boycott-riaa.com - Article: Gnutella Still No Threat to RIAA

Gnutella Still No Threat to RIAA

Posted by John-Michael Wong on April 4, 2001 at 10:50 AM (printer friendly)

Despite the immense gains in Gnutella usage over the past several months, Gnutella usage is still not seen as a threat to the recording industry.

In an article to CNET, RIAA anti-piracy expert Frank Creighton stated that Gnutella is not enough of a problem to warrant devoting manpower to stop it. The industry association is currently focusing its efforts against Napster and its clones.

User Comments (These do not necessarily reflect the beliefs of this site)


cype	Date: April 4, 2001 @ 3:03 PM Music isn't about the money, well in a way it is, but if you look at it in the right perspective music is about hearing it and about the experience, but now everything has a pricetag on it.

Anonymous	Date: April 4, 2001 @ 8:33 PM thank you so much for clarifying what music is about. i couldn't have understood music without your post. thank you

yellowbeard	Date: April 4, 2001 @ 9:27 PM whamBAMmoneygram

Anonymous	Date: April 5, 2001 @ 6:21 AM It's actually a good thing they dont see gnutella as a threat. It would be hard for them to shut us down, but let's not go spreading this around, eh?

Anonymous	Date: April 5, 2001 @ 6:36 AM The people in black suits ha to close Napster because it was so well known, and they needed to make a public anouncement that this kind of piracy would not be allowed. Gnutella is not yet as widely known. The secret to keeping Gnutella around is to keep it to yourself. ie no advertising, no telling friends. The MIB will only remove Gnutella if it gets to the stage where clients are being shiped with new MP3 harware or computers as Napster was.

Anonymous	Date: April 5, 2001 @ 6:38 AM ok who broke my d key?

milladrive	Date: April 5, 2001 @ 7:52 AM Maybe 1 day the threat will be seen in the communities shutting down instead of gettin' bigger. I can dream, can't I?

ssscary	Date: April 6, 2001 @ 6:51 PM not a threat? fine with me. seems a bit like sour grapes, tho- they dont have an obvious way to shut it down so they won't even try because they "arent a threat".

Anonymous	Date: April 7, 2001 @ 8:30 AM I don't think they realize that the numbers shown on the tracking sites don't accurately represent the number of people actually connected to the gnutella network. Because of the way the network is connected, the maximum number of hosts you can ever see is in the 20-30k range, which is still a lot more than you can get to on a single napster server.

Anonymous	Date: April 7, 2001 @ 11:04 AM After seeing a lot of good things about Bearshare, being posted here, I decided to get it. It did not live up to the hype in my opinion. From what I could tell, you cant choose the bitrate of a song, not to mention that the user interface is a jumbled mess. every tab had a window full of blinking statistics. The reason the record companys dont care about Gnutella is the same reason they dont care about irc, (which is something people used to trade files long before Napster)its a big pain in the ass. Napster is a task specific program, it has a SIMPLE user face, and it works (worked) as close to perfect as you can get on the internet. Thats why unless someone creates a Napster clone that can interface with the gnutella service, or Napster wins its court case, p2p (for mp3's) is never going to achieve the same amount of popularity as it did with Napster. And with out a wide range and a large number of people online and sharing then what good is a p2p service?

Anonymous	Date: April 7, 2001 @ 5:35 PM I don't know what the fuck those people have against napster or gnutella or mp3 swapping. Are they stupid or what? why the hell don't tey check surveys or something? they would realize MOST of the people(like me) buy the records after downloading some songs. It's stupid downloading a whole album, you spend the same money you would spend on a record, in the telephone bill. So, that's about it. I have another advantage, I have a cd recorder, so, after I listen to the MP3, I buy the record if I like it, and then, sell cds or burn compilations to my friends, jeje. But that's another story. Leandro

LiVid	Date: April 8, 2001 @ 12:44 PM Reading the comments below I feel as though I've missed something. It seems to me that as Gnutella is open source and peer to peer it can't be shut down. If this is the case then the more people who know about it the better... more music, more videos etc... BearShare seems like a great program to me. I prefer it to Napster as I can find images, sofware and videos, in additon to music. The clients will get better too as time goes on. I feel that the music industry has not really got too much of a chance with their subscription services. Streaming is not as useful as being able to download the songs and burn a CD, stick them on your mpg player etc... Also, why are people going to use them when you can find all you want on Gnutella? I think it serves the industry right really, the have been screwing both the artists and the public for far too long. The industy is fat and complacent. The high price of CDs (especially here, in the UK) cannot be justified at all. I do feel that the free sharing of files may provide rather a problem for artists though, and it is difficult to see how they will become quite as rich as many of the more popular ones have become(perhaps not such a bad thing!). However, I tend to use the download of files as tasters... the sound quality of mp3s, especially when burnt to CDs leave a little to be desired.. and if i find an artist I like i will go and buy the CD... for the better sound quality and also the print stuff. Napster and Gnutella have actually increased the amount of CDs I buy as traditional mediums in the UK do not generally play the sort of music I like... so it's difficult for me to find music i like. Napster and Gnutella really suit me as i can find someone who's sharing music i like, and then look at the rest of the stuff they are sharing to see if i may like that too. I think the music industry has rather missed the plot.... they are blinded by greed.

Anonymous	Date: April 8, 2001 @ 5:01 PM 1. Tell Everyone about LimeWire. Don't listen to these idiots who say keep it underground. The more people on Gnutella the better. 2. Fact: Gnutella is a "threat" and the RIAA will soon realize that it's impossible to stop file sharing. Developers and programmers will always be one step ahead of the game.

Anonymous	Date: April 9, 2001 @ 5:36 PM There is but one way to stop Gnutella, and that is by taking action against every member of the Gnutella network, a nearly impossible task. If they start trying this method of punishing person by person, they will make examples of the first people they catch (through IP address routing). I hope I'm not the first!

zotdog	Date: April 10, 2001 @ 6:14 AM Of course the RIAA cares about Gnutella. They've already commissioned studies to see how it might be attacked; but they're certainly not going to play their hand until they have some idea what to do about it. I was really impressed by Bearshare, by the way. No, it's not perfect. But it's a huge step in the right direction, and what's really important is that the search works. Everything else is just pretty pictures-- seeing the file's bitrate would be nice, but don't forget that there're a lot more file types available than just MP3s, and the bitrate thing isn't useful for a lot of them. Look for this software to be nicer and easier to use than Napster in a few months.

Anonymous	Date: April 10, 2001 @ 1:03 PM The only way i can think of to stop Gnutella (at least temporarily) would be to have ISP's block Gnutella traffic, and even that would be really hard to enforce. I don't think that would go over well anyway. Blocking a port is only a temporary solution.

Anonymous	Date: April 10, 2001 @ 9:18 PM With the network intensive nature of Gnutella, I can see how the RIAA would choose to block services to Modem users first. I know people with gigs full of songs from Napster that they squeezed through a tiny pipeline, but not a single person I know on Limewire is that patient. As cable / dsl / t1 lines represent less than 10% of people, it makes sense to go after modem access, especially when attacking a figurehead to set a prescident. But let's not think we're invincible, shall we? They can block at the ISP. They can get the code and linking to the code outlawed (Think De-CSS). Microsoft might get malicious and "tweak" their OS to give error messages when running a Gnutella network (in exchange for making .wmf files the industry standard for selling online music). They could begin spamming or packeting the network to death. They haven't ignored us because there is nothing they can do, they've ignored us because they have bigger fish to fry. Enjoy the service, before we have to move to the next thing.

Anonymous	Date: April 11, 2001 @ 2:15 AM damn. y'all are some ignorant motherfuckers. -jm2

Anonymous	Date: April 11, 2001 @ 2:54 PM All the given tasks they could do to stop the net are as illegal as the users are so it would be a WAR in every aspect.

Anonymous	Date: April 12, 2001 @ 4:58 PM I spend most of my time DLing things that AREN'T commercially available. That's the beauty of P2P, the strange, esoteric and rare finds you get from the community.

Anonymous	Date: April 13, 2001 @ 5:28 PM I, like millions of others, buy more CDs now I am P2Ping then I ever did before. Blinded by greed? The RIAA (and others) are too busy rolling around in piles of money jacking off to the sound of the cash register to see what's going on. More fool them. I think *tella will be a lot harder to shut down. Who's responsible for it? Exactly. And should I get a court order, I will be as disobedient as I can be, while still being civil :P In the end, as far as I'm concerned, civil disobedience is the way to go. RIAA: We're not trying to rip you off (hypocrites). All we're trying to do is add a little bit of fun to our ordinary lives and find music we like (which most of us then buy on CD). There. I'm done.

Anonymous	Date: April 14, 2001 @ 6:16 AM enjoy life? who says we're supposed to enjoy life? that's not what our economies and societies are set up for... we're supposed to produce, and they're supposed to give us just enough to continue producing so that a privileged few can live high on the hog... :)

Anonymous	Date: April 14, 2001 @ 9:57 AM When gnutella takes off will any of us be willing to pay for music voluntarily? Maybe. But what if you could cut out the record companies, and pay whatever you want directly to the artists who deserve it?

Anonymous	Date: April 14, 2001 @ 10:18 AM If the RIAA starts sueing Gnutella users by tracing them through their IP addresses, is there any way the protocol can be altered to hide your IP address?

Anonymous	Date: April 14, 2001 @ 10:13 PM There are a few things wrong with the Gnutella network. 1. As previously stated a "10%" of gnet users have high speed internet cable+ i am am one of them. It is true, even i get pissed when a dialup tries to dl a 650 Meg file from me. Takes em like 6 5hr attempts to get it through. The problem is people freeloading or not sharing. Or people with roadrunner or mediaone or high speed letting only 1 upload go at a time. This cripples the network and pisses people off, including me. The only way i see around this is hunting for firewalled hosts to dl from. Most have cable or above and usually get a good dl. Once i have achieved 3.0 megabits/second (384 kbytes/second) from a duke host. But the ONLY way they can punish gnet is by going after the programs that run it, bearshare,limewire,gnotella,..... but if they wipe out one, you can always access gnet through another one. Then a clone of the one that got wiped out sprouts up. The only way to KILL gnet is by being either obsolete or out of Ignorance that is chipping away at it now.

Anonymous	Date: April 15, 2001 @ 1:01 PM Another thing i see on it that REALLY pisses me off is i dl from someone that only lets 1 upload at a time, then have it go at a blazing speed that even beats AOL, A record 7.8 kbits/second. Then to see the SAME person uploading from ME at like 2 or 300 kbits/second. Thats the worst part of it.

Anonymous	Date: May 2, 2001 @ 6:19 PM Gnutella can only be stopped in one of two ways... 1. ISP's prevent the running of the software on certain ports, or 2. The RIAA begins suing people for Copyright infringement. This will never happen because it would be too costly, even with the $25,000 per infringement statutory damages. What's your view?

randy-lind	Date: May 3, 2001 @ 6:38 AM $20 bucks a month is not the same price as a record, so I don't know where you dial in from. I pay $39.95 a month for cable modem access and can download all the records I want. I like to see a music store let me take all the cd's I want for $40!

Anonymous	Date: May 3, 2001 @ 11:32 PM ECONOMICS 101: ya got that shit exactly right...we're all surfs!