Globe & Mail's series, the Download Decade

Posted: Mon May 11, 2009 12:28 am

Globe and Mail, a high profile Canadian business newspaper, has launched the Download Decade series (digg this, they deserve it!). 6 months in the making and for one which they revamped their whole site programming in order to accommodate the new multimedia in the series, I especially applaud the fact that the Globe and Mail have now joined the CBC in releasing multimedia content over BitTorrent. Adoption of BitTorrent at big publications like G&M in a series celebrating the 10th year anniversary of Napster is a symbolic milestone in itself. What can we look forward to in the next decade to come? I think it's going to be exciting.

Currently only Part 1 of 5 in the series is out at launch of the Download Decade, featuring a long look back at Napster and the beginning of P2P. I have been interviewed, expect yours truly to come up in the coming parts. There's so much insights summed up in the series involving the enormously complicated legal and political issues surrounding copyright, culture and creativity, with well compiled audio/video interviews and interactive content. I highly recommend you to follow this series.

And of course, what's a news worth without torrents? Torrent of Part 1 as well as the upcoming parts in the series should be indexed here.

Posted: Sun May 17, 2009 5:40 pm

Lol this site annoyed me ...

The stupid censorship on the globeandmail wouldn`t let me post this, so I post it here. (http://beta.theglobeandmail.com/news/technology/download-decade/thank-you-napster/article1014979/)
>>>> You included words not permitted by our language filter. <<<
WTF ^^^^^^^^ Here my text:

Napster is crap. Everything that di*tades you what you are able to consume is crap. Napster offers 2-3-4 Million Songs ? what about thew other 15 Million long tail songs that got shared at the highest peak times when Napster really was Napster.
Maybe some of you remember Audiogalaxy. That was the absolut future in my eye, and it got shut down so quickly ... we just need that back ... the BEST way to share music and get to know new one.
The only good thing about Napster is the idea of paying a fee for month and get anything from it. Now transport this to the internet, but piggishness kills those ideas. Stop fightiung against P2P find ideas to profit from it.

Posted: Mon Jun 01, 2009 5:43 pm

It was a very interesting read, and I realized that I was sharing a lot of the ideas put forward, some of the answers I had come up with myself in the past. In part four, the last quote really strikes me as meaningful, and it summarizes my position quite nicely:

“We should accept now that we have the biggest library ever [the Internet]. We have the biggest library, and it’s so huge and everybody should have a way to use this and the whole idea of ‘culture can’t be free’ is not the issue. We’re not saying that everything should be free, it should be free and so on, we don’t say that it doesn’t have to be for free, it just has to be free [as in] freedom.” (Peter Sunde)

Posted: Thu Jul 09, 2009 8:56 am

Good interview Gary and thanks for sharing the link to this. Very good stuff! Smile

Cheers!

Posted: Sun Jul 12, 2009 7:03 pm

Zwerchfell wrote:

Lol this site annoyed me ...

The stupid censorship on the globeandmail wouldn`t let me post this, so I post it here. (http://beta.theglobeandmail.com/news/technology/download-decade/thank-you-napster/article1014979/)
>>>> You included words not permitted by our language filter. <<<
WTF ^^^^^^^^ Here my text:

Napster is crap. Everything that di*tades you what you are able to consume is crap. Napster offers 2-3-4 Million Songs ? what about thew other 15 Million long tail songs that got shared at the highest peak times when Napster really was Napster.
Maybe some of you remember Audiogalaxy. That was the absolut future in my eye, and it got shut down so quickly ... we just need that back ... the BEST way to share music and get to know new one.
The only good thing about Napster is the idea of paying a fee for month and get anything from it. Now transport this to the internet, but piggishness kills those ideas. Stop fightiung against P2P find ideas to profit from it.

I never used Napter, mainly because there are plenty of other service around here, for example Kazaa, WinMX, Limewire,Audiogalaxy,Emule (Edonkey) and so on, Napster intially and mainly was only for music, specially for popular music. Instead, if you want to search for a non-popular music or non-english music, then napster wasn't the solution.

IMHO :Napster was cool for noobs.

Also, the download-decade show that ipod as a holy grail, ipod in total has selling 35 millions unit only. It is a big number for a single company but, in a broad viewpoint, is almost as nothing, the number of portable mp3 is about a billion units (mainly cheap mp3 pendrives).

Posted: Thu Jul 23, 2009 8:33 pm

Oh man, I remember Audiogalaxy. How I miss it. You could find some really obscure and hard-to-find stuff there that I haven't been able to find anywhere else.

This being the 10-year anniversary of Napster confirms a memory of mine. I swear I must have been among the first users of it--when I first stumbled across its homepage (looking for mp3 files that at that time were hard to find and hyperlinked on websites) it looked like it had been designed by a 2-year-old. I distinctly remember a bright green (or was it red?) background, default blue, green and red text, all in huge bold text. It stayed that way for a while before it became the branded Napster we know today.

Napster was revolutionary for me and in some ways I miss it, but I'm sold on torrents now. Viva la isohunt. Smile

Posted: Sun Aug 16, 2009 11:48 am

Quote:

Napster is crap. Everything that di*tades you what you are able to consume is crap. Napster offers 2-3-4 Million Songs ? what about thew other 15 Million long tail songs that got shared at the highest peak times when Napster really was Napster.
Maybe some of you remember Audiogalaxy. That was the absolut future in my eye, and it got shut down so quickly ... we just need that back ... the BEST way to share music and get to know new one.
The only good thing about Napster is the idea of paying a fee for month and get anything from it. Now transport this to the internet, but piggishness kills those ideas. Stop fightiung against P2P find ideas to profit from it.

Quote:

I never used Napter, mainly because there are plenty of other service around here, for example Kazaa, WinMX, Limewire,Audiogalaxy,Emule (Edonkey) and so on, Napster intially and mainly was only for music, specially for popular music. Instead, if you want to search for a non-popular music or non-english music, then napster wasn't the solution.

IMHO :Napster was cool for noobs.

Napster was awesome when it started, just as Bram Cohen's first site was before it was closed by the industry, and isohunt was up until a few weeks ago before someones started producing fake torrents by the thousands.
What's UP with that, by the way? Hundreds of fake aXXo torrents with hundreds of fake seeders? Can anything be done?

Posted: Sun Aug 16, 2009 2:16 pm

WaxMan wrote:

isohunt was up until a few weeks ago before someones started producing fake torrents by the thousands.
What's UP with that, by the way? Hundreds of fake aXXo torrents with hundreds of fake seeders? Can anything be done?

People like you are just as bad as the people that upload fakes, You come here spewing crap about isohunt and fakes acting like you know what you are talking about and in all actuality you don't know squat, There are no fake files released here any fake you see listed was released some where else they get indexed by us and no we will not go through the trouble of trying to filter the sites we index that is not feasible, If you think you can help get rid of them then make an account on every site that a fake comes from and complain to them.

Personally the fake's don't bother me as I know how to tell the difference. FYI Learn How to Spot Fake Torrents Rolling Eyes

Posted: Sat Oct 30, 2010 11:57 am

Zwerchfell:

Woha! I don't believe you're dissing Napster Shocked

. Omg, I remember the days when almost everything you wanted was available for quick download on Napster Wink

- Some 10 years ago when you could only ever hope to download music files with dial up internet and all Smile

. But it wasn't long till Napster was banned and I swtiched to Kazaa, which was great too.

Hey, anybody know if Kazaa is still working? lol I had completely forgotten it til I started writing about Napster right now. Not sure what the best P2P software is now for music files. Limewire is currently not working due to some copywrite violations Sad

, but it was rubbish anyways.

Posted: Mon May 30, 2011 1:05 am

I remember the days when almost everything you wanted was available for quick download on Napster Wink - Some 10 years ago when you could only ever hope to download music files with dial up internet and all Smile.

Yeah))) I remember too. That was a long time ago)... Internet evolves. (:

Posted: Thu Jul 14, 2011 3:51 am

Very good!!!!! Laughing

Posted: Sun Jan 15, 2012 8:31 pm

I came, I spammed, pacino23 cut the brakes to my minibus...

Posted: Wed Jan 18, 2012 5:48 pm

Quote:

“We should accept now that we have the biggest library ever [the Internet]. We have the biggest library, and it’s so huge and everybody should have a way to use this and the whole idea of ‘culture can’t be free’ is not the issue. We’re not saying that everything should be free, it should be free and so on, we don’t say that it doesn’t have to be for free, it just has to be free [as in] freedom.” (Peter Sunde)

...libraries can provide a third partys content to the end user for free, but as soon as its from the internet, thats a risk, and has to be censored and/or its gonna cost. Too bad for you if some one can give it for free and that prevents you from selling something that isnt yours to sell. Those who know get info for free, those who dont, get ripped off