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Blog Torrent: Downhill Battle Interview 224

Posted by CmdrTaco from the something-to-think-about dept.
scubacuda writes "In this GrepLaw interview, Downhill Battle's Nicholas Reville describes the success (and takedown) of SP2Torrent.com, alternative ways to buy music, what indie musicians think about filesharing, and real ways to counter threats to creativity and an open culture. Those excited about the possibilities of Bittorrent will especially appreciate Downhill Battle's Blog Torrent, an easy-to-install program that will dramatically simplify the creation, posting, and seeding of new torrents."
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Blog Torrent: Downhill Battle Interview More

Blog Torrent: Downhill Battle Interview

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  • huh? (Score:5, Funny)

    by StevenHenderson ( 806391 ) <<stevehenderson> <at> <gmail.com>> on Thursday August 26, 2004 @01:34PM (#10080927)
    alternative ways to buy music

    buy? ...music? wtf?

    • Keep music live (Score:3, Insightful)

      by leathered ( 780018 )
      I appreciate the humour in what you said but I truly believe we should all pay for our music, but instead of getting it on a piece of plastic, it should be delivered the way music was intended, i.e live.

      Live performances are the only way to ensure that the artist gets both the money and recognition they deserve. Sadly the art of the live performance, barring a few notable exceptions, is one that's been foreign for mosts of todays 'artists'.

      All I can say is that if you like a particular band or singer then
      • There is no substitute for live music, but it isn't the only way for musicians to get rewarded:
        • For the biggest popstars, the number of fans outnumber the number of people that can visit a concert
        • Concerts don't cover all situations where one likes to listen to music
        • Some artists make fantastic music, but a lousy live act (and vice versa)
        • Some people don't WANT to visit a concert, but really appreciate the music anyway

        I sometimes download different copies of a song, and compare those to find out what

      • Re:Keep music live (Score:3, Insightful)

        by YrWrstNtmr ( 564987 )
        I enjoy the London Philharmonic. Traveling to see them play live would be a bit expensive.
        I enjoy REM (or any number of other bands). I have no desire to go to a concert (anymore).
        I enjoy Mike Oldfields' stuff. Quite a lot of it does not transfer well into a live performance.
        I'd consider going to a Rolling Stones performance, if the tickets weren't sold out in the first 30 minutes, making it impossible except for the people who camp out in line for 3 days prior.

        Not all types of music and artists lend the

      • it should be delivered the way music was intended, i.e live.

        What an elitist attitude. "The way music was intended?" I think that the thousands of artists who never perform their music live would disagree with your assessment that music is "intended" (whatever that means) to be live. If you put together a song with a synthesizer at home, is it not music?

        Those who want to attend concerts should compensate the artist for performing the music for them. Those who would like a CD, or an MP3, or other record

      • > instead of getting it on a piece of plastic, it should be delivered the way music was intended, i.e live.

        Not all music was intended to be live. I make some music (sucks still, so no link), but I could not play it live -- that's just the nature of the stuff I do. I'm not a musician, unless you can call a PC a musical instrument, but I am still making music that is intended to be heard prerecorded.

        Think Electronica. Usually not the best live stuff (although there are numerous exceptions).

  • Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Thursday August 26, 2004 @01:34PM (#10080932)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Forget p2p and torrents (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 26, 2004 @01:35PM (#10080936)
    Bob has 2Gig of mp3s. Jane has 5Gig of mp3s. If they share via 1Gb/s (local) ethernet, they will quickly both have 8Gigs each.

    In a few years that Gigabytes will become Terabytes. When one person can have a copy of nearly all music in existence, they will never spend a dime on it. It's too late. Content producers are fucked. Only niche markets will survive.
      • I suspect so, for sufficiently large values of 2.
        • There is one exceptionally weakly typed programming language that lets you redefine arbitrary symbols...effectively, you *can* make the number 2 into the number 3 (or 2.1, 2.5, 2.6, etc)

      • Of course.

        It's part of the RIAA modifications to math. I think there's a bill working it's way through congress right now. Essentially, all mathematical functions f(a1, ..., aN) will now be defined as: rho(f(a1, ..., aN)). rho is a function that will be decided upon, on a case by case basis, by the newmath oversight committee (to be established by an act of congress), for the benefit of artists and content producers.

        I think your parent poster had access to drafts of the bill.

        -Laxitive
    • And I thought geeks sodomizing the SI prefixes was bad. Now they've hijacked basic arithmetic !


      --LordPixie
    • Your model is flawed (besides the obvious math error). It doesn't take into account overlap between libraries.
      Example: I have 30gb of music. One of my good friends has 40gb music. When we link up, does that give us 70gb music each? Of course not. About 50% of the albums we have are the same, and it ends up we only pull about 3gb maximum from each other, simply because it's all that interests you that you don't already have.

      Lost revenue isn't an album you download. It's an album you download inst

    • Re:Forget p2p and torrents (Score:5, Funny)

      by kfg ( 145172 ) on Thursday August 26, 2004 @02:03PM (#10081243)
      No, not really. There's bound to be a considerable amount of duplication between their two collections. Let's call it 6Gigs each.

      However, in RIAA math that will be 16Gigs of stolen music (taking your latter figure), which is really the equivilent of 832Gigs of stolen music resulting damages of more dollars than there are fundamental particles in the universe.

      But the RIAA will settle for whatever they've got in their piggy banks and a public service announcement that they were evil hackers, which is just plain wrong.

      KFG

    • Re:Forget p2p and torrents (Score:5, Interesting)

      by TheRealMindChild ( 743925 ) on Thursday August 26, 2004 @02:08PM (#10081278) Homepage Journal
      This is where things need to progress in a different fasion. Rather then making money explicitly by allowing you to listen to music, they will need to/should offer services that make me WANT to purchase a CD or whatever, rather then downloading it.

      I think Bon Jovi and his people had the idea with their last album that came out, you could use the unique code that came with it to get a discount on the current tour and merchandise... and something completely exclusive, but I cant remember what that was.
      • i like the g-unit idea better. buying the album gets you a chance in a raffle for 4 huge g-unit medallions worth 40k each. at least then the label has a fixed cost associated with the contest.

    • In a few years that Gigabytes will become Terabytes. When one person can have a copy of nearly all music in existence, they will never spend a dime on it. It's too late. Content producers are fucked. Only niche markets will survive.

      I'm not worried about the content producers. What about the content CREATORS? Your statement only applies if there is no new content coming into the system. If people don't keep paying for the same content, there's more money to go toward NEW content. More money available,

    • Where'd the extra gig come from?

      2+5 != 8
    • I think you're right - ultimately the days of packaging and selling bits are over, no matter how much the companies sue, threaten or wrap their bits up in DRM. It's like the War on Drugs, or the War on Terror... the only way to win is to kill all your citizens.

  • Music and movies aside... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by tcopeland ( 32225 ) * <tom@th[ ]sleecopeland.com ['oma' in gap]> on Thursday August 26, 2004 @01:35PM (#10080948) Homepage
    ...BitTorrent is a boon for open source projects with large files. PostgreSQL [postgresql.org], for example, publishes torrents of their releases and the the "PG Live" ISOs. On a much smaller scale, we've put up a torrent [rubyforge.org] for the Ruby windows installer on RubyForge - it's only 11 MB, but even a small file like that is worth torrenting.

    PLUG: Here's the beginnings of a Ruby BT library [rubyforge.org]. Just parses the metainfo file for now, but it's a start...

  • Let's not get defensive (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Catamaran ( 106796 ) on Thursday August 26, 2004 @01:37PM (#10080975)
    Downhill battle wants to prove that P2P has "legitimate" uses, but they should not fall into the trap of trying to defend the all of these new technologies. Quite the contrary, the RIAA and the MPAA should be constantly on the defensive. They should prove to us that they can move with the times and are not just obsolete obstructionists.

    • Re:Let's not get defensive (Score:2, Interesting)

      by garcia ( 6573 ) *
      It does have legitimate uses it's the fucking retards that insist on supporting the RIAA and their bullshit that keep them in business and in the news.

      Fucking dump the RIAA and their music. Do not support iTMS, do not support music store sales of garbage CDs, and certainly do not support any radio station that plays their bullshit for money.

      Support FREEDOM of music. FurthurNET [furthurnet.com] and various other sources. You might be surprised who you see on that list...

  • BitTorrent is nice. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by London Bus ( 803556 ) on Thursday August 26, 2004 @01:41PM (#10081025)
    It's an established technology. That's good. What I'm looking for now is a push-based P2P system; one which allows you to subscribe for content and will then automatically download new content as it's propagated through the network. We've had stories on Slashdot before about sites' popular RSS feeds saturating bandwidth - well, this would be a perfect solution. Are there any plans to retrofit push functionality into BitTorrent to help alleviate the stress of releasing new content? BitTorrent doesn't gel with RSS at the moment because there's no way to automate serving and/or obtaining RSS files. It all has to be done manually, which is no better than just refreshing a web page.
    • The solution is, in my opinion, to first move away from BitTorrent for content distribution. There are significantly more flexible, powerful, and elegant protocols ready to take its place such as PDTP [pdtp.org] which could be used for distribution of the actual RSS feed.

      The next step would be some sort of UDP beaconing system, where clients periodically "ping" a beacon saying they want updates pushed to them, and the server will periodically "beacon" with the latest available content of a given type until a TTL ex

    • konspire2b (Score:3, Informative)

      by RAMMS+EIN ( 578166 )
      Sounds like you might enjoy konspire2b [sourceforge.net]

    • Re:BitTorrent is nice. (Score:4, Funny)

      by Twirlip of the Mists ( 615030 ) <twirlipofthemists@yahoo.com> on Thursday August 26, 2004 @02:07PM (#10081270)
      Jesus fucking Christ. Stealing music isn't good enough for you any more, now you want people to deliver stolen music to you?

      Holy fuck.

    • Re:BitTorrent is nice. (Score:3, Informative)

      by iso ( 87585 )
      I'm not sure why you need to do this manually anymore. Most torrent sites already publish RSS information and good BitTorrent clients have RSS reading either built into them, or can do it through a plugin.

      I personally use the client Azureus (which works on Linux as well as others), with the RSSFeed [sourceforge.net] plugin. It works very well.
    • That's good. What I'm looking for now is a push-based P2P system; one which allows you to subscribe for content and will then automatically download new content as it's propagated through the network.

      You want to do this in a decentralised manner? Tricky. You end up having to subscribe to a hub, so that when the hub gets notified of a change, it notifies you. In turn, the hub subscribes to another hub, etc, until you reach the original source of the file. Whenever the file changes, the notifications would

  • Example Bitorrent/RSS Feed (Score:4, Interesting)

    by sleeeper ( 210375 ) * <slashdot AT bigelow-springs.net> on Thursday August 26, 2004 @01:43PM (#10081042) Homepage
    I wanted to mess around with Bittorrent and RSS, so I added a feed (or whatever the officail lingo is) for my Air America Radio Ogg Vorbis Archive.

    It has saved me a lot of bandwidth, because now people are leaving their bittorrent clients open longer (due to the automated downloads leading them to passively leave their downloader open).

    Here is a link: http://bigelow-springs.net/airamerica/

  • Buy music, no thanks (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 26, 2004 @01:44PM (#10081049)
    its called downloading LEGAL music:

    http://bt.etree.org

    Excellent legit application of p2p to distribute legal music.

    I have been filling up dvds left and right once i found out i like a lot of those bands.

    I wont buy music from any RIAA member, except bands that allow legal trading of their music. that is kind of a toss up. do i support the band that "gets it", and support the industry heads that dont.

    well i dont even download RIAA members music anymore. but i am not buying it either, guess i must be a pirate, hurting their sales.

    so they can assume all they want that i am a pirate because i am not buying their trash, my conscience is clean.

  • my suggestion -from a musician (Score:4, Interesting)

    by peculiarmethod ( 301094 ) on Thursday August 26, 2004 @01:46PM (#10081070) Journal
    umm.. okay, here's my two pence.

    We should start a govt run program, much like Social Security, only one that isn't a joke. It would work like this:

    You're a musician- you get paid by the Artist Living Payment Option. A nationwide program that uses taxes and donations in order to merely pay for distribution, and pay royalties to the artists. Payments from ALPO would be contingent upon number of releases, how current last release, and popularity (based on distribution systems numbers). An algorithm would use these variables to give a somehwat fair distribution of monies alloted/gathered. Distribution? Anywhere wifi can be set up. Which is everywhere, now. Keyosks are set up to have a digital display of songs list.. you pick and choose like a juke box.. create your login name and password.. and log your computer, or wifi IPOD, or whatever to the system and download the songs for free. You want a CD or dont have a computer type thingy? Pay 5 bucks for the hard copy.

    Kinda like shareware.. only I think the govt funding the arts a bit more would benefit the creativity of its future citizens (think children).

    anyway..

    it will never happen. All we'll get as musicians is alpo. Not ALPO.

    pm

    • Re:my suggestion -from a musician (Score:5, Funny)

      by Agent Green ( 231202 ) * on Thursday August 26, 2004 @02:01PM (#10081220)
      Alpo already comes in can and bag form, is loaded with nutrients and proteins...and if it's good enough for your dog, it's almost certainly good enough for you. :)
    • Why does this have to be government run?
    • Or we could have a system where people who want to listen to music could pay for it! We could call these people "consumers" and they could buy music in a format called "Compact Discs" at places called "stores". That way only the people who like a given piece of music end up paying for it and we dont end up with a broken socialist system like Europe.

      The day my taxes go to Yanni is the day I start setting towns on fire.

      • Except the "CD"s sold at "stores" are produced and distributed by the evil cartel "RIAA" which claims the vast majority of the proceeds for itself, and occaisionally pays the artist a pittance. . .when it bothers to go looking for them. .
    • what i fi have no interest to pay for this? I don't need their music and don't want my government holding a gun to my wallet and forcing me to pay so that some artist can produce stuff. If YOU want to pay an artist for something that you appreciate, then knock yourself out, but how do you asume it's fair to TAX me to pay for your idea? jeez this whole idea drives me nuts.
    • We should start a govt run program...

      Yeah, they have something like that in Cuba already. It's no surprise to me that people are literally jumping off that island into homemade rafts in attempt to float across shark-infested waters to Florida.

  • It doesn't help the cause that their google ads are 4 or 5 variations on the theme of:

    Download Unlimited MP3s,
    Music, CDs Movies, Games,
    Software and More!

    Geez...

    • Re:minor hypocrisy (Score:3, Informative)

      by chatooya ( 718043 )
      Hey, this is Nick from Downhill Battle. Yeah, I agree that those ads are pretty bad, and we actually blocked a couple that were even more egregious. We're just trying to make a little bit of money back to pay for hosting and whatnot. Hopefully, we can get our fundraising together better and not do ads on any of our stuff.

  • Downhill Battle lost all credibility with me... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Have Blue ( 616 ) on Thursday August 26, 2004 @01:55PM (#10081170) Homepage
    ...for this [downhillbattle.org]. Look at the caption on the second and the last pictures. If you're going to throw moral/ethical stones at the RIAA, get out of the glass house.

    • Re:Downhill Battle lost all credibility with me... (Score:4, Informative)

      by chatooya ( 718043 ) on Thursday August 26, 2004 @02:07PM (#10081271)
      Hey this is Nick from Downhill Battle again. First, I think those are pretty clearly meant to be humourous captions, so I think it's a little silly to even get into it, but let me respond. I don't see how the second to last caption is even an issue-- it's a joke about filesharing and we strongly believe that the value of being able to listen to any music in the world should be defended and a licensing system can make it work for musicians. As for the last caption, the real reason that we returned the camera was because it was crappy. We needed a camera, we got it, started using it, and it wasn't worth keeping. I don't see how this is an ethical issue-- Walmart just puts it back on the shelf and that return policy is there in the first place because it makes them money.
    • Its not throwning moral/ethical stones in glass houses. You just dont understand what these people are trying to say. They're against teh RIAA etc trying to stop them doing what ever the fuck the want without consequences. You see the world OWES them free movies, music, software etc.
      • Come on, this is ridiculous. If you disagree with what we're saying, then that's fine, but don't imply positions that we've never taken.
        • Come on, this is ridiculous. If you disagree with what we're saying, then that's fine, but don't imply positions that we've never taken.

          That statement could adequetly go in almost any thread on slashdot.

          I wish you the best with your efforts but don't expect too many reasonable discussions here.
      • You see the world OWES them free movies, music, software etc.

        The distribution companies OWES us reasonable access to reasonable amounts of copyrighted materal at reasonable rates. I found iTunes to be quite reasonable, and millions of paid-for and downloaded songs back up my position.

        If a company chooses to ignore demand, in our capitalist country what right do they have to throw laws around to prevent their inevitable demise?

    • I agree. Based on their destruction of property, and they're "borrowing" cameras from Walmart, they've become no better than a bunch of idiots on a crime spree.

      It would be one thing if they marched in front of the store with signs, or put bumber stickers on their car, or put flyers on cars in the parking lot, or handed out pamphlets, but to actively go in and physically deface property that is not theirs, regardless of their "moral high ground", is wrong.

      Welcome to the MTV "Bam" generation.

  • Executable wrappers? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by gojomo ( 53369 ) on Thursday August 26, 2004 @02:26PM (#10081445) Homepage
    BitTorrent is good, DownhillBattle's idea of making BT easier for a larger audience is good, but their proposed technique has problems. The "Blog Torrent" site says....

    "One good way to do this [avoid excluding a large portion of users] is to attach torrent files to an executable client."

    Directing unsophisticated users to download custom EXEs from any random site offering big media they want would be a dangerous step backwards, encouraging a very unsafe practice that's likely to get their machines infected with various kinds of malware, sooner or later.

    I'd suggest instead improving the installers of well-respected BT clients, and encouraging users to get them from well-known sites.

    It loses a little in terms of instant gratification, butbut is instant gratification worth it if it also risks instant victimization?

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