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Music Media

Napster Reprieve 44

Posted by michael from the up-up-down-down dept.
camusflage writes: "As if to try to prove that Napster doesn't suck, the 9th Circuit Appeals Court overturned Marilyn Patel's July 11th order that Napster remain down. Now they've got the green light to turn it back on, blocking "only" 99% of copyrighted songs, instead of the full 100% Judge Patel required of them. Full details here."
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Napster Reprieve

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  • If it's privately controlled by one individual or company, it can be shut down.

    What could *any* lawyer do against ftp? http? Or warez servers WHERE THEY ARE LEGAL like in Taiwan? And *.tw accesses just easily as .com. Blockade the whole *.tw? That would cause more harm than good. Get the UN to convince Taiwan to sign the Berme/WIPO treaties? Sorry, the UN doesn't recognize Taiwan as a soverign nation so the decision is up to China (who says, no No, NO). Woo hoo! Whatcha gunna do counselor boy?

    God himself BLESS the lack of a single world government.

  • No need to post anything here... (Score:4)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 19, 2001 @03:48AM (#75044)
    I'll save everyone the trouble:

    63 "I don't need Napster, I've got WinMX/AudioGalaxy/Gnutella/etc." posts
    8 "Like it or not: what you're doing is illegal." posts
    38 "Napster was dead a long time ago." posts
    24 "I thought this was supposed to be 'Stuff That Matters'?" posts
    3 "First Posts"
    40 "I hate the recording companies!" posts
    58 "I'm sick of hearing about Napster." posts

    There. Now we can just end this topic and get on with more important things. What's that? Good software takes ten years?...

  • Re:heh (Score:1)

    by Knara ( 9377 )
    Except that some of us have better things to do when we get home at night than read slashdot at all =P... So it says something, just not what you might have thought it said.
  • this whole ordeal really makes me question Shawn Fanning's sensibilities. He's a young millioinaire, and a pioneer to boot...he could drop out of the scene now, and live on as a legend in the world of technology...

    but, instead, he dumps his money into a useless legal defense, and attempts to re-instate a totally useless service in competition with several more-than adequate replacements for the original, fully functional service. Why?

    If I remember correctly, his uncle has a fat wad of cash invested in the company, so I would guess that he's under extreme family pressure to make the business work.

  • Napster, the Motion Picture (Score:3)

    by ch-chuck ( 9622 ) on Thursday July 19, 2001 @04:08AM (#75047) Homepage
    right here [modernhumorist.com]

    work, work, work.

  • ... was on the CNN story ( http://www.cnn.com/2001/TECH/internet/07/19/napste r.offline.ap/index.html [cnn.com]):

    Napster immediately sought relief from the appeals court, which overturned Patel in a two-sentence order.

    Two sentences? This must have set a record for brevity in a court case. Now if only the DMCA could get overturned in such a concise manner:

    "We find the Digital Millenium Copyright Act to be a vile piece of underhanded manipulation designed to screw over the average consumer for the benefit of record, movie execs, and - indirectly - corrupt or incompetent congresscritters; DeCSS for all!!

    "(P.S. We'd like to see Judge Kaplan in our offices post haste for a severe beat down.)"

    Ahhhhhhhh ....

    -jdm

  • Who Cares (Score:5)

    by samael ( 12612 ) <Andrew@Ducker.org.uk> on Thursday July 19, 2001 @03:06AM (#75049) Homepage
    Really, who cares? I've got Gnutella and WinMX and I'm sticking to them.

    Napster's only chance was to get a tidal wave of defence for its actions, and it failed. In its favour, it inspired a lot of people, and its caused a lot people to rethink their beliefs on intellectual property.

    But it's dead and gone now, no point worrying about the corpse.
    _____
  • Last report I saw, traffic to Napster's web site is down 99%. They must have TONS of over-capacity to serve those pages now...

    ---
  • What could *any* lawyer do against ftp? http?

    Send the offender's ISP a letter demanding they TOS the user, or see you in court.

    Or warez servers WHERE THEY ARE LEGAL like in Taiwan?

    Tell the US backbone providers to block these IPs or see you in court.

    Simply the threat of a lengthy court battle with it's expenses is enough to get a company's cooperation. Who wants to spend tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars defending pirates? There's no profit in it.

  • They won't even allow you to connect anymore unless you have the latest version with the latest filtering shiznit.

    That's terrible! You should demand a refund!
  • Almost everybody left Napster, and with the 99% blocking, I don't think Napster will ever be a popular service anew.
    The court decision doesn't change anything. Instead of ordering Napster to close its doors, they have a green light, but they must block anything and lose all their visitors. The result is the same, only the form changes.

    -- Pure FTP server [pureftpd.org] - Upgrade your FTP server to something simple and secure.

  • heh (Score:5)

    by British ( 51765 ) <british1500@gmail.com> on Thursday July 19, 2001 @04:18AM (#75054) Homepage Journal
    This article's been here for a little over 12 hours, and it only has 18 replies.

    That speaks louder than the comments.
  • There. Now we can just end this topic and get on with more important things. What's that? Good software takes ten years?...

    So yours would be one of the 58 "I'm sick of hearing about Napster" posts?
  • ...Knowing that winning your court case dosen't change anything: Priceless.
  • The volatility would be incredible.
  • Why don't we have a /. poll to see how many people really care about all these Napster stories... and if the "I don't care"s win there won't be anymore Napster posts.

    --
  • how do people become judges? Can you take night school?

    I guess we all saw this coming. I always wonder what happens with those judges down in the court of appeals.. They were probably sitting around looking at the order... "Man, this is dumb."

    time to go back to sleep

  • That speaks louder than the comments.

    It certainly does, it says Napster is dead. However, it's rotting corpse remains as a decoy for the RIAA to stomp on while the rest of us quietly move on to other methods and programs, ie. gnutella, etc. Let RIAA tilt at the Napster windmill.

    ChodaBoy

  • Re:why? (Score:3)

    by Stephen Samuel ( 106962 ) <samuel AT bcgreen DOT com> on Thursday July 19, 2001 @07:46AM (#75061) Homepage Journal
    If you look at the larger legal battle over whether or not the DMCA is constitutional, or not, the REAL fight of that question is going to take place in the higher courts (Courts of appeal and Supreme Court). The fight in the lower courts is simply setting the baseline for the larger fight. Yes, he's likely to loose at this level, because the lower courts rarely look at the question of whether the law itself is valid. That tends to happen in the higher courts.

    You still have to fight the lower court fight like your life depends on it -- because it does. If you surrender a technicality that turns out to be pivotal issue at the higher level, you lose the greater battle. It can be hard to figure out, at this level, what the pivotal issues are going to be.

    This is one of those instances of "somebody's got to do it". Given that the fortune he made was made through the sharing of music, I can see him being willing to tithe a portion of it to the fight over the peoples' rights to share their beloved art. -- and if he wins, he may still make money out of it.

    I know that it may not make sense from a pure greed point of view -- but not everybody operates from a pure greed perspective. Some people take on battles for a larger section of society than just themselves. I think that it's something that we should honor -- even if we wouldn't do it ourselves.
    --

  • Napster has officially announced it's death with their plans to move away from mp3 to nap. Berry's overwhelming need to kiss the record companies collective asses has most definatly killed the company. It is as much his fault as the RIAA's fault. I vote for a ban on all future Napster news. Really, who gives a rats ass?
    Joe McGuire
    tinfoil.music

  • Napster would be alive and well today?

    You consider it alive? It's a vegetable on life support
    Joe McGuire
    tinfoil.music
  • ...namely the "Beowulf Cluster" and "All your base" bitches.
  • for the DMCA? Napster got fried for vicarious copyright infrigtement, which has been a full part of copyright law for long. I remeber the days, before the rulings, say last year, when we were still arguing wheter napster should be legal or not. I was very happy to hear the american law already had planned for those kind of situation.

    Vicarious infrigment is nasty. It is about turning the blind eye on murders because you can sell the meat.

    Wheter you will agree with the coparison will have more to do with your belief that copying is a crime, which, indeed, is debatable.

    -

  • ...but I've found that WinMX [winmx.com] has not been blocked at all and I can find any MP3 I want, anytime... or any movie, or image, or zip file, or... Whatever whoever on the network happens to be sharing at the time. There is a problem with queues not being open or available, but at least you can see who has queue slots open on a search... Very nice little program, if you've never used it before. Give it a whirl before the RIAA attacks it too. (And forgive me if this comment leads to its attack.)
  • From what I remember, Shawn has limited control because of his uncles larger stake in the company. So although Shawn got a nice stash from it, I don't think he's the one losing the most money (or with the most potential to make money).
  • You forget that Napster could still make him some RIAA cash. Regardless of whether it's worth a shit or not after it re-launches, it's certain that some labels are going to dump some money into Napster for an extra marketing attempt. This money will simply supply Napster, Inc. until it crashes horribly.

    So why not milk as much money as you can while people are willing to give it to you? Who gives a damn what it creates. You shouldn't.

    --Perianwyr Stormcrow

  • Sadly (Score:1)

    by 51M02 ( 165179 )
    They killed Napster... You bastard.

    Disclaimer: "These opinions are my own, though for a small fee they be yours too"
  • Berry's overwhelming need to kiss the record companies collective asses has most definatly killed the company.

    Do you honestly think that if he didn't kiss their asses, Napster would be alive and well today? The death of Napster was inevitable from the get-go, anything that he did or didn't do couldn't stop that train wreck of an idea.

  • Legal prescident is interesting that way. Even if the company will never provide a usefuk service again, the legal prescidents set by the case will stand. IF it is allowed that the service be shut down for failure to completely filter the copyrighted music it is required to filter, then a dangerous prescident has been set.

    IF instead, they made a good faith effort to comply with the court order, to the limits of modern technology, then that should be recognized by the court as a sufficient level of complience. It is a vary dangerous prescident to set that a court can order something which is not technically possible.

    --CTH

    --

  • Nobody cares about Napster! I've gone back to borrowing CDs from my friends (yes I know it's illegal lending) and going to friend's homes to listen to their CDs (yes I know it's illegal public performance) and humming tunes in the shower (yes I know it's illegal to create derivative works without permission). So can we please just not hear about Napster any more? In fact, can /. filter out articles based on words in the title? Hmm.

  • You let somebody else listen to your 1000 CDs? That's intellectual property theft! You pirate! You should go to jail for illegally distributing the music on your CDs! Remember kids, sharing is stealing! Protect those CDs better next time!

    (in case it isn't clear, that's a joke.)

  • Regardless of what they do, unless they are using some sort of weird digital signature on every single song that was part of the previous CD, or somehow filtering the song through a "copyrighted song detector" of some sort, they cannot filter them enough.

    Now maybe the .nap encoder asks the CDDB or some Napster database if the music is registered, but there are 2 ways around that, 1) unplug your puter from the net when you encode them (which could be prevented by not allowing encoding unless there is a connection to the net), 2) download a 3rd party encoder (They have probably found by now how to crack it). And then you have to get around the fact that the names themselves are filtered... ROT-13 anyone? :-P Unfortunately they probably have alot of letter-swapping filters on, so many of those wont work, but how about quoting a different lyric on the song?

    Yes, I am most likely ignorant on these matters, because I have never used Napster, but its like name filters, people just get more and more ingenious on how to bypass them.

    Congrats 99% smokescreen!...

    ... Unless they are using a digital key requirement along with a variable size requirement, both built into the Nap databases (128bit encoding of X song is from 3.2MB to 3.4MB, and is named Y)and forcing the .nap to have to follow that. In which case its like trying to choke Jello. You get more problems in the first place.

  • Re:Who Cares (Score:5)

    by wackysootroom ( 243310 ) on Thursday July 19, 2001 @03:21AM (#75075) Homepage
    Just because it is dead and gone does not lessen its importance in the legal arena one bit. The napster case was basically the turning point and testing ground for the DMCA. The recording industry has too much power, and napster proved it.

  • This story has less than 70 comments, and it's at the bottom of the Slashdot front page. Yep, people have already forgotten about Napster and moved on to something better.

  • Sticking to your guns (Score:3)

    by codingOgre ( 259310 ) on Thursday July 19, 2001 @03:24AM (#75077)
    Napster has proven the old addage, "Give someone an inch and they will take a mile". Napster should have *never* given an inch to the RIAA. Once they did the RIAA just kept asking for more & more until Napster was effectively useless. Court orders be damned, let the US Supreme Court decide on the matter and burn up all the VC money and go out like a rock star not a punk :^)
  • While I think Napster will never return to its "glory days," I am happy that the absolutely ridiculous decision by judge Marilyn Patel was overturned; if it hadn't been it would have set a horrible legal precedent which could be used to block out sites all over the internet.

    "We've found that 7 years ago someone traded an illegal file via your site. We're going to have to shut you down because you didn't filter out 100% of copyrighted material."
  • Actually if you go to http://audiogalaxy.com/ I found more stuff on it then even Napster at it's prime and much better then most of the alternatives out there right now. Nykon
  • It will never be the same. Specialy when they start charging for the service.
  • It was a joke guys, come on, no need for name calling.
    ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
  • Okay, here's something to think about: Last year, my book of about 1,000 CDs got stolen along with my car, stereo, and other misc items. After this happened, I replaced most of the collection with MP3s off the internet (because I doubt that the insurance company or the RIAA was going to replace my collection w/o recipts). Now my new car only has a tape player, so I actually buy tapes instead of CDs. Now according to the recent court decision, you're paying for "intellectual property", not the actual CD itself. So when I buy a tape, am I entitled to an MP3 backup? Also, since my CDs were stolen, and I paid for this "intellectual property", shouldn't I be entitled to a way to restore this "intellectual property" which was taken from me?
  • From the article

    The Recording Industry Association of America (news - web sites) noted that the court only temporarily lifted Patel's order and will hear arguments on the case later this year. At that time, the industry said it expects to prevail.

    It's more like a stay of execution rather than an overturning.
  • this whole ordeal really makes me question Shawn Fanning's sensibilities. He's a young millioinaire, and a pioneer to boot...he could drop out of the scene now, and live on as a legend in the world of technology...

    but, instead, he dumps his money into a useless legal defense, and attempts to re-instate a totally useless service in competition with several more-than adequate replacements for the original, fully functional service. Why? I'd really like to know what's going through his head right now...what's his motivation at this point? To say "fuck the RIAA" in as many languages as possible? I just don't get it.

  • That's just the judge's way of taking the piss out off it :) Ohhh, guess we can still exchange other files in there... ohhh, looks like we could transfer other stuff than mp3s hahahahahaha ! We can use it for warez :) Wants some games/movies for free :))) Anyways, Napster was doomed from the start. If only those idiots had managed to keep it away from the eye of the music industry. As soon as it started to try and make money and become like a company it signed its death warrant. That's the lesson, if you're into warez keep it free and hidden :) And remember,You gotta rip them before they rip you... -Link http://www.75megs.com/sepultufart -Link http://www.geocities.com/faecalorgy
  • "To say "fuck the RIAA" in as many languages as possible? I just don't get it." I guess it could be. That's probably the kind of attitude that brought them in this mess. If only they kept a little quiet. Like a Warez site (it's quite tricky to find them) But then at the time 1999, it was the net boom and all evryone though they could suck some money in. "Hey I'm selling drugs through the net, I wanna be sponsored..." You can fool someone a 1000 times, you can fool a 1000 people once but you can't fool a 1000 people a 1000 times :) link: http://www.75megs.com/sepultufart link: http://www.geocities.com/faecalorgy

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