okay. i need to hear from the computer literate public. i get lots of music i just can’t find in the stores through napster. for those of you who don’t know, napster is an application that lets you download/upload, basicaly share, music over the net. for free. its an issue lately, been in the papers and on the news. whats your angle on all this?
Simple answer - it’s stealing.
In both the moral and legal sense.
I am not going to lecture anyone on morality, but, except for the small minority of MP3 music you can get with Napster that it intended to be downloaded for free, the rest of it is commercially available - to get it for free is theft.
Then only reason it’s still available is because the record companies haven’t pushed hard enough in court yet.
It’s like copying tapes and CD’s you get from the library.
Shame shame.
BTW, I use Napster myself… 
my view about this topic - move to MPSIMS…
Seriously though, Napster will lose the lawsuit. No doubt it. Pity.
you know what? Napster is pretty much the wave of the future. I’m on the side of Limp Bizkit and Fred Durst. I think that loser bands like Metallica and <GigglE>The Goo goo dolls, need to stop whinin about their royalties.
Conversely, they really should use the publicity in a positive way, just like Limp did.
Oh, and let’s stay away from the “moral and legal sense” crap. You can’t stop this, the MPAA can’t stop DVD ripping, the bands can’t and won’t win this legal battle against Napster the same way they lost the battle aganst the Diamond Rio MP3 player, and Sony won the battle against their MiniDisk format, and audio tape before that…
This “Immoral and Illegal” practice of making copies has been going on forever, and in the future it will become easier and cheaper for us(the teeming millions), to do it.
Napster is just a browser - therefore, it can’t be at fault. That would be like blaming Netscape for kiddie porn. A few facts:
- Napster browses for MP3’s;
- MP3’s can either be legal or illegal;
- Turning an audio file (regular CD) into an MP3 for your own use is perfectly fine, just like taping a CD is;
- Exchanging self-made MP3’s (i.e. from regular CD’s, not freely distributed) for non-profit purposes (read: Napster) might be considered a violation of copyrights, but to arrive at a legal conviction, the transfer must be witnessed redhandedly;
- Thus, when I use Napster, I’m not doing anything wrong untill I make a transfer to my computer or a transfer is being made by someone else.
Seriously: the only static evidence on my computer is 1.5 GB’s of MP3’s for private use and a browsing program for MP3’s. How the HELL can that be wrong?
Napster will win any lawsuit that crosses its path. Either that, or Netscape and IE will get their asses burned as well. Ever heard of FTP?
all good points. i’m at ease now. got 7g (and growing) worth of music on one drive, its too tasty to let go now.
I feel it is a form of stealing, but I still use Napster.
I consider a very, very, minor “badness”. Here’s why.
I start thinking of the old Helen Reddy song, “Delta Dawn”. I decide to give it a listen, so I find it with Napster and dload it.
Did I commit theft? Technically, I think I did. Neither Helen Reddy nor anybody else who worked to produce the song got a dime from me.
But guess what? I NEVER would have spent a dime to listen to it. The assets of Helen Reddy have been denied ZERO revenue.
napster is not going away. coldfire brings up a good point – it’s just a browser.
just like people use netscape and ie to browse through warez and porn sites, napster’s function is for mp3s (though netscape and ie can do the same, it’s just that napster does it better).
if it turns out that napster is ordered to cease and desist, some other company will emerge and take napster’s place. or maybe napster will just pop up under a different name.
listening to the radio, we hear music for free…
so whats the difference whether we copy it off a radio station playing the song then?
…for those who think it’s still some sort of badness.
You are aware that radio stations have to pay fees to the various performing rights organizations like ASCAP, BMI and SESAC, right? And that those organizations in turn distribute the money to the writers and publishers of those works, right? The fact that X number of people may listen to it, and Y% of X may tape it, is factored into the fee structure.
Yes, it’s perfectly OK to use someone’s copyrighted material without paying for it. All books, music and movies just exist out there for the taking. :rolleyes:
it has been paid for, like you said.
just not by me… 
Exactly. And when you use something that someone else has paid for, you’re stealing. :rolleyes:
So listening to the radio is stealing?
Although, I will admit, it looks like the Napster people designed the system with “maximum deniability” in mind…
The things I download from users on Napster are almost exclusively sound files derived from foreign CDs. With maybe one or two exceptions, if that, none of these CDs were ever released stateside. They are out of print and I am unable to obtain them through import services. I probably wouldn’t be able to find them even if I went to their country of origin. I would pay if I could, but it simply isn’t possible. Thanks to Napster, I am able to listen to songs that I had lost all hope of ever finding.
I love Napster, use it every night.
I just wish there were more items at a lower sampling rate. A lot of songs take an hour to download.
I would settle for radio quality instead of CD quality, since I just want to play stuff when I’m stuck in traffic.
They need a filter to send things at a lower sampling rate on request.
No - of course not. As soon as I hit the Post Button I realized that some idiot would try to twist my words that way.
RTFT! :rolleyes:
Earlier in the thread, you’ll see:
Soulsling said
Then pldennison replied that radio stations have to pay for the music they broadcast (to ASCAP, BMI and SESAC).
Soulsling gleefully quipped:
And I said what I said. IMHO, soulsling purposely misinterpreted pldennison’s remarks to apply to pirated MP3’s - an immature approach. So I replied as I did.
I think it would be interesting to compare tekkies opinions on the use of pirated software with their views on Napster. There seems to be a big public awareness push on by the software people to promote the fact that use of borrowed software is stealing. However, I wonder how many of those same software engineers listen music files from Napster?
Philosophical question – Why should everyone who uses software pay for it? How does a computer program differ from a book or a record album? If I buy a book, I’m free to sell it to someone else (or let them read it for free). The author or publisher doesn’t get a cut. What makes computer software different from more traditional software?
Frankd…
I work for a leading Internet software provider. We are VERY against the theft of our 15 thousand dollar software, however(and I think this distinction will be made later), and music that has been purchased by the end-user, and ripped into an MP3 format is completely different from the intellectual property of a software company.
Also, the distinction between a $15 Cd, or a 3 dollar downloaded MP3 from CDnow.com, and a full-service, full-featured not for redistribution copy of a fifteen thousand dollar program are completely different.
What are the royalties on an MP3 that CDnow sells? 2 cents?(if that…it’s probably closer to a fraction of a cent).
So, like I said, it all comes down to the age-old fight against recordable medias…taken to a new level, but the manufacturers and distributors will no doubt triumph over yet another frivolous bullshit lawsuit.
P.S.-- All techies and engineers at my company use Ye Olde Napster.
Apparently Napster lost their lawsuit.
So says my dad, anyhow.
Music sales went up last year. A lot of people use Napster as kind of a preview, to see if they want to buy the album or not. Or they use it for one or two songs from each artist whose album they would otherwise never buy, anyway. Granted, some people d/l entire CDs and never go and buy them, but that’s usually because they can’t afford the CD, anyway. So again, the artist isn’t really losing money. That said, I understand where they’re coming from. Unfortunately, they can’t stop it. As someone else said, you can’t sue the browser for what the users are doing. You can’t sue the school because some of its users are using the browser. This last is a particularly touchy subject for me, because I attend Indiana University, one of the schools sued by Metallica over this issue, and not only that, but IU banned Napster’s servers because it was trying to avoid the continuation of the suit. So I can’t use Napster anymore. No biggie, though, really, 'cause I just picked up a nice copy of Gnutella and continued to get anything I wanted. An added feature of Gnutella is that it’s practicaly impossible to ban, which I’m sure will piss off Metallica and IU. But fuck 'em.