Napster Clone

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©1996-2012 Roedy Green, Canadian Mind Products

Please do not email me about this project without reading the disclaimer above.

What would a legitimate Napster replacement need?

• No more dreaded "file transfer error". Napster just totally gives up on the slightest hint of trouble. What it should do is restart the transfer, picking up where it left off, using a different source, if available.
• Songs must be accurately indexed. Napster is total chaos. You can’t search for "Gay"; as recording artist without also getting comedy sketches about Captain Kirk coming on to Spock. You need accurate artist names, accurate album titles, accurate song names, accurate album serial numbers.
• Napster searches bring up dozens of duplicates. It should bring up each song title separately, and once you select the song title of interest it could show you the variants available and the estimated time to get each one. The system should select the best source for you automatically. The system can then fairly allocate the work.
• People who download a recording should be able to rate it for various sorts of quality. You should be able to access those statistics as well as individual comments.
• Napster has no facility to sell music. It only handles free music. It should be possible to try before you buy. It should be useful both for individual musicians and recording companies to sell music. You might buy ten plays for a nickel, 100 plays for a quarter, or lifetime use for a dollar. Or you might just pay a flat fee of $20.00 USD a month for all your music, much the way you pay a flat fee for Internet access. Napster has to track what people download and what they play to compute the bill. You might have a gastank system, like Digicash where you prepay, or it might be a charge put on your credit card or an itemised bill than arrives each month. The technically tricky part comes working out a scheme so that purchased music cannot be shared. Since you can hear all music at least a few times free, there is less incentive to try to crack the sharing scheme than there is now to steal when CD (Compact Disk) ’s cost $20.00 USD .
• Once Napster went legit, it could legally cache popular songs on high speed servers, giving much faster downloads than now.
• You need to support some higher quality message formats, and allow for the option of new formats to be introduced from time to time.
• The current music distribution system rewards someone equally if you buy their CD and play it once and if you play it every day for the rest of your life. Surely the second artist should be more amply rewarded.

The payment scheme would be based on public key encryption and digital signatures. For some hints of how the scheme would work, see my essay on digital signatures. The idea each client has a private key (a random binary number) they can use to prove their identity by encrypting a challenge phrase from the server that the server then decrypts with the client’s registered public key. This ensures that other people can’t get music and bill it to you.

Music can be passed around encrypted on the web, along with, and in exactly the same way that free music is freely passed around now. You pay nothing to download the music, but you only get the decryption keys once you have been authorised for a free trial or yet another play. There are at least four ways a pirate might cheat:

1. Tell other people the decryption keys.
2. Keep a copy of the unencrypted trial play file, and play it as many times as he pleases.
3. Put up a copy of the unencrypted file on Napster.
4. Play the file, and create a new digital file from the analog output to the loudspeakers.

1. To prevent people from sharing decryption keys, don’t publicly distribute the entire file. Leave parts of it out. When a users pays for a play, or is determined to have the right to a play, the server sends him just the missing parts, encrypted specifically for that target user with his public key. The file can only be decrypted with the client’s private key. He dare not divulge his private key or else people could bill music to his account.
2. To prevent the user from keeping an unencrypted copy of the file, standard software must simply not hand it over. The server software can challenge the client software to ensure it has not been tampered with. Pirate software would fail the dynamic challenge. If security were ever broken, new software can be downloaded, and all old software disabled. This scheme simply stops the user from saving the MP3 file (or the keys) in unencrypted form. It does not prevent a pirate from recording the S/PDIF (Sony/Philips Digital Interconnect Format) output of his sound card on his DAT (Digital Audio Tape) drive. To save it as a MP3 file, he would have to play the tape back, and run it through a MP3 compressor. The pirate would have to manually type all the track titles. Not everyone has this equipment so the amount of such copying might be considerably lower than now when all you need is a computer. Pirates might attack the sound card drivers, persuading them to save WAV files. Standard software could check for these, much the way you check for viruses, and refuse to function.
3. The same techniques to prevent someone from saving an unencrypted MP3 for their own use also makes it difficult for them to share them. In addition, it might be possible to create a special sort of digest to identify a file. If a free file matched the signature of one of the for pay ones, Napster could simply quietly refuse to share it. Calculating this signature is tricky. There are many ways of compressing a file, and each subtlely alters it. Pirates would have to alter the sound to be sufficiently different from the original to bypass this check.
4. I can conceive of no technology that could prevent recording the analog outputs, save some sort of sealed unit headsets with wireless Internet access and decoders in them. However, that sort of copying would lose fidelity, much like copying cassette tapes.

How do you switch to such a new format? Music will have to continue to be sold on CD s, which are sitting ducks for piracy? The music in the new format will have to be higher fidelity, with better channel separation. New songs might come out first in the new format, and only several months later in CD format. Songs may make most of their sales and downloads in the first month after release. If people already have the new format song, why would they need a pirated version of inferior CD quality?

The RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) must realise they can’t kill Napster. If they do, like the mythological Hydra, ten more even more decentralised clones will rise in its place. The only way to kill it is to offer huge amounts of high quality music at low prices, including tons of music difficult to get in pirated form, and free try before you buy. With electronic distribution, it costs almost nothing to give people unlimited amounts of music. This cost saving must be passed on to the consumer. The public is using wholesale piracy to punish the RIAA for being so greedy and stubborn. Technology makes possible unlimited near-free choice. Heaven help the fool who tries to stand in their way.

Music distribution will change. Retail outlets will be much less important. There will be thousands of little home "radio" stations that construct 24 hour playlists with commentary. You will be able to get a discumentary on almost any topic, not just music. They will be highly specialised. You can subscribe to these for a penny an hour. They don’t actually distribute any music, just playlists and commentary, that your player constructs into a continous wallpaper of sound. You don’t have to listen to them in real time, the way you do with broadcast radio. You are basically paying them to go digging for you to find the great recordings in the mass of so so ones. Every band will have at least one "radio" station. It would play that band’s music, tell stories about the band, play interviews, compare cuts with other bands that did the same song etc. You could go into the radio business with just a PC (Personal Computer), a mike and a sound card. There will be tens of thousands of people doing the same thing for free, so the for pay ones will have to be top notch quality. There will also be some using the old style of financing, with ads. The target markets will be very specific, so these stations will be quite valuable to advertisers.

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