I just wonder with latest actions taken against the mp3 swappers, if there are
people among you starting to think that mp3 file sharing on the net is coming
to an end.

If you look back, there was Napster, and AudioGalaxy. The first blow was the
shutdown of the Napster servers. Then it was AudioGalaxy. Now, individuals are
getting sued. I personally can't help, but unfortunately start thinking that
slowly but surely mp3 file sharing is coming to an end.

I like to hear what the rest of you guys think about this.

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On 19 Sep 2003 23:17:59 GMT, pccomputerdr@aol.com (Pccomputerdr)
wrote:

I believe as long as some people are engaged in rampant violation of
copyright ownership (sharers), and others are engaged in "making it
easier" for the first group, there will be a continuing cycle of
service start-ups/shut-downs. The technology itself isn't inherently
illegal, but the actions of some of it's users is blatantly illegal.
It's those users who are painting huge "bull's eyes" for the RIAA to
track down.

And truth be known, it still amazes me that all of this is an issue.
P2P is a very OS specific technology, from what I can see. There are
a lot of reasons for not using P2P; unwanted attention from the RIAA
is just one of those reasons.

However, to date, one method of "free RIAA copyrighted content" seems
to remain unscathed, and I am amazed that (a) the RIAA hasn't turned
it's attention in this direction, and (b) users are even concerned
with P2P as this method has been around longer than Napster.

Consider NNTP. This protocol is immune to issues related to the
user's operating system, as surely news readers exist on every
platform. And to the best of my knowledge, the RIAA hasn't even
approached this method of content delivery yet, even though it's
longevity is well established. If I were interested in obtaining
MP3's, the alt.binaries.sounds.* and alt.binaries.mp3.* hierarchies
would be where I would be pulling from.

The upside and downside, depending on your point of view, is that
NNTP is not as "easy" as P2P, which may explain why it hasn't been in
the RIAA's cross hairs yet.

And there is still FTP and IRC. They are still semi-platform neutral.

My primary use of MP3 technology is place on my computer more
convenient representations of the audio content for which I've
purchased a license to use (ie, bought a CD from the store). I like
the ability to dynamically create a play list that has a group of
artist, albums, and/or songs and play them back in an order that I
arrange, without having to dig through the CD pile that sits beside
my desk.

If I were interesting in using MP3 technology to obtain titles for
which I did not have the legal right to listen too, I would pursue
NNTP, FTP, and/or IRC.

P2P? Who needs it? If it were to go away tomorrow it would be no big
loss. The internet existed before P2P, and is quite capable of
existing without it. Those who truly want to post and/or pull
material that is in violation of copyright ownership do so rampantly
without P2P technology. Sadly enough, for the most part, I think they
pretty much laugh at the P2Per's and the battles they are enduring.

When people wake up and stop painting bull's eyes on themselves for
the RIAA, SPA, and/or MPAA through P2P, all of this will disappear.
Until then, the safest bet is to avoid the issue altogether, and if
you can't fight that temptation, consider NNTP, FTP, and/or IRC.


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---

The last song I started on my PC was: Consider This-Filter-Short Bus
This is track 2 of 95 in the current playlist.

"David W. Poole, Jr." <spammersshouldbekilled.50.dwpj65@spamgourmet.com>
wrote in message news:h5dnmv0llh0m0gj3bbbqjt90lujgb8s6n6@4ax.com...
True enough. First there was Napster, with its centralized servers, which
got shut down for facilitating copyright infringement. So then came Kazaa,
with decentralized servers, and it'll die because it's not truly anonymous.
Next will come truly anonymous P2P networks. It's conceivable the RIAA (if
it's not bankrupt by then) will find some way to fight that, and the next
thing will come.

How is it OS Specific? Kazaa, or some version thereof (or some client
connecting to the Fastrack network), will run on any OS, whether it be
Windows, Linux, or Mac.

The popular theory is that the RIAA hasn't targeted usenet because it's
relatively low traffic and they don't want to call attention to it.

The good old fallbacks, tools of pirates since the birth of the internet.

Obviously, you don't like P2P. Fair enough, I'm not a fan of it either (for
getting music or movie files, anyway). But the technology is important for
other reasons, and I wouldn't dismiss it so easily.

--
"I remember another gentle visitor from the heavens, he came in peace and
then died, only to come back to life, and his name was E.T., the extra teres
trial. I loved that little guy."
- Reverend Lovejoy, The Simpsons

"David W. Poole, Jr." <spammersshouldbekilled.50.dwpj65@spamgourmet.com>
wrote in news:h5dnmv0llh0m0gj3bbbqjt90lujgb8s6n6@4ax.com:

Most P2P platforms are written for Windows, but I've read plenty of
accounts of people sucessfully running them under Linux. And there are
several clients written to work on Macs. For now, though, since most
people use Windows, the OS-specificity isn't much of an issue.

Indeed, USENET is such a treasure trove of free music I'm amazed more
people don't access it. But they don't, and that's why RIAA isn't
terribly concerned about it

Where do you shop that you "purchase a license" to use an audio CD? I've
never seen such licenses anywhere.

--
Michael M.
New York, NY USA
-email addy is valid-

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On Sat, 20 Sep 2003 04:41:23 GMT, "Reverend Lovejoy"
<papare@remove-these-words.rpi.edu> wrote:

It should be an interesting battle to watch. I bet it will go much
the same way that battle between the satellite TV providers and the
hackers do, although in a different arena. By that, I mean that one
camp will make inroads into the other, and vice-versa.

I don't follow P2P enough to know that much about it, so I don't know
if Kazaa (or any of it's brethren) is open source or not. In spite of
the fact that I use a Microsoft "Operating System", I am an
open-standards kind of guy. I am also a programmer, so I'd like to be
able to find documentation on said standards in the event I want to
roll my own application for any particular client or service.

P2P has obviously changed since I last looked at it. I can't find the
Napster program in my archives, so I can't tell the date, but I
remember that I was one of the first to download and install it,
purely as an experimental exercise. At the time I lived off of the
MP3 news groups, and when I shared up my collection, mine was the
third largest. My upload connections were filled immediately. I did a
few cursory searches for some tunes, again experimenting, and when
the results were fruitless, I shut down Napster and removed it from
my system; the MP3s followed suit a short time thereafter. I messed
with Napster maybe 15 minutes, if that long. The content that was
available (at the time) via NNTP, in my opinion, was greater than
what was available through Napster. I posted elsewhere in this group
recently my disgust with Lars Ulrich, Metallica, and MP3s, which
occurred within a week of the Napster experiment. Given at the time
my realization of the crap that would be forthcoming (and is now
apparently here), I decided to use MP3 technology to only make copies
of audio tracks for which I have the CDs for, or to utilize it to
listen to artists who willingly distribute their music in that
format.

Agreed. Like file sharing, it's not the tool that's illegal, but the
use it's put to. The internet is just like paper; it can be used to
transmit porn or Bibles.

I don't like P2P in it's current incarnation any more than I like the
RIAA in it's current incarnation. And P2P in and of itself is not
evil; it's just that the flagrant uses of some spoil it for all. And
until a P2P standard is ratified by the IETF I have little interest
in it.

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On 20 Sep 2003 05:11:00 GMT, Mcubed <myspamhere@mindspring.com> wrote:

In another post in this thread I address this issue. Basically the P2P
movement hasn't "moved" me enough to look into it further, but I'm
relatively uninterested in any form of "closed" technology. For the
time being I choose to use a Microsoft "OS", but I want to know that
if I decide to "jump ship" I don't have much to worry about. And as a
developer, should I decide to write my own client, portability is an
issue.

I don't believe that to be the only reason that the RIAA hasn't
targeted it, but I believe it to be a valid one.

Wal-Mart, Best Buy, Circuit City, Sam Goody's, etc. :-)

Software and music share the distinction of being intellectual
property, not tangible goods. When you purchase a CD of either
software or music, you are not paying for the medium it's distributed
on (well, not entirely, anyway), but you're paying for the right to
utilize the medium's content as long as it's not a violation of the
copyright owner's wishes. Even though I've purchased software and
music on the same medium types over the years (audio cassettes for old
Trash-80 computers and CDs for PCs), I never considered software and
audio content to be equivalent.

However, within the last five years or so, I purchased an audio CD
that had a very interesting notice in the liner notes somewhere. I
forget the exact wording, and unfortunately I've forgotten which disc
it is that contains the notice, so I can't access it at present.
However, loosely paraphrased, the message on the audio CD (which was
not a mixed mode CD) explicitly used the term "software" in reference
to the disc's audio content. At that point in time I realized that
both audio content and software content, though they represent
different end products, are both intellectual property, and are
similar in that regard as well as the medium they are distributed on.
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Given that realization, and having read enough shrink-wrap licenses
for software over the years, I can only conclude (and I know the
danger of assumptions) that the purchase of a CD is paying for the
right to play the content back as I see fit, as long as I don't
infringe on the copyright holder's desires.


---

The last song I started on my PC was: Lounge Fly-Stone Temple Pilots-Purple
This is track 3 of 94 in the current playlist.

"David W. Poole, Jr." <spammersshouldbekilled.50.dwpj65@spamgourmet.com>
wrote in news:h5dnmv0llh0m0gj3bbbqjt90lujgb8s6n6@4ax.com:

1. You need to find what you're looking for posted somewhere.

2. If you can't, you need to post a request and hope that somebody sees it
and posts what you want.

In my experience, by and large the binaries are a hit and miss proposition.
There is too much wholesale dumping of extremely common stuff that nobody
requested, far too many reposts of an entire album because somebody yelled
that they didn't get one song, and far too little attention paid to posted
requests unless somebody knows you. Requests from unknowns or newbies tend
to go completely ignored.

Forget the request groups - I have seen very few of the hundreds of posted
requests answered.

It's quite an imperfect system, and you are not very likely to find what
you are looking for there.

On 20 Sep 2003 06:52:36 GMT, donut <none@none.com> wrote:

Yup. Usually did. And then some.

Never had to post a request; patience was a virtue. Only one song I
can think of that I wanted was never posted, and it wasn't available
on Napster either.

Things must have changed a great deal since the last time I visited
them (it's been almost four years). Most of the requests I noted were
fulfilled unless the song had just been posted; the groups I
frequented had respectable reposting guidelines to reduce redundancy.

Correct; it is an imperfect system.

But I found far more than I was looking for, and I didn't have to
concern myself too much with the RIAA.

Plus it was a wonderful place for finding FTP servers.

Yes it is - soon people will be sharing OGGs and other more technically
advanced formats to MP3

"Pccomputerdr" <pccomputerdr@aol.com> wrote in message
news:20030919191759.08239.00001531@mb-m14.aol.com...

"David W. Poole, Jr." <spammersshouldbekilled.50.dwpj65@spamgourmet.com>
wrote in news:lk9omv4ibqtgv9n3sm48ngq632d82qo8kf@4ax.com:

Take a look at how Usenet itself has changed over those 4 years, and you'll
get an idea.

On 20 Sep 2003 15:59:28 GMT, donut <none@none.com> wrote:

I spent *way* too much time pulling from the alt.binaries hierarchy in
my past; I prefer to keep my subscriptions to the non-alt.binaries
tree these days. Temptation can be a bitch. :-)

How has it changed in the last four years? Other than noticing a
decline in AOL posters, and an increase in top-posters as well as
Outlooker's, it seems to be about the same.

Has the alt.binaries.* tree gone to hell?

"David W. Poole, Jr." <spammersshouldbekilled.50.dwpj65@spamgourmet.com>
wrote in news:4crnmvog453d29l3b85ie5dr7gnavcv3on@4ax.com:

What do you think the other reasons are? The only one I can think of is
that there isn't a very practical way to do it -- not that I think the
RIAA's plan of attack on P2P is terribly practical either, but one can at
least see the logic, however flawed, behind its strategy.

A music CD and a piece of software are tangible goods that (often)
contain copyrighted material. So is a book. The fact that they contain
copyrighted material doesn't make the purchase of those goods a
"license." In the case of software, there is often a license you must
agree to in order to use the product as it is intended; however, at least
some of the terms set by some licenses (so-called "shrink-wrap" or
"click-wrap" licenses) have already been thrown out by courts.

But your basic premise is incorrect -- when you buy a CD, you are
purchasing a product. That entitles you to certain rights, such as the
right to resell the product if you wish.

That's a shame, I'd love to know what it said. Regardless, the fact that
they both contain copyrighted content doesn't change their status as
consumer goods. A product can contain any language the manufacturer
wants to include, like "Purchasers of this CD hereby agree to enroll
their children under 12 in RIAA Indoctrination Camps," but the purchase
doesn't make the language legally binding on the purchaser.

--
Michael M.
New York, NY USA
-email addy is valid-

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On 20 Sep 2003 22:17:20 GMT, Mcubed <myspamhere@mindspring.com>
wrote:

I think P2P is much easier to deal with than usenet, and as such,
will have a much larger group participation in the transmission of
copyrighted materials. The news groups require more skill and
patience to deal with than P2P, and as such, the majority are more
likely to favor P2P over NNTP. The RIAA wants to send it's message to
the largest percentage of it's violators.

What has been the nature of the court cases by which the shrink-wrap
licenses have been thrown out? Have these been related to duplication
and/or distribution of content, or for other reasons?

Please explain, then, how someone who does not hold the copyright to
a particular work, has the right to sell something not authorized by
the copyright holder? As I read it, the copyright holder has
exclusive rights to these activities, and subsection 3 below applies
to the subject at hand.

106 Exclusive rights in copyrighted works.

Subject to sections 107 through 122, the owner of copyright under
this title has the exclusive rights to do and to authorize any of the
following:

(1) to reproduce the copyrighted work in copies or phonorecords;

(2) to prepare derivative works based upon the copyrighted work;

(3) to distribute copies or phonorecords of the copyrighted work to
the public by sale or other transfer of ownership, or by rental,
lease, or lending;

(4) in the case of literary, musical, dramatic, and choreographic
works, pantomimes, and motion pictures and other audiovisual works,
to perform the copyrighted work publicly;

(5) in the case of literary, musical, dramatic, and choreographic
works, pantomimes, and pictorial, graphic, or sculptural works,
including the individual images of a motion picture or other
audiovisual work, to display the copyrighted work publicly; and

(6) in the case of sound recordings, to perform the copyrighted work
publicly by means of a digital audio transmission.

I would like to find it, too. I've spent a minor amount of time
looking through a rather sizable pile of CD jewel cases, but
unfortunately a percentage of the liner notes are stored at another
location at present.

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"David W. Poole, Jr." <spammersshouldbekilled.50.dwpj65@spamgourmet.com>
wrote in news:084pmv48r46q2rnmhvlql4tith78p8eekm@4ax.com:

That would be a large part of it. Now take into account the general
computer savvyness of the Outlookers, and see how that would translate to
forums like the binaries. Little regard for group etiquette, etc. A good
parallel is to compare CBers to hams.


I wouldn't say it's gone to hell. There isn't very much rare posted these
days, requests seem largely ignored, and the same people flood the same
groups day after day with the same stuff over and over again.

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On 21 Sep 2003 06:45:54 GMT, donut <none@none.com> wrote:

Interesting observation/comparison.

Sad. When I cruised last I was rather impressed with the diversity of
the posts in the groups I followed. Not necessarily the diversity of
genres being covered, but in the individual titles themselves. The
best FTP server I've encountered I found in there.

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There's several clients that access the same network (Fasttrack) including
Kazaa, Morpheus, and Grokster. I'll admit I don't know the relationship
between them or if that means its open source or not, but it is an open,
public network.

Napster, in its earliest iterations, was bug ridden and plagued with other
problems. Eventually they fixed most of them and it was scaled to a huge
network (for the time), fairly stable and reliable, until the RIAA shut it
down anyway.

Kazaa (Fastrack) in spite of the RIAA's efforts, remains an awesome sized
network with just about anything imaginable available. It has it's own set
of quirks and problems, but I think it is a step above what Napster was, and
I do believe that successive generations of P2P networks will make it as
ubiquitous as the WWW for getting information from the internet.

As I said, P2P is still very much a developing technology, but there's a lot
of potential there. I do believe some legislation does have to come down to
allow it to fully mature, particularly with regards to copyright law and
internet privacy

--
"I remember another gentle visitor from the heavens, he came in peace and
then died, only to come back to life, and his name was E.T., the extra teres
trial. I loved that little guy."
- Reverend Lovejoy, The Simpsons

"David W. Poole, Jr." <spammersshouldbekilled.50.dwpj65@spamgourmet.com>
wrote in news:sukqmv81o523nkof6agcsh2agbfica4oco@4ax.com:


Well, I don't mean to paint a picture of complete doom and gloom. There is
still good stuff there - you just have to wait.

Haven't seen anything about FTP servers in a long time. You'd probably be
more likely to find that kind of thing in the IRC chat channels, which I do
not use at all.

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On 21 Sep 2003 19:29:00 GMT, donut <none@none.com> wrote:

Well, waiting was a requirement when I used it, too. But it was worth
it. Plus, I sampled so much that I would have normally not heard
otherwise that it made the effort worth while.

I didn't do IRC much, either, but I knew of some folks that lived
there.

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noname nonnom <place@mestechkon.net> wrote in
news:Xns93FDBF3566C1k3jdkvs11@207.217.77.201:

No, it wouldn't be -- no court would rule in RIAA's favor if it sued to
force an NSP or an ISP to drop an MP3 group. MP3s are not illegal, nor
are they by definition infringing. A newsgroup that exists for the
purpose of distributing MP3s is not, therefore, illegal nor by definition
infringing. That doesn't mean you can't use them to infringe copyrights,
but the same can be said for photocopy machines, computers, email, VCRs,
tape decks, the Internet, etc. -- all of which, of course, are perfectly
legal.

Heh -- as if the RIAA could embarrass itself more than it already has.
:-)

--
Michael M.
New York, NY USA
-email addy is valid-

"David W. Poole, Jr." <spammersshouldbekilled.50.dwpj65@spamgourmet.com>
wrote in news:i19qmvkoddhgnv8cqq8spf3vk74fdptjah@4ax.com:

The ones I've read about involve reselling (distribution) of content.
I'm not aware of any regarding unauthorized duplication. The highest-
profile one, probably, was a lawsuit Adobe brought against a company that
was purchasing Adobe suites, breaking the suites into components, and
reselling at least one of the components. Adobe alleged that this was a
violation of its license. The judge said license-schmicense (not his
words!), you can't force someone to "agree" to something that interferes
with his rights under the law. Adobe argued, as you had said, that the
company was not "purchasing" the software, but licensing it. The judge
said a purchase is a purchase.

It's called the "first-sale doctrine." It is a long-held doctrine in
copyright law, going back I believe to legal decisions made in the early
19th Century. Do a search on Google.

See the above where it says "subject to sections 107 through 122"? That
means that the exclusive rights you quoted from Sec. 106 are *limited* by
sections 107-122 of Title 17. The first-sale doctrine is dealt with in
section 109:

"Sec. 109. - Limitations on exclusive rights: Effect of transfer of
particular copy or phonorecord

"(a) Notwithstanding the provisions of section 106(3), the owner of a
particular copy or phonorecord lawfully made under this title, or any
person authorized by such owner, is entitled, without the authority of
the copyright owner, to sell or otherwise dispose of the possession of
that copy or phonorecord."
http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/109.html

There are further refinements on what "otherwise dispose of" can include
(for example, you can't rent your CDs for "direct or indirect commercial
advantage" without permission of the copyright holder), but no
limitations on the rights of the owner of a legally acquired CD to resell
it.

Oh well, if you ever do, please let me know.

--
Michael M.
New York, NY USA
-email addy is valid-