Michael Polák ( )
Přečteno 174147x, 26 komentářů, rubrika: (en) Archive

It sounds too good to be true, but it seems, that there is some anti-trust law valid in USA, which prevents enforcing of copyright law in certain situations, like anti-competitive behaviour of copyright holder. And Napster's lawyer plans to use this law to defend Napster at court!

Check this News.com article: It seems that if RIAA cartel uses enforcement of a copyright law in anti-competitive fashion, they may lose their ability to legally enforce that copyright.

Now, how many CDs were you able to legally buy last year ? Maybe CD prices are no problem for North Americans and for Western Europeans, but I am big music fan, and for rest of us, CD prices ARE problem, if we are music fans who want to listen to more than few new recordings every year. I am musician myself, so I know that most musicians are not in it for money: well, I don't really defened real piracy, which means re-selling of bootleged CDs for profit, but I think that there are certain aspects of copyright, which are very weird and dehumanizing. I think that future of intellectual property of all kind is shareware and/or freeware for non-commercial use: I hate all those big rock concerts, where promotion agency parks huge trucks in front of the stadium, and let engines running during concert, to prevent non-paying fans from listening to music. I don't think musicians themselves are happy about that: and this is what Napster, Gnutella, MP3 format and MP3 players are all about: we all love music, but most of us hate music industry, for artificaly increasing price of music by turning it to "rare resource"... I feel like more sane way of distribution of intellectual property of any kind is strictly recognizing non-profit and commercial use..

This is especially important because of the fact, that in USA, recording industry now holds copyright FOREVER, not only during lifetime of artist, and musicians can be now just hired, as any other employees, being paid per-hour. Now, that's really unfair! I think that recording industry will soon learn, that they need musicians to make money, while musicians will find out, that they don't need recording industry to live and create music... thanks to Internet.

Note: Arachne 1.64 for Linux is tightly integrated with mpg123 media player, and it will be shipped pre-configured for launching and background playing of both MP3.com-style and Shoutcast.com-style MP3 streams when browsing Net - all you need is properly configured sound support in Linux and mpg123 player installed. You will be able to experience MP3 streams even on hardware, which is not suitable for running memory- and CPU-hungry X11 based applications (like Netscape or XMMS).