companies (outside of their pure research divisions - e.g. Bell Labs, Xerox PARC) never come up with anything because it might disturb the status quo.

    (support the silver standard ;)
  • What you say is right on target regarding MP3s, but Napster very much promotes piracy. It is a means for people to copy copyrighted music from one person's computer to another -- what part of that is not blatant piracy?

    Missing in this analysis is that it is not illegal to copy music in all countries. For example, Canada amended its Copyrigh Act in 1998 such that it is no longer illegal to copy "musical works" as long as the copying is done for private use. See section 80, as amended [cb-cda.gc.ca], and the explanation of this section [cb-cda.gc.ca]. Many /. readers will recall the furor over the copyright levy [slashdot.org] imposed in Canada, but many missed that the levy was the flip side of legalizing the private copying of musical works. In other words, it is no longer illegal in Canada to copy music for private use, and the levy was put in place in an attempt to compensate artists for private copying that does take place.

    Now, the BIG question that remains for Canadians is the following: if I'm in Canada, and I log onto Napster and connect to someone's MP3 files in the USA and download a file, am I subject to Canadian or US copyright laws? Where is the copying taking place?

  • I send thanks. It is one of greatest new tools on the internet.
  • Making Napster illegal would be like making Usenet or IRC, or eve a search engine illegal simply because there is illegal activity by their users. It would be like making a bandwidth provider or ISP mother their clients, which is just blatantly ignorant. There is no way the RIAA can stop Napster, and relatively impossible to track down the users trading mp3's on Napster. :)

    EraseMe
  • > This quote seems to sum it up:
    > I send a letter to a friend over postal mail.
    > In the mail, i say "I have a package for you.
    > I'll send it via fedex". I
    > then send him a kiddie porn video. Is the postal
    > office criminally negligent for allowing the
    > transmission of child
    > pornography?

    Sorry, that doesn't quite cover it.

    Because what's really happening is your are writing to the postmaster general and saying: "who has kiddie porn?". The post master general writes back and says: "Bob has kiddie porn. Here's his address. By the way, getting kiddie porn is illegal." Then you write to Bob and say: "Bob, will you send me a free copy of your kiddie porn?"
  • I like this line in the article...

    It was rooted out of frustration not only with MP3.com, Lycos, and Scour.net, but also to create music community.

    It's basically a large, online community of thieves.

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • There's already plenty of precident of things being banned because of what they "can" do...

    Though it's in a completely different league, on one hand the second amendment states that we have the right to keep and bare arms, but on the other hand, you can't have automatic weapons, many states bar handgun sales, "cop killer" bullets are illegal, and private sales are on their way out of the picture too...

    Those are all things that our second amendment protects, and are no problem if only law abiding citizens ever get guns... But because of the minority of gun buyers, criminals, who would use the guns for the "wrong" purpose (after all, guns are made for killing, but you can't just kill anybody), the majority loses out.

    Yeah, it's a leap away from napster in terms of effect on society and stuff like that, but it's also a perfect example of consitutional rights being taken away because they could be or were abused by a miniscule percentage of the population.
  • Yeah... But at least BeamIt attempts to introduce some form of authenication in that it wants to know, or reasonably believe, that you own the CD (or at least have it in your possession)... Napster doesn't do that.

    And come on people, be honest... Everyone who has never ever ever downloaded one song from napster which they did not already own, raise your hands high above everyone elses so we can call you liars. I admit that i did. I also admit that I deleted the song, as well as the program immediately thereafter. A LOT of the music i listen to is produced by small artists on small labels, and they DESERVE to make money from people buying their CD's... I'm not about to just let anyone who wants it to download it from me.
  • Isn't it ironic how Puff Daddy is quoted defending the RIAA, since his music is ripped from other artists... :)
    Absolutely. Interesting how Public Enemy are outspoken supporters of MP3, but Puffy, who desecrated one of their tracks, is capitalistic in comparison.
    Then again, he's just so media friendly, while pretending to be tough. After all, why release one single, when you can release four(or was it five?)
    nb,
    I couldn't believe it when I found out that this Napster was linking thousands of people to the new Notorious BIG album...This album is a labor of love from Notorious BIG's friends to the man.

    How could it a new Notorious BIG album, if it's by his 'friends'?
    Why dontcha just dig up his corpse and get jiggy wit dat?
  • The reason it works like that is because the backend was changed recently from a substring-match-class searching mechanism to a keyword/token-based matching mechanism. Most people don't experience the difference, but to the few who do: such is our price for making a better search engine.

    --jordan
  • I don't see why what you describe is such a risk. This risk exists already with FTP files and anything you download from the Web. Why should Napster be so special and different in this respect?

    What about WMA? Or other audio formats?

    --jordan
  • > Is Napster going to eat into CD sales?
    > Absolutely--and I believe that the end result
    > is going to be a lot of prudning in the
    > industry.

    That's interesting; the RIAA posted reports that CD sales are at record numbers this past year. Yeah, Napster sure is eating into their pockets.

    --jordan
  • Yeah, we all remember the /search mechanism in IRC, don't we? Oh yeah. Glorified IRC client, indeed. :-)

    --jordan
  • FYI, Linux != Unix . I suspect that the poster was not actually ignorant, and that he was referring to the fact that Napster servers do NOT run on Unix.
  • thee doesn't need to be an offical unix client --
    there are already several clones/workalikes

    they just need to give their blessing/approval to one ... froinstance gnapster, which, in my opinion s even better than the real thing (it can connect to non napster servers)
  • -"If I recall, it's about a 500K download; what's winamp alone, about 2MB?"-

    If I recall correctly, the normal Winamp download is about 600k, but you can get the 2 meg download to have support for windows media and mjuice formats. I've never found a reason to go for the bloat version.
  • Sure, if all you're dealing with is a small subnet. But what about big operations, where you've got upwards of 50k users? 100k users? It gets pricey. Adding more bandwidth or traffic shapers gets pricey, and not-for-profits and Unis don't always have the funding to solve problems like this by throwing money at it. Sometimes adding something to the AUP makes sense. I know that in an academic environment, research and educational uses should come first. If that's distance learning, or engineers trying odd new things, or whatever. Joe and Jane User's resnet connection is low priority by comparison, imnsho. If Joe and Jane User want faster better more from a resnet situation, Joe and Jane ought to pony up and get themselves some commercial feed. Alright, maybe that's taking it too far. But at the very least, during business hours, doesn't it make a bit of sense? I think I saw a suggestion for bandwidth limitations on resnet stuff here on /. earlier. And for a Uni, I couldn't agree more. I like the high speed connection when I'm not working, but I waste it. Someone who is actually using it for work deserves it more.

    itachi, who got to boot a luser on Friday for violating security policy despite warnings

  • At a certain point, you've got as much bandwidth as you can reasonably afford. The highest of high tech isn't available in the area, and the very biggest pipe is beyond your budget. (Note: this happens to Unis and companies, too - UUnet/Qwest/whomever might be able to get you DS-3, or even OC-3, but at a certain point, they just can't get you anything more, and those things aren't cheap) So at that point, what else can a Uni/company do? You limit the uses allowed. Why should a Uni help Johnny Frat-boy build the world's biggest MP3 collection? The Uni I work at spends as much as we can on connectivity without going overbudget, but we still are pretty much maxed out from about 8am to 1am. And about 25% to 33% of that was napster at last check. Another equal amount of webbrowsing. How much of it was academic? Genuinely? I could buy a good chunk of the web stuff. But Napster as academic research?

    itachi

  • No, I went to Oberlin. I work elsewhere. And an AUP is based more on trust than anything else. People violate AUPs all the time, but the only people who get in trouble for it (at my workplace, anyway) are those that cause admins to get email saying "hey, someone is your domain is doing ____ to my box, could you make them stop?" or the like. No admin has the time to sit there sniffing traffic watching for misbehavior. Shutting off someone's port when they are in the middle of DoSing someone, on the other hand, is more of a job requirement, don't you think? As for the need for warrants, it depends. IANAL, but my understanding is that if a reasonable and understandable AUP is presented, any uni/corp. can kill a connection based on behavior that violates policy.

    itachi, who resents being called jackbooted. I wear hiking boots with steel toes :)
  • i think that jabber was going to add napster like file searching...
    here [jabber.org] is some more info...

    nmarshall
    #include "standard_disclaimer.h"
    R.U. SIRIUS: THE ONLY POSSIBLE RESPONSE
  • Because there are so many mp3s, and many people store greater than 1000 mp3s on their computers, if you and I go to the same college, there is a large chance I'll have the mp3 you're looking for. Maybe napster could add in the abilitly to search napster clients on a local network before they searched those that are in europe or australia? So search all those with 204.17.30.x, then 204.17.X.X, etc, and finally search the napster servers. It would surely lower some of the bandwith stress on the college networks.
  • There's more than just Napster. Someone else has mentioned another one (although I don't recall the name and am too lazy to look it up right now...). There's also CuteMX (by the people who brought you
    CuteFTP), Hotline, and of course, IRC is a super set of the functionality present in Napster, save a search function.

    There's probably even more that I'm not familar with, but I think the point is made: It's not about Napster, it's about the concept of easy-to-use global file sharing. Previous methods work, but are a bitch to use or to find specific things. The ones that allow one to share any damn file they want, as opposed to JUST mp3s, will be sue-proof.


    --
    These are *MY* opinions.
  • What really gets me angry is how there is no mention of IRC. For about as long as MP3's have been available, I have been on DALnet trading mp3s with "bots". This is almost identical to what is being done on Napster. And, anyone who has ever been on IRC, will immediately see the strong resemblance between Napster and IRC, especially when it gets down to the Channels.
    Napster is nothing original, it's just a user-friendly (aka: usable by techno-ignorants) implementation of a foundation laid by IRC about 3 years earlier. I find it almost impossible to believe that he arrived at Napster with no influence at all from IRC, and when he mentions that there was no simmilar way to obtain MP3s, he is overlooking the easiest of the time, IRC.
    It really gets my goat how this guy is taking the credit for what has already been done, and is still widely being used even today. For an experiment, pick up an IRC client, log into DalNet or EFFnet or some similar server, do a channel search for the word MP3 and limit results to rooms with 30 to 200 people. You will get probably 150 rooms, all organized into genre by room topic, and filled with bots ready to fill your harddrive.
    SO remember, NAPSTER IS NOTHING NEW, IT'S LIKE SAYING FORD INVENTED THE CAR! (Dailmer and one other guy in Germany did) FORD JUST MADE IT AVAILABLE TO THE MASSES. That is nothing to be overlooked, but certainly it should be known that the two achievements are not synonymous.
  • Yes, please, for the love of God, give us a stop button in the search menu!

    Seriously, that is my only real complaint with the user interface, besides locking the user out of the program until the login process either loads or they hit 'cancel,' and the fact that the 'X' button doesn't kill the program.
  • I suffer daily from this Bandwidth Hog problem. About 10 people in our office use Napster. They all do it via our feeble 64k line, mainly becuase the 400k DirectPC thingie sucks.

    They discovered Napster en Masse, about three weeks ago. (They're Mexicans!)

    I typically view /. at 500-800 BYTES per second. It's ridiculous. Part of the problem is that it uses HTTP (afaik), so throttling or even blocking it doesn't work.

    Besides, our Sys Admin is this quiet guy who knows what kind of grief he'll get if he attempts to impose sanctions.

    The plus side? The management don't understand why the line is suddenly so amazingly slow. We're upgrading to 512k in a month :P

    But yeah, I'm all for the Uni's doing this - sorry!

    Mong.

    * Paul Madley ...Student, Artist, Techie - Geek *
  • actually if you click file exit it will close. I really like that feature. And who cares if you fool every newbie? It's there jobs to learn...
  • This is quite obviously lawsuit-bait, but should Napster be the one to bear the brunt of it? I don't think so, it's just a tool that's oblivious to copyright. But the actual network, and those computers being used to do the copying of copyrighted material, yeah they're gonna get burned.

    Of course, one of the things that makes Napster work the way it does is that the file transfer itself is peer-to-peer, which conveniently means the files are never stored in anyone's server. Therefore there are N,000 separate individuals at any one time that they would need to go after. As N->infinity (and it definitely seems to be rising steadily), it's going to become completely unfeasible.

    Which explains why they go after Napster. Napster may not be doing anything illegal, but at least they're one specific company that stays put.

    [TMB]

  • You can resume a download. It's called the "Resume Download" button.
    And you can exit the program by right clicking on it in the system tray and hitting (get this) "Exit"
  • From what I gather, Napster does _NOT_ track IP addresses of its users, so it's not quite that simple.
  • What you say is right on target regarding MP3s, but Napster very much promotes piracy. It is a means for people to copy copyrighted music from one person's computer to another -- what part of that is not blatant piracy? Sure, you can trade public domain music or only download songs you already own legally. But the former is a huge minority, and the later is rather pointless since you may as well rip your own music, and actually have control over the quality.

    The Napster community is like a video or music store where anyone could walk in with a blank tape (or buy one at the store) and make copies of the music/movie right there, then walk out of the store with their own copy and the original remaining at the store for anyone else to copy. This is quite obviously lawsuit-bait, but should Napster be the one to bear the brunt of it? I don't think so, it's just a tool that's oblivious to copyright. But the actual network, and those computers being used to do the copying of copyrighted material, yeah they're gonna get burned.
  • There is one great and really new concept with Napster: It created a music community that shares and is expanding it everyday [Its the users that are expanding the community but anyhow...] That is why "Nappy" is mostly talking about UI improvents so much, they are improving UI so that more people can use the program more easily and enjoyably.
  • Remember when Netscape/McAfee/tons of other software used to be free... I do.

    I remember back when Netscape cost money, and then became free (as it is now.)

    I guess that's not what you meant.


    --

  • They [the CIA] are big and powerful and well armed, and they keep secrets from the very people they purport to protect. They cannot be trusted to have humanity's best interests first and foremost in their minds.

    Just out of curiosity, if they're so big, powerful and particularly, secret, how do you know so much about their "murder, rape and destruction"?


    --

  • Besides, I'm out of school a long time ago, sonny.

    Sorry; so much of Slashdot is young and naive, I guess I'm making too many assumptions. :)

    Obviously the system we have nowadays strays far from the so-ideal of so-called "free" trade. I'm don't think capitalism is a good word to describe it anymore.

    This is what I've never understood. We have more choices, more information and more opportunity than at any time in history, yet many people like you seem to have some image in their mind of a point in the past when we had some "mom and pop" Utopia. Tell me, when was this golden era of Capitalism that you are comparing "nowadays" to?

    And please don't tell me you long for the gold standard.


    --

  • ...several states have Good Samaritan laws, which protect them from liability when they volunteer to help others.

    That's great, except it has nothing to do with the point I made. What I said was that I have no legal obligation to report a crime.


    --

  • If capitalism was linked to free markets, there would be no drive by companies toward monopolies and oligopolies, since they would be harmful to capitalism itself.

    I'll accept your refinement of the definition ("capital"-wise, at least), but this doesn't make sense to me. Of course there is a drive toward 100% marketshare, since every company has the desire to sell to every possible consumer. When dominant marketshare becomes detrimental to free competition through abuses of power, we call it a monopoly. And that's why we have anti-trust laws.

    In my experience, it is a word used by people who see that so-called free market capitalism regularly produces results which seem unsound, but are unwilling to question whether capitalism itself provides incentives toward sub-optimal outcomes.

    I agree with that to some degree, although I would phrase it differently. I would say it's used by people who expect 100% perfection from capitalism, and call it corporatism when it fails to achieve it. They cling to the naive notion that it's possible to legislate perfect economies, and wilfully ignore the historical evidence that every other economic system produces far worse abuses and misery.


    --

  • I'm all about choice and freedom. If you believe thats what we have today, I should like to get my glasses tinted the same shade of rose. Just because we begin each ball game by singing about "the land of the free and the home of the brave" doesn't make it so. The real trick has been to make the general populace believe that's what we have. Pulling that one over on us was quite a coup. Yes, we have choices, as long as they are the ones printed for us by the corporations and federally approved. Theres quite a difference between "freedom of choice" and "freedom from choice". I'm all about choice. I just don't like this mandated menu.

    Sorry for the long quote, but I think it's all important. You throw out all these statements as if we live in some police state or something. It's long on drama (maybe you should've been a drama major...), but very short on facts. I never claimed that we live in a perfect society (far from it), but I see no reason to have this cynical, pessimistic outlook on life. I mean, what would it take to make you happy? It's seems perfectly clear to me that, on balance, life is getting better with every decade that passes.

    "The land of the free and the home of the brave" are not intended to be descriptive of every event that ever has or will take place in the US. It's meant to be the ideal, a statement of the foundational vision for the country.

    And what "mandated" menu are you talking about? That you only have the Colas that the "corporations" allow you to have? You have total freedom to make your own Cola if you want (or fill in your own product). Products are not legislated into existence, they are created by real human beings. If you don't like a particular option, then make one yourself. But to complain that someone isn't delivering you custom made-to-order products is just silly. What is it you expect? Of course your options are limited to what people actually produce. What other option is there?

    BTW, what is a gold standard? You mean an ideal? If that's what a gold standard is, sure I long for it. Don't you?

    The value of the dollar used to be tied to the price of gold (which was originally legislated in the constitution). The "gold standard" was abandoned in the sixties (early 70s?), but every so often someone complains that we should go back to that valuation method.


    --

  • Why has he switched to windows-only?

    Because he wanted the program to be useful to the most people (namely, a lot of his friends in the beginning). The number of people who use Unix/Linux day-to-day with multimedia capabilities is microscopic.


    --

  • The number one goal of most modern corporations is to keep themselves at the forefront of their market, even if they don't deserve to be.

    Well, of course. But on average, this is done through better products. Can you cite times when inferior products have made it to #1? Sure. But over time, the better products win out almost every time. The point isn't that capitalism is perfectly efficient; the point is that it's self-correcting (with rare exceptions).

    Note that in computing every advancement I can think of has come from research labs and academics unconcerned with making money, or from small startup companies and entrepreneurs.

    I've got news for you... 90% of all computer innovations came straight out of IBM in the 50s-70s.

    But in any case, it's hardly surprising that many innovations come out of small companies. An innovation or an efficiency is how small companies start and survive. But to say that innovations never come out of big companies is just absurd. I could cite any number of them: Post it notes. Cellular phones. Satellite communications. Composite plastics. Laser Printers. Railroads. The "butterfly" laptop keyboard. Auto-everything cameras. Microprocessors. Compact Discs. And my personal favorite lately: Electronically Image Stabilized binoculars (by Canon).

    And let's not even get into the amazing track record of the medical industry, which is almost exclusively the realm of large companies.


    --

  • It IS that simple. Imagine that I work for a record company. I load up napster and search for our companies latest hits. I then get a list of people who are serving it. Now I click on "Download". All I'd need is to monitor the ip's Napster is connecting to.

  • Re:Napster Linux Downloads (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Actually, you don't need VMWare:
    1) Upgrade to a recent version of WINE
    2) Install Napster for Windows using WINE
    4) Switch to the Napster directory
    5) Run napster like this:
    wine -dll commctrl,comctl,commdlg,comdlg32=n napster.exe
    6) Download away ;)

    Its almost entirely functional except the ping feature doesn't seem to work.

  • Capitalism has nothing to do with sharing information. It is simply an economic system allowing regulated free trade among individuals.

    Capitalism has nothing to do with free trade - it is a description of how the means of production are owned (capital, in the modern world, as opposed to land in fuedal Europe a few hundred years ago). Whilst it is often convenient for proponents of capitalist systems to conflate free markets with capitalism, there is simply no connection.

    If capitalism was linked to free markets, there would be no drive by companies toward monopolies and oligopolies, since they would be harmful to capitalism itself.

    "Corporatism" is a nonsense word created by people who don't understand what corporations are. It means absolutely nothing.

    In my experience, it is a word used by people who see that so-called free market capitalism regularly produces results which seem unsound, but are unwilling to question whether capitalism itself provides incentives toward sub-optimal outcomes.

  • The only ones I've used are nap, gnome-napster, and gnapster. My personal favorite is gnapster, it's really professional and works perfectly for me. I've only used the windows client 1 or 2 times but it didn't impress me half as much as gnapster.
  • Yes. Glorified IRC client.

    http://www.var.cx/dfsi/ [www.var.cx] describes the "Distributed Fileserver over IRC project, which appears to have died because of Napster's success.

    DFSI, technically, appears to be the better solution: a vanilla IRC server is all that is required on the server side. The web page says that bandwidth usage is heavy, but my brief look at it didn't flag anything that would be significantly more bandwidth-intensive than Napster.

    The way it (and Napster) works, is that the client broadcasts a search query on a channel. Other clients on the channel send their matches as a private message (like /msg on a vanilla IRC client). The querying client may then request a file transfer from whichever client reported a match and seemed the best bet (fewest transfers in progress/fastest link/whatever).

    I dunno how firewall-friendly IRC file sends are, but other than that I can't see much wrong with it. Certainly better than inventing a new protocol.
    --
  • That's right. Open source, Open protocol, the way something with this kind of potential should be. Check out OFSI, the Open File Sharing Initiative [ofsi.net].
    This idea is to provide a similar service as Napster but with ALL file types. Plus to be better, faster, etc... ;)
    Because it's an open project we feel it has better potential, because as many open projects have shown, open projects evolove much quicker and much better.
    Sorry for the plug, I just felt this was an opportune time to bring OFSI into some light.
    Check it out, help is wanted!
  • When was the last time you strolled the streets of any "big city" (fill in the blank) in the U.S.?
    Most of the music cassette and video crap sitting on the tables for sale are pirated.

    Most cassettes and videos are pirated? What big city do you live in? You stated somewhere in the US, so that rules out China. I have yet to see one pirated shrink wrap cassette or video. Granted, I have seen taped music in a few homes, but in a retail store? Where do you get this information?
  • It's pretty common to find pirated videotapes in ma+pa video stores. Are you sure that you know what you are looking for?

    Common? In a big city? On the sidewalks? Where do you guys live? As a music aficionado who travelse the Western states about once a month for a week or two at a time, I see lots of drugs, booze, and lots of bodies for sale on the streets, but bootleg copies conviently for sale have not presented themselves to me.

    I believe you. Perhaps I was not looking in the right places. My theory was that employees who make incomes at stores who have much invested in the retail market would not be happy at bootleg vendors not playing by the same rules and promptly call for enforcement. They might be upset at someone who is selling a good collection $16 cd's for $4 and call the cops to bust them on one of many of the city's ordinances.
  • If the music industry gets this in front of congress, runs a quick search and shows that 98% of all available songs on the Napster network are copyrighted it will absolutely destroy any credibility

    According to the ninth circuit court you have the legal right to load a MP3 of a copyright song that you own on CD. I remember reading that off a link from slashdot, but couldn't find it in slashdot's search, but here is a diffrent summary http://www.nylj.com/tech/091399t3.html [nylj.com], unfortunitly it doesn't really discuss space shifting. As I recall the judge essensally ruled that owning the CD was like owning a "right to use", so owning Ray of Light on CD gave you the right to listen to it in MP3 or other forms. He went on to rule that it didn't matter if you gained the other form from a source that wasn't allowed to listen to it (which I found supprising). I wish I had kept a link to the ruling. Does anyone have one?

    MP3.com's "BeamIt" relys on this ruling (as far as I can tell).

    So you can't just point to the large number of copyrighted works in Napaster's list, you have to show that the people downloading the songs don't have the legal right to do so!

  • [Corpratism...]
    In my experience, it is a word used by people who see that so-called free market capitalism regularly produces results which seem unsound, but are unwilling to question whether capitalism itself provides incentives toward sub-optimal outcomes.

    Of corse free market capitalism regularly produces unsound results. The free market doesn't find global optima, it finds local optima. As far as I know it is the most efficent process known to find local econmic optmia. The only one in fact. There is no known way to find econmic global optima.

    You can look at the local optmia that the free market does find, and imagine a better end result, but nobody has shown a process that finds that result for you! Certonally no econ text I have read talks about one. Certonally no non-free market economy seems to be doing better then the mostly-free-merket economies of the world. (I don't know any country that uses a total free market economy, but many are "close enough")

  • You are very ignorant of the difference between backend and frontend, obviously. Coding a Linux client would involve starting from the ground up - it literally has no similarity to the server. By your logic the same argument could be made for any service. Does the existance of Apache (the "backend") on Linux in any way help along the development of the "client" (browser)? Of course not.

    --
  • Well, from a practical standpoint, it sounds like he's been really damn busy. This thing literally blew up in his face, yet as he says there are still a ton of problems with his flagship product. Right now he is worried about appeasing the 80-90% of the people who would be on Windows anyways, and to that end he has a lot of work to do. The infrastructure is a mess (I still can't logon during peak hours, 5-9PM), the client sucks (can't even abort a search), and there is a lot to be desired. He feels a very palpable sense of urgency to get these things right before someone else does, which is why he left school, etc. I'm sure that a Linux client is in the works, but there are more important priorities right now. The evolution of ICQ went the exact same way - they spent a good year or two ramping up their servers and creating a better client before they ever bothered with Linux. A Linux napster, by the way, is kind of a moot point, considering that there are 7 or 8 unofficial ones out there already. Some of these work a lot better than the Windows client itself. But for the sake of appearances, I doubt he will forget his Unix roots.

    --
  • They mention in the article that Napster is a formal company now, and it appears as though they have employees and the like. My question would be, since napster is free to download, and since you can use the servers for free, how does Napster's corporation make money?
  • Perhaps Napster should go the way of IRC, and run as multiple servers, e.g. eu.napster.com, us.napster.com, etc. He could then link reliable servers into a small network, allowing for more balanced bandwidth.

    It would also mean that individuals could run their own segregated napster networks, for internal usage.

    Napster is an incredible innovation! I just wish there was a Stop button when doing a search. The Unix clients still need quite a bit of work as well. Is there a rfc like document for Napster protocols available (so that I could write a perl module or the likes)?

    EraseMe
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • I would expect using it to exchange certain 'types' of picture files could be potentially more popular than exchanging MP3s.
  • There is nothing technologically new, or even innovative about napster.
    It simply gives the average dork an easy way to start sharing mp3 with everyone, and as some have said, takes certain steps to do things for them (like, not actually shutting down when you hit the close button, just minimizing to the systray and continuing to share).

    Napster simply does what us geeks have always done, but in a simpler manner. The only ones who this benefits are those who can't cope otherwise. Those of us with a clue, share things with our friends over standard protocols.

    Napster is garbage. The code is garbage. The application is garbage. And all the hype is garbage.

    It was simply something written at a time when something of this nature would get lots of attention.

    Feh.
  • Interesting point...

    I know the trade in DATs is (or was) a huge 'industry' as such, people trading lists of what bootlegs and other stuff they had was very popular...

  • iMesh [imesh.com] can be used for any type of file. My roommate has already used it to snag several South Park episodes.
  • Just look at RealPlayer. The've sold tons of the upgraded versions even though you can get the baxic for free.
    Have you ever tried to download RealPlayer from the company's web site? Many users are led to believe that there isn't even a free version to begin with. When you select "download," you're presented with two ENORMOUS banners to purchase premium versions, and a tiny link to the free version. After that, you're presented with a this-is-your-last-chance opportunity to purchase a premium version. Even after you download the free version, you're subjected to marketing and pop-up ads relentlessly advertising premium services.
  • What else would the Napster design be used for?

    Off the top of my head...

    • News articles
    • Scientific papers
    • Videos (but would require massive bandwidth)
    • Store catalogs
    • E-books

    There must be more... can anyone think of any?

    [TMB]

  • Gather a bunch of 24.x.x.x ip addresses from napster's servers, and complain to @home and Roadrunner that users with certain IP addresses are pirating using napster. The cable modem ISPs can kick those users off both for pirating and for running high-bandwidth servers, and the users probably won't be able to find another cable modem ISP thanks to [slashdot.org] the AOL-TW merger.

    --

  • Describing himself as a member of the security community, i can almost see why he was paranoid enough to think a linux client may have been the start of security issues, except for the fact he was more familiar with unix programming to begin with. Out of curiosity why didn't he initially release a *nix client to begin with rather than buying a book and struggling to learn how to program the API under windows? Anyways, Napster is a really great tool despite the bandwith problems it causes, and thats all i have to say aside from complaining how repetitve he was, saying over and over again (i don't know how many times) how they were working on the UI and the scaling of the network.

    just my $0.02
    -----------
    #!/usr/bin/perl -sp0777iX+d*lMLa^*lN%0]dsXx++lMlN/dsM0j]dsj
    $/=unpack('H*',$_);$_=`echo 16dio\U$k"SK$/SM$n\EsN0p[lN*1
  • The great thing behind napster is the whole idea, too bad that the implementation is a disaster. I already read complaints about the 'x' not exitting the program, and the lack of an stop button. But the most annoying thing of napster is the fact that you cannot resume a file. When your link hickups you loose connection (protocol problem?) and you can forget the last 5% you had left to complete. $olid
  • Another RIAA statement I found interesting was that they deem it unacceptable to "build a business" on top of pirating the recording industry. Last time I checked Napster was completely free, and I doubt Napster Inc. has made a cent off of the RIAA let alone anyone else. How can they with no ads or sales of the client? Now, Napster is still in the beta stage yet and may turn shareware or payware, but for the moment there is no business of pirating..it's a free exchange of files.
  • If the internet had been big when NFS and smb were developed, the RIAA and MPAA would probably have sued the creators of those two protocols for creating something that would make sharing illegal files easier, too.

    While they're at it, why don't they sue the creators of the TCP/IP protocol for creating something that is frequently used to trade illegal files. And sue the postal service because I could burn an MP3 CD and snail mail it to you. Why don't they lobby to get laws passed requiring the entirety of humanity to be isolated in little metal boxes since any communication could lead to the illegal trading of their copyrighted materials?

  • You must be a drama major.

    Capitalism is a process based on the noble process of sharing honest information.

    Capitalism has nothing to do with sharing information. It is simply an economic system allowing regulated free trade among individuals.

    Consider that more Coca-cola gets drank in America than water, and I can't think of a better all around product than water. Why is this so? Marketing.

    Coca-cola sells more because it is a better product than water. The important question, of course, is what is the definition of "better". Health-wise, water is probably better. Taste-wise, Coca-cola is better, which is why it sells more. It also has caffeine which many people like to have in their drink of choice. The key word here is "choice".

    "Corporatism" is a nonsense word created by people who don't understand what corporations are. It means absolutely nothing.


    --

  • Napster gets Bob and Joe together, and then Joe sells Bob some crack. Napster is witness to this, and fails to inform the authorities. Napster has violated the law.

    There's no such thing as a good samaritan law, despite what you might have seen on Seinfeld. I have no legal obligation to report a crime to the authorities.

    The better analogy is that Napster is like manufacturing safe cracking tools. They can be used for legitimate or illegal purposes, but the manufacturer has no obligation to follow every purchaser around to make sure they don't rob anyone.


    --

  • But I think the main reason behind closed-source and windows only was because of the "your ad here" banner in the client. An open source version of the software would almost certainly breed a bannerless version, which appears to be where napster was planning on getting their cash from. Just a thought...


    mcrandello@my-deja.com
    rschaar{at}pegasus.cc.ucf.edu if it's important.
  • There's an article in the most recent US News & World Report with "Napster guy" also.

    http://www.usnews.com/usnews/ issue/000306/napster.htm [usnews.com]

    Pablo Nevares, "the freshmaker".
  • if the CIA is so bad, and if marketing propaganda is so powerful, how is it that you escape to dispense your pearls of wisdom for the rest of us to read? you must be a super-human to be able to resist the brainwashing and dodge the Man who is trying to take you down. I for one am glad that we have ubermenschen like you to save us. I mean, as we lose our freedoms, black people continue to have to sit in the back of the bus... oh wait, I mean, as we lose our freedoms, women increasingly have to stay home and raise children... oh wait, I mean, as we lose our freedoms, gay people have to closet themselves more and more... oh wait, I mean as we lose our freedoms, you can't get a job unless you cut your hair... oh wait, I mean, as we lose our freedoms, we have to sneak to the bad part of town to buy erotic material in brown paper bags... oh wait, I mean as we lose our freedoms, we are presented with less and less choice of what we can buy and eat... oh never mind.

    anyway, I'm glad to see how successful you've been at stopping the Man from limiting my choices about everything from the important to the trivial.

  • If you (a campus sysop) really want to throttle down the bandwidth used by napster, why don't you install a traffic shaper? A fast x86 with linux will do the trick for a subnet with approx. 200/300 clients.
    Ofcourse, users can enter a different data-port, but with a little packet-sniffing the shaper could detect this and limit that users bandwidth.

    It really isn't so hard to implement
  • surely there could be a low-bandwidth option that users could select to throttle the bandwidth they use ... similar to gozilla ?

    This might stop universities banning the software, just restricting the throttle allowed on-campus.

    We ran a leech server from a university campus for a few weeks, and hammered out gigabytes each week ... and shut it down before anyone complained!

  • This is another case of software development being years ahead of the hardware and infrastructure.
    However we need tools like this as the only way bandwidth is going to be improved quickly is when it is made to look inadaquete. Like all other hardware, from CPU's to memory, the fast bandwidth will come along soon and it's arrival will be sped up by these bandwidth killers.
  • to quote:
    • "We love the idea of using technology to build artist communities, but that's not what Napster is all about. Napster is about facilitating piracy and trying to build a business on the backs of artists and copyright owners," said Cary Sherman, senior executive vice president and general counsel of the RIAA.
    For the 1000th time. COPYING is not PIRACY. No matter how many times I say it, it seems that some people just don't get it. Piracy is where you brord a ship, beat the hell out of people or kill them, and then loot their stuff. This isn't even close to copying a CD. For christs sake. Give it UP!!
  • There are larger issues here that no one has yet touched on. Mainly, that Napster has validated and empowered an entire community of illegal MP3's; they've brought music bootlegging into the mainsteam. MP3's have been available for a while, but you had to search hard for them, going to seedy sites that were littered with porno ads and the like. Most people using Napster, however, will think, "This is so easy, it can't be criminal!"

    Amen. &nbsp And that was the gist of the "VCR" thread, ie., it being so easy and prolific, that the criminality is lost.

    Personally, I'm not an advocate of bootlegged music, but I can't help rooting for Napster. We all know that music CD's are grossly overpriced. I don't think that the RIAA would have to worry that much about the bootleg industry if they could keep their prices reasonable; but paying $18 for a CD is absurd, especially when they are cheaper to produce than vinyl LP's (which sold for under $10). CD prices continue to rise in spite of the fact that the music industry is bigger than ever. I believe that the music industry is top-heavy with overpaid execs who aspire to add another $10 mil to their compensation package.

    Amen again. &nbsp I remember buying my first consumer CD player in 1986. &nbsp At that time, there were only 4 CD manufacturers in the world (located in Japan, Germany, and a single one in the U.S.). &nbsp The store where I bought the player had a little box that had maybe 10 CD titles in it, with a bunch of duplicates. &nbsp That was it. &nbsp I reluctantly picked up a Lionel Ritchie CD for US$15 and slinked on home.

    The CD industry of 1986 then promised me this:

    • "As soon as we get more manufacturers to retool for CDs, the price will drop to the level of record albums, that is, $7.00 per CD"
    • "CDs will last forever."
    • "CDs don't skip or scratch like records"
    • "CDs won't rot or warp like records"
    • "CDs will sound better than records"
    Then there was all the hullaboo with the AAD and the ADD and DDD (analog recording/mixing/mastering vs digital recording/mixing/mastering) and what sounded better.

    It's interesting that it's the young folks today who are pushing the mp3s and the Napsters, but tell me why *I* shouldn't support mp3 when I was basically lied to and ripped off by the CD revolution??? &nbsp Within 5 years, you couldn't find a vinyl record anywhere except maybe a used record store. &nbsp So what the industry lost in record sales, they made DOUBLE in CD sales by effectively eliminating the cheaper format. &nbsp Seems that payback's a bitch... &nbsp ;-)

    Just adding more to the discussion... &nbsp ;-)

    "

  • The argument that something like Napster foments piracy is the same tired old issue that surfaced with the first reel-to-reels, then the cassette, then the VCR tape, etc. &nbsp Yes, there will always be free-loaders. &nbsp But is blaming the "engine" that was created for legitimate purposes the way to solve the piracy and copywrite issue? &nbsp This is like suing all the cassette recorder manufacturers for promoting piracy. &nbsp They tried it at one time and failed. &nbsp It'll never happen here either.

    What usually DOES happen is that the business suddenly realizes that they have a new format to sell (which they have started doing with .mp3s) and so they make even more $$$ by capturing a wider range of audiences, ie., those who purchase vinyl, cassette, CD, and now mp3.

    The bandwidth issue though, is a concern. &nbsp Despite claims to the contrary, the infrastructure out there is not what it should be to handle the increases in streaming media. &nbsp More choices of bandwidth providers would certainly bring the costs down for upgrades, but I expect that most sites, particulary at colleges, have gone with their local Bell company at quite a cost. &nbsp Perhaps the latest network providers - the fiber providers - may be the answer. &nbsp Fiber will certainly offer the bandwidth needed to do this sort of thing.

  • When VCRs were first released the movie industry's protestations were immediately shown to be baseless. Pirating (on the level of _consumers_ which was the industry fear) never materialized.

    Napster has been out for a while now and is currently used almost exclusively for piracy. Denying this fact makes it difficult to push forward for changes in the music industry and intellectual property laws. If the music industry gets this in front of congress, runs a quick search and shows that 98% of all available songs on the Napster network are copyrighted it will absolutely destroy any credibility Napster has if their (and our) defense is "ummm, no really, people don't use it for piracy ... and if they did its not our fault."

    Prior history is _not_ a valid comparison because previous devices did not turn out to be tools for piracy. Napster has - there is absolutely no denying the fact. Lets not bury our heads in the sand here people.

  • Those of you out there who use IRC clients such as mIRC, may have noticed that Napster is just an IRC client with its own servers. After all, commands such as /whois and /msg in IRC do the same thing as the commands in Napster's chat rooms, and the downloading/uploading in Napster is the same as the DCC sends and gets of Napster. The only major differences between Napster and IRC are the restriction to Mp3's and the GUI in Napster.

    Oh yes, and as a sidenote, Napster is not the only one of it's kind, a program called iMesh is another IRC client with a GUI, but iMesh has 2 major differences; support of audio, video, and still images, and it has fewer users.

  • I can't speak for everyone here, but I'm new to slashdot. So far, the wheat/chaff ratio is better than anywhere else I've seen.

    I'm all about choice and freedom. If you believe thats what we have today, I should like to get my glasses tinted the same shade of rose. Just because we begin each ball game by singing about "the land of the free and the home of the brave" doesn't make it so. The real trick has been to make the general populace believe that's what we have. Pulling that one over on us was quite a coup. Yes, we have choices, as long as they are the ones printed for us by the corporations and federally approved. Theres quite a difference between "freedom of choice" and "freedom from choice". I'm all about choice. I just don't like this mandated menu.

    And for the record, I never claimed to believe in a mom and pop utopia. Capitalism in its purest form sounds to me like it would work, much the same as many other ideologies. Unfortunately, we've got this pesky things called human nature to contend with, contaminating most well meaning social endeavors.

    As for a golden era, I don't know when America as a country was ever in one. A case could be made, I think, that the last Golden Era was the few years leading up to and including the drafting of the Declaration of Independance and the subsequent Revolutionary War. After that, the lawyers got ahold of it, and most of 'em who couldn't hack the courtroom became politicians.

    As for a Golden Era on a world wide scale, I suppose it was just before Homo Sapiens evolved. We've pretty much raped this place.

    BTW, what is a gold standard? You mean an ideal? If that's what a gold standard is, sure I long for it. Don't you?

  • Napster's 50+ servers are not linked, the bandwith is balanced by the main server which your napster client connects to. This is also the reason that it's impossible to find someone again after you get disconnected from napster... a way to get around this, is napigator at http://www.napigator.com which lets you choose your own server. It runs under Windows.
  • In the article, Shawn says "Obviously, a natural extension is to include other types of file formats, things like that. I think it's pretty obvious to most people that Napster is not media specific, but I could see a system like Napster evolving into something that allows users to locate and retrieve different types of data other than just MP3s or audio files."

    This struck an odd chord with me. While distributed storage undoubtedly makes sense, what does it do for the long-term preservation of data? As we move towards distributed storage, don't we place the content more and more under the control of trends and fads?

    The web is, in a manner, a type of distributed storage too (I think?), and can maybe serve as a weak demonstration of my concern: When I conduct a search and find a myriad of invalid links, it indicates to me that what I'm searching for is an unpopular topic, and has therefore been eliminated to make room for the newest download that, like the data it has replaced, will also be forgotten in a matter of weeks. One can't blame webmasters for this problem - it takes time and effort even to maintain an archive. If the majority doesn't want the data, why put in all that effort? This extends to commercial sites where that time and effort translate into dollars lost.

    One might argue that by bringing shared storage down from the level it is on the web to the level of the individual user in fact makes it less susceptible to these trends, as there has to be at least one other person "out there" that wants to share the data with you. But can I really count on this the next time I want to know about the mating habits of Pseudoceros Bifurcus?

    Is any work being done on this problem - if, in fact, it is a problem at all?

  • Re:Bandwidth gripes (Score:3)

    by um... Lucas ( 13147 ) on Sunday March 05, 2000 @07:27AM (#1224917) Journal
    Companies and universities don't need to up their bandwidth when it's being used for activities that aren't in line with people job or education requirements... Why should they?

    "We need to upgrade from our T-1's to T-3's because our employees insist on listening to music."

    No. They can just say "our new policy is that if you want to listen to music here, please bring your CD's... we don't have the resources to allow for people to stream audio through our network"

  • Re:GUI over FOUNDATION?? (Score:3)

    by Wah ( 30840 ) on Sunday March 05, 2000 @09:04AM (#1224918) Homepage Journal
    But is so much easier to sell a pretty product with promises and use that money to make it better than it is to create a very high quality product that makes its money through repeat buying and reputation for quality. (just to play bil^H^H^Hdevil's advocate. (-;)

    'Course this is a good reason why the OSS developement model works good. The quality is built by people who use it and really care. Because there is no money involved, nothing is rushed, cruft can be easily discarded, and programs -work-. Then later the marketers come along and get to add all the shiny happy buttons, but they are basically left to stand or fall based on their ability to appeal to the peole who need and depend on friendly goo-E's.

    --

  • USC policy on napster (Score:3)

    by flieghund ( 31725 ) on Sunday March 05, 2000 @08:34AM (#1224919) Homepage

    An unusually excellent article on the whole napster mess here at USC [usc.edu] can be found here [usc.edu].

    Basic summary: the folks at ISD (the network admins) issued a preliminary statement that they were going to ban napster due to bandwidth concerns and legal worries (even huge universities don't want to be sued). As you might expect, students expressed outrage at this proposed suppression of their so-called rights (this is a debatable issue, leave it for the next post). Then USC's legal department came back with their answer... and it was no!

    Turns out that there is probably more chance of losing future lawsuits if USC starts censoring out certain websites, than if they just let students have free access to the entire net, no questions asked. (Think of all the problems that internet filters have.)

    So, instead, ISD held a nice roundtable discussion with student groups and hammered out a compromise. The rule now stands that whatever site you want to access is open (the head of ISD was quoted as saying to the effect that he didn't really want to know where students were going!). The only limitation is on bandwidth: students who exceed 40% of their bandwidth allocation (about 500k/sec) for more than two consecutive hours will have their ethernet port shut down. It's a nice incentive, especially since they are really slow about reactivating ports. Everyone involved agreed that this was an acceptible outcome of the situation.

  • Napster sparking a revolution (Score:3)

    by artemis67 ( 93453 ) on Sunday March 05, 2000 @09:37AM (#1224920)
    There are larger issues here that no one has yet touched on. Mainly, that Napster has validated and empowered an entire community of illegal MP3's; they've brought music bootlegging into the mainsteam. MP3's have been available for a while, but you had to search hard for them, going to seedy sites that were littered with porno ads and the like. Most people using Napster, however, will think, "This is so easy, it can't be criminal!"

    Personally, I'm not an advocate of bootlegged music, but I can't help rooting for Napster. We all know that music CD's are grossly overpriced. I don't think that the RIAA would have to worry that much about the bootleg industry if they could keep their prices reasonable; but paying $18 for a CD is absurd, especially when they are cheaper to produce than vinyl LP's (which sold for under $10). CD prices continue to rise in spite of the fact that the music industry is bigger than ever. I believe that the music industry is top-heavy with overpaid execs who aspire to add another $10 mil to their compensation package.

    Is Napster going to eat into CD sales? Absolutely--and I believe that the end result is going to be a lot of pruning in the industry. Hopefully, the end result is going to be a dramatic drop in CD prices before they lose totaly control over music distribution.

  • Re:How does Napster make money? (Score:3)

    by saridder ( 103936 ) on Sunday March 05, 2000 @07:43AM (#1224921) Homepage
    My guess is when the app comes out of Beta, they will have enough proof to show advertisers that they have enough eyeballs to put banner ads into the client. Plus they will be able to prove that most of the users are 18-24 yrs. old-- a marketers dream! I'm almost positive that they will incorporate banner ads. I also think that they will offer a "premium version" of the client with added features for a price. So they'll probably have a basic free version and the upgraded version. Just look at RealPlayer. The've sold tons of the upgraded versions even though you can get the baxic for free.

  • Why no official Unix client? (Score:3)

    by Wizard of OS ( 111213 ) on Sunday March 05, 2000 @04:13AM (#1224922)
    Hmm, when I first heard of napster, I've spend hours and hours finding a linux version. That was quite some months ago and there was only one: 'nap', which was closed-source and not very usefull. Fortunately there now are a zillion napster-clients that are open source (knapster, gnapster, gnome-napster, jnapster, etc. etc. etc.).
    Knowing this, I was a little surprised when I read to following in the ZDnet article:

    Also, it was pretty difficult because I had a background in Unix development, but it was really my first Windows application. I had to actually purchase a book to learn the API and write the client. It was pretty frustrating trying to learn the API and develop a product quickly.
    Now this is weird. A true unix-developper creates a windows program (ok, that is possible :) but then he doesn't release a unix version? Why has he switched to windows-only? I mean, if you still have to learn the windows api an then write a successfull program like this, it shouldn't be too hard to make an official port to unix.

    Strange ...
    --

  • Napster Linux Downloads (Score:4)

    by EraseMe ( 7218 ) on Sunday March 05, 2000 @04:28AM (#1224923)
    Available Downloads:

    Gnapster [gotlinux.org]

    gnome-napster [sourceforge.net]

    GTK Napster [geocities.com]

    iNapster [optusnet.com.au]

    jNapster [xoom.com]

    Knapster [netpedia.net]

    Linux Napster Client [gis.net]

    Jnap [perham.net]

    OpenNap [sourceforge.net]

    Would anyone like to throw some review of the different Napster implementations available for Linux? Or should I just run Napster over VMWare? ;)

    EraseMe

  • GUI over FOUNDATION?? (Score:4)

    by Lonesmurf ( 88531 ) on Sunday March 05, 2000 @05:36AM (#1224924) Homepage
    What really tickles my toenails about this article, is how the author of napster keeps harping on 'Prettying Up' the client.. even though he knows that there are major issues with how stable/efficient the infrastructure underneath is.

    As a professional GUI designer, this type of problem runs across my desk a lot. Marketing maniacs push and push a product to market as fast as (in)humanly possible. They don't really care if the program actually functions, they just want it to look fancy and have a lot of useless features. (HOT LINKS!! WTF?!?)

    This is a common trend in the software business today.. and it REALLY has to stop.

    Less features; better programs. Everybody (well, everybody but the management) is happy.

    Don't mind me, I just had a GUI change thrust into my lap by a certain clueless manager. IT'S ART DAMN YOU!

    --

  • There are lots of interesting issues to think about when it comes to Napster. First and formost is the legality of the whole thing. This is still very much up in the air...while I personally think it should be legal, two comments were made on here I want to address.

    Someone said making napster illegal would be like making (among other things) the USENET illegal. The problem with this analogy is there isn't the same level of direct culpability with regards to the USENET as there is with Napster. The USENET is a far larger and amorphous entity than Napster is. Who would you find liable for file trading on the USENET?...The USENET isn't a product of a given company like napster is...

    Another analogy was made to VHS and cassette tapes. I would say this isn't the best analogy but instead think of "video stabalizers" or "cable decoder boxes". So called video stabalizers have long been used to try to break copy protection in copying a tape from one VCR to another. Similarly, cable decoder/descrambler boxes have long been used to circumvent the cable companies scrambling. Now, the problem here, and with napster, is that all three products have the possibility and potential to be used in a completely legal manner. If I am working on a video project on some crappy old VCR, I might use a video stabalizer to improve my image quality; if I by accident knock my cable box off my TV and break it and want a new one without wanting to pay the cable company, I may just choose to go buy one from a shop down the street. Similarly, if I am an independent music producer (some small indie band or whatnot), I may choose to try to use napster and it's chat rooms to promote my band by giving away free samples...

    Legally the question becomes then not can the product be used for legal purposes, but what is it most likely to be used for. And this is where the law gets REALLY hairy. Then, "intent" has to be proven, which is a mess in and of itself, and it gets crazy. Two perfect examples though are syringes and "burgalarious tools". If you are caught in a drug bust, or whatever, it is against the law to carry a syringe without a valid reason why (at least this is true in Massachussetts...some MIT students recently got in trouble for just this (amongst other things)). Also, if you are caught breaking into a house and you have a bag of hammers, screwdrivers, etc. (esp., lockpicks!), you can be cited for illegal possession of "burgalarious tools". In both these instances, the person is usually caught doing something else, and these are secondary charges the cops like to tack on additionally, but still, a good example of how something completely legal can be found to be illegal.

    It's scary, I know...

    Now, departing from the legal side, Napster has technical problems galore (still being so new). Here's just a couple complaints:

    • Multiple servers that don't communicate, and yet provide no notice to the user that there are in fact multiple servers nor which server they are on
    • Search queries that can't be aborted
    • Lots of firewall problems
    • Lots of connection issues
    • Lots of UI problems (like I can't look at what files someone has without explicitly adding them to my hotlist)
    But hopefully, these will all be sorted out in later versions...so I strongly hope napster is around for a while yet!

    And now on to the article...first, I was amused to see this sentence in the second paragraph:
    "At a time when the MP3 industry is under fire from multiple directions, the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) has filed a lawsuit against the small start-up company out of San Mateo, California, known as Napster [napster.com]. "
    So there's an MP3 "industry" now, is there?...heh...

    And here's a bold lie by the RIAA:
    "We love the idea of using technology to build artist communities"
    Yes, when it's a community around an artist that already is well set in the industry...new small artists not really interested in the RIAA? Uhuh. No way...The RIAA is not only not interested in them, it doesn't like them! They are potentially dangerous!

    And here's a misnomer on Shawn's part too:
    "I think it's pretty obvious to most people that Napster is not media specific".
    Well, no. Currently, it is. It doesn't have to be, is what I think he's trying to say, and eventually won't be, but currently, yes, it is.

    But in general, I don't think this article really says anything new. Big companies hate it, small individuals like it, and so it goes as per usual... Interestingly, Jon Katz was recently at MIT and stated this was an excellent example of how Geeks [amazon.com] and young smart computer kids have usurped the "Corporatism" that exists today. I wondered about one point he made: he mentioned corporatism was different than capitalism, but I just don't see how?...

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