From joelmeulenberg at yahoo.com Thu May 25 10:35:59 2000 From: joelmeulenberg at yahoo.com (Joel Meulenberg) Date: Wed Aug 4 00:01:06 2004 Subject: May's Grand Rapids Perl Mongers Meeting *Cancelled* Message-ID: <20000525153559.19620.qmail@web312.mail.yahoo.com> Well, it seems that everyone is really busy this spring. I just learned that due to scheduling issues the presentation initially planned for Friday won't be happening. (I'd been waiting on sending out the meeting announcement until I got a confirmation.) Rather than scramble to pull together a presenter/presentation for this holiday-weekend Friday, it seemed better to just skip this meeting and promise that there will definitely be a meeting on June 30th. The presentation topic for next month will be announced on this list soon. In lieu of this month's meeting, I'll give you an SNL "Coffee Talk" sort of topic: The nifty, new MP3::Napster Perl module by Lincoln Stein - is Lincoln or anyone who contributes to such open source software potentially exposing themselves legal attacks? (Think of recent events surrounding DeCSS.) Would you contribute to it? Why or why not? And how do you feel about the whole Napster thing? (Personally, I'm hoping that the whole Napster thing brings about a revolution in the way music is distributed/sold. I don't want artists to starve. In fact, thru disintermediation (of the RIAA), I hope artists receive even more proceeds from sales of their music. Out of this revolution I'd like to see: - try before you buy - nearly-instantaneous trying and buying without having to go fetch physical media or wait for it to be delivered - able to purchase just the tracks I like (a nice side effect is that artists get more detailed customer feedback than they ever did before) - artists are rewarded more - non-value-adding middle men become irrelevant - better prospects for "start up" artists - etc. ) Discuss amongst yourselves on grand-rapids-pm-list. : ) __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Kick off your party with Yahoo! Invites. http://invites.yahoo.com/ From jeffk at pcr7.pcr.com Thu May 25 10:59:20 2000 From: jeffk at pcr7.pcr.com (Jeff Klein) Date: Wed Aug 4 00:01:06 2004 Subject: May's Grand Rapids Perl Mongers Meeting *Cancelled* Message-ID: <392D4DD8.3F8748EF@pcr7.pcr.com> Joel Meulenberg wrote: [...] > (Personally, I'm hoping that the whole Napster thing brings about a > revolution in the way music is distributed/sold. I don't want artists > to starve. Too late! http://www.theonion.com/onion3618/kid_rock_starves.html -Jeff From joelmeulenberg at yahoo.com Thu May 25 11:20:22 2000 From: joelmeulenberg at yahoo.com (Joel Meulenberg) Date: Wed Aug 4 00:01:06 2004 Subject: Napster Killed Kid Rock Message-ID: <20000525162022.14109.qmail@web314.mail.yahoo.com> --- Jeff Klein wrote: > Joel Meulenberg wrote: > [...] > > (Personally, I'm hoping that the whole Napster thing brings about a > > revolution in the way music is distributed/sold. I don't want > artists > > to starve. > > Too late! > > http://www.theonion.com/onion3618/kid_rock_starves.html LOL! I'm not sure of the article's veracity though - the guy in the picture looks more like actor Steve Buschemi than Kid Rock. :) +Joel __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Kick off your party with Yahoo! Invites. http://invites.yahoo.com/ From sdpoling at home.com Sun May 28 23:36:34 2000 From: sdpoling at home.com (Steve Poling) Date: Wed Aug 4 00:01:06 2004 Subject: Napster: ethics and installation Message-ID: <002801bfc927$78535d20$0700a8c0@atlas.edu> >From the onion: >either: Why would anyone in their right mind pay $12.99 for a CD with >artwork when they could simply spend seven hours downloading the >compressed MP3 files of all the album's songs onto their home >computer's desktop, decompress it into an AIFF sound file, and then >burn the data onto a blank CD?" that says why people don't pirate software, be it EXE or MP3. however, i've got a deeper question. how do we know that copying copyrighted materials is wrong? when Moses wrote "thou shalt not steal," everyone understood that if I get your loaf of bread, you don't have it any longer. that's different from when you have a file, and give me a copy. you still have the file. i'm not trying to sound like RMS and say that copyrights are a positive evil, or that information wants to be free. Rather, i know that something is neither right nor wrong simply because someone passes legislation. i'm pro-life and i think that abortion, though legal, is wrong. you may disagree, but maybe you can come up with a different example that illustrates how ethical rightness and legal rightness are decoupled? now, suppose enough Napster draws enough users that their political pressure exceeds that of the RIAA's lobbyists. suppose further that congress passes a law saying, go ahead and copy MP3s. If copying is wrong when it's illegal, it won't become right when it's legalized. Decades back, Bill Gates wrote "the letter" that shook the infant microcomputer community. he became a billionaire because we all accepted his argument that copying is theft. What if he lied? ----------- This is a perl listserv, so i should probably ask a perl question. i have been installing packages on my ActiveState Perl Win23 system via PPM. However, PPM can't find MP3::Napster. What's the easiest way to get MP3::Napster onto my windoze boxen? From ptjapkes at email.com Mon May 29 06:27:50 2000 From: ptjapkes at email.com (Paul Tjapkes) Date: Wed Aug 4 00:01:06 2004 Subject: Napster: ethics and installation Message-ID: <382753124.959599670346.JavaMail.root@web12.mail.com> If Activestate doesn't have the module, try these steps. 1. Pay Gates for VC++ ;) 2. install it 3. download the MP3::Napster module from CPAN 4. untar it and run nmake, nmake test and nmake install; fixing any dependencies that arise But chances are, if Activestate doesn't have the module available, there is a dependency that is unavailable on Win32 systems. ----------------------------------------------- FREE! The World's Best Email Address @email.com Reserve your name now at http://www.email.com From joelmeulenberg at yahoo.com Tue May 30 01:29:26 2000 From: joelmeulenberg at yahoo.com (Joel Meulenberg) Date: Wed Aug 4 00:01:06 2004 Subject: Napster: ethics and installation Message-ID: <20000530062926.11323.qmail@web311.mail.yahoo.com> > however, i've got a deeper question. how do we know that copying > copyrighted > materials is wrong? when Moses wrote "thou shalt not steal," everyone > understood that if I get your loaf of bread, you don't have it any > longer. > that's different from when you have a file, and give me a copy. you > still > have the file. That is a deep question. I won't pretend that I have the answer, but I do have some thoughts. I've not experienced it, but I've heard that in countries/times lacking "the rule of law" the most basic forms of work/production slow down or even come to a virtual halt. For example, if you're a farmer in a time/place without the rule of law and every time you gather your crops, guys with guns come and take it (or (think future) they simply "teleport" it away : ) ), you're soon going to lose the will to sow (at least on a large scale) since you ultimately won't reap. I imagine that, if things got really out of hand, the same could happen to information goods. A music artist who knows that she won't reap any rewards for releasing her creations might choose not to make it available. Or, worse yet, since she cannot sustain herself doing what she does best (making music), she has to spend the majority of her work time sweeping floors or doing "quality assurance" for GM or teaching piano lessons just to sustain herself and that leaves much less time for her to create music. Of course, this assumes things "getting really out of hand". You mentioned the download times, burning time, etc. associated with "stealing" a CD (and ultimately getting a worse product) and how that outweights the $12.99 cost for many people. But now imagine that everyone has OC-12 to their homes and anyone can simply utter (or think!) the command - "Get me Dr. Demento's tune 'Boot to the Head'." and almost instantly you have it. Or, taking it a step further, imagine we have "replicators" (like in Star Trek) and virtually unlimited free energy (by harnessing atomic energy or something). Then, given a copy of a molecular model of the physical CD, you can have a perfect replica of the original CD complete with artwork! In that vision of the future, the scarcest and most valuable resource is probably human attention. Loaves of bread or instances of any physical object are had virtually for free, but they won't design/create themselves. Peoples' mental attention is needed to design/create initially - whether it's music or banana nut bread divine. Now you might be thinking: Assume we have replicators and nanite builders and unlimited free energy and whatnot. Then it's a given that everyone has the basic necessities. Many people will create (music, software, bread molecular models, etc.) simply because it's what they like to do. So what's wrong with having them simply doing what they do best and giving it away to the world for free? Well, nothing I guess - if that's what they want. However, I see some issues with this arrangement: 1. Without incentives to do something with their attention, I suspect that some would piss it all away (or most of it) - not that there's anything "wrong" with that either. (When I think about it, I guess I'm casting that in a negative light because it doesn't help mankind achieve the "transhumanist" goals (i.e.- be all that we can be) that I think would be fun to achieve. As with many other behaviors, not using our most precious resource (i.e.- human attention) for something constructive is neither "right" nor "wrong" - just more or less useful in a given context. In the context of "achieving a better understanding of the universe" or pursuing any admirable goal, playing video games is not useful, yet I play video games. (I suppose I've digressed into relativism or something like that.)) 2. Even people who want to give (some or all of) their creations away for free would likely create *more slowly* than if there were incentives to create. Is having everyone creating more slowly a "good" or a "bad" thing? Again, it's only more or less useful in a given context. 3. It seems to me that it's a limitation of the freedom of creators to *not* allow them to have some control over the use/duplication of their creations. This point is a little trickier because some restrictions on the use of a creation seem unethical. For example, it seems wrong for a country music artist to declare that "Yankees" may not purchase or listen to their music. (It's seems "wrong" because we're empathetic (i.e.- the underpinnings of "the golden rule"). Empathy is generally a good thing as long as we are humble and grok those on whom we are inflicting our empathy. (Things that come to mind include: "(Hypothetical) Preventing the piggies from 'slaughtering' each other in Orson Scott Card's 'Xenocide'" and even "Saving the heathens".) However, declaring that customers must pay if they wish to experience/use one's creation seems OK. Anyone may have the experience, they just have to pay (which really boils down to trading "attention currency"). At the same time, no one is forced to pay for it directly or indirectly. (The "Microsoft Tax" associated with purchasing a new computer system comes to mind here. (The OEM, due to their contract with MS, must include the cost of Winders whether or not the customer even gets Winders with the system!!)) Whew. This post has gotten much longer than I expected. I could spew more ideas, but I've gotta finish up some enhancements to a DHTML/Javascript-based GUI widget and contribute it to the "DynAPI" free software project at SourceForge.net (some people are waiting for it). (BTW, see point #2 above. ; ) ) +Joel __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Kick off your party with Yahoo! Invites. http://invites.yahoo.com/ From tom at pcr7.pcr.com Wed May 31 09:38:45 2000 From: tom at pcr7.pcr.com (tom laird) Date: Wed Aug 4 00:01:06 2004 Subject: Another perspective on Napster Message-ID: <00cb01bfcb0d$ed173e00$48eb1bcc@Arrakis.pcr.com> Just a link to an editorial by John Perry Barlow, lyricist for the Grateful Dead. http://www.technocrat.net/958163435/index_html Happy reading... -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.pm.org/archives/grand-rapids-pm-list/attachments/20000531/28ae0eae/attachment.htm