May 10, 2001

11:01 AM

Songbird is billed as a Napster anti-piracy tool. It's job is supposedly for an artist to see the many title variations of their material as documentation for copyright violations. I don't know if this is truly a thinly-veiled claim of legitimacy or whether the author is just being earnest - but because it shows what users have what variations, I'm finding it a great tool to track down songs that I couldn't find before because of Napster's filtering and not necessarily being able to think of every possible variation...Neato.
posted by DiplomaticImmunity (7 comments total)

As long as a technology has a "significant non-infringing use," the courts have ruled that it is legal. This goes back to the Betamax decision, in fact. Artists or record companies might in fact want to use this service for exactly the reasons stated -- in fact, one can easily imagine them being eager to do so -- so I think their ass is well-covered.

In the same vein, Napster would have had a far better chance at survival if they'd let you share other kinds of files besides music. A peer-to-peer network for distributing shareware would be extremely useful -- and it would be a significant non-infringing use for the technology, which could have bolstered Napster's legal position substantially.
posted by kindall at 11:09 AM on May 10, 2001

Yup I agree with you Kindall, that was (is, I suppose) really their fatal flaw IMHO as well.
posted by DiplomaticImmunity at 11:19 AM on May 10, 2001

Napster would have had a far better chance at survival if they'd let you share other kinds of files besides music.

Would it? Or would it have brought down the wrath of Hollywood and Silicon Valley, as well as that of the RIAA? And if that would have helped, why hasn't Napster allowed such sharing in the aftermath of the court ruling? It would seem to be a very simple change in the code.

There's no implication behind these questions, and I don't necessarily disagree with you, kindall. I'm genuinely asking.
posted by jpoulos at 11:29 AM on May 10, 2001

If Napster had been set up from Day One as a peer-to-peer file transfer service that did not encourage or discourage sharing particular kinds of files, I think the courts might have found that it had substantial non-infringing uses.

Napster's biggest problem in court was all of the "stick it to the recording industry" e-mail the founders sent to each other when the service was being created.
posted by rcade at 11:38 AM on May 10, 2001

Actually, there is a network that is just like Napster except any kind of file ... and it's been around a lot longer than Napster. It's also the major source of click-fraud in affiliate programs and a bunch of other sweet stuff ... I can remember the guys from Haxan Films finding The Blair Witch Project downloadable 6 months before the film was released. Leave it Canadians, eh?

Why hasn't it been destroyed yet? Because it has developed a speakeasy culture ... to download from a machine, to have to contribute to it first (or whatever metaphor that particular HotLiner decides on ... go click this banner and make money and you get this level of access, but you can only download this much, etc.) That very speakeasy culture takes time (and effort) to penetrate -- more time than most lazy consumers want to spend (who just want it free with no hassle now.) It's based on the idea that you have to already have something a pirate wants before she'll give you what she's got.

That was Napster's real problem -- it made wholesale piracy so easy that it became an easy target. The speakeasy culture of pirating has never gone away.
posted by bclark at 12:01 PM on May 10, 2001

kindall: A peer-to-peer network for distributing shareware would be extremely useful -- and it would be a significant non-infringing use for the technology, which could have bolstered Napster's legal position substantially.

How would P2P shareware distribution improve on the current model? Admittedly, sometimes when new sw comes out, the publisher gets heavily loaded, but the current model is that they get mirrored, and load typically subsides within 24 hrs. Publishing ala Napster would only serve automating that mirror process.

OTOH, rereading your post, did you mean that this would actually be useful for people who use the service, or did you mean that it provides a more viable defense for lawyers?
posted by swell at 12:10 PM on May 10, 2001

Hotline is not just like Napster except for any type of file. First, everyone who's running a client is not also automatically a server. (This is not strictly the case on Napster either, with third-party clients, but it's part of the service's design.) Second, there's no really useful way to search all Hotline servers and then transparently connect to that server and grab just one file. Instead, even once you find the file, you have to deal with whatever is involved in getting access to that particular server.

As for the "usefulness" of a distributed shareware archive, I'm thinking specifically of what happened to Info-Mac a couple years ago when they purged all the older software from their archives. Some of that stuff can still be useful even on newer machines and it's a shame it's basically gone forever. There were also a lot of obscure little goodies in AOL's Mac Utilities area that are, from what I can tell, gone now. Whereas on a P-to-P network, as long as even one person is interested enough in a program to keep it around, it is available to everyone. A lot of people would willingly leave their machine up all the time to provide older software. My machine and "always on" Internet connection aren't doing anything 16+ hours out of the day right now anyway...

What I was really going for was a legitimate application for the search-and-download technology of Napster, and shareware was the first thing to spring to mind. It doesn't have to be vastly superior to existing methods of distribution, it merely has to be a substantial non-infringing use. Had Napster been interested in actually surviving, they would have taken this kind of approach.
posted by kindall at 12:34 PM on May 10, 2001