Can't even seek through songs.
this post was submitted on 17 Oct 2023
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I am on lemmy right?
I only skimmed, but not one single suggestion to federated our music? Isn't that what we need to do now, and not for downloading, simply sharing libraries. It's out there...
There's a ton of technical reasons that would be difficult and stupid expensive, even if completely ignoring the aspect of being highly illegal.
Federation isn't a magic concept that instantly fixes the internet.
Doesn't have to he illegal at all. Plenty of freely shared music out there, and some with less restrictive licenses.
On the other hand it seems absurd I am not allowed to let other people browse my library and listen to songs. Not copy them, simply stream them.
What if we collectively bought the music and lent it out in library fashion? Only I user per stream. I refuse to give up having control because of stupid backwards laws.
And this is enforced how? By having a whitelist of file hashes for songs that can be legally shared in this way? At that point just set up a server for streaming/downloading those files... except that already exists with their existing free distribution methods.
Licensing still applies, and technically you're still providing a download by streaming with no drm.
I'd love for the money to materialize for that but it's a pipe dream, and still likely has licensing concerns more complicated than you're expecting. At that point you're only a few steps from spotify again as well, as the costs of infrastructure for providing this service would not be anywhere close to as cheap as hosting for primarily text based servers. The money has to come from somewhere.
Beyond all that, federation doesn't come into the concepts you're suggesting yet at all. The only benefit to federation of this would be to spread the base files across more servers.
Additionally, you can totally share your music library with whoever you want already via a decent number of self-hostable media servers. Can even do the streaming only option that you seem to think would somehow make it legally more viable.
And there it is! Yo ho, yo ho...
For context, my home lemmy instance is dbzero, the piracy instance. Yarr!
I guess I'm just trying to point out that if you don't care about laws or being caught, you can already do exactly what you're asking for fairly easily.
If you only care to share with specific trusted friends, those options work fine too as you won't be caught.
If you simply don't want to be caught, laws be damned, there's options like soulseek, or maybe hosting a file or media server on Tor.
If you do care about laws and not having the music industry coming for your ass, then you should probably give up on this project as there's too much money invested in the status quo to challenge it.
And ultimately, federation doesn't solve any of the issues with music sharing or streaming except maybe keeping the media available while just giving more targets for legal action.
Tl;dr- federation is a tool with uses and limitations like any other tool, not a magic "make the internet better" button
True about the enforcement, that would be difficult. If one of the federated nodes suddenly had copyright material, how would we know and deal with it? How does Funkwhale deal with it?
No, the whole point is distributed servers (and users), and there are not easy distribution using a single server method.
I can't believe we cant get past this, it is ridiculous.
Edit: the library idea was like Freegal where different libraries can contribute.
well yeah, if you pretend the laws don't exist then nothing has to be illegal.
More like get them changed of course, the rules make absolutely no sense. Of course that will be hard because the publishers and corporations have a nice racket going.
I pirate all my music since that's the only "service" that has never tried to fuck me over
Thing is, most people want to listen to copyrighted music. Federating copyrighted music is a surefire lawsuit for anyone who hosts that federated service.
And you don't need federation for acquiring music files. Torrents are better for resilience than federation, since they form a distributed network, not just a decentralized network.
There is a piece of software that implements federation for music, called Funkwhale.
This is their flagship instance: https://open.audio
That flagship instance hosts basically only Creative Commons music and podcasts, due to aforementioned problem.
The other instances I've seen federating with it, were generally self-hosted by musicians or podcasters to share their own work.
I imagine, if an instance started federating copyrighted music (which wasn't separately licensed by the artist either), it would need to be defederated by everyone else in the network ASAP, to avoid lawsuits.
Right. In another comment i wondered how funkwhale was handling copyright.
Personally, I gave up on copyrighted music. I just don't care, there is so much freely traded music out there it just doesn't matter to me.
But then again 99 percent of music on my server is live so I know I am the oddball
Alright, yeah. I do even feel the same about copyrighted music. But lots of people want to listen to their favorite artists and will accept rather much pain to do so...
I don't know what the difference is between downloading and sharing libraries, but check out Soulseek. It's a little file-sharing program that lets others download directly from your music folder and vice versa. When I couldn't find an album on any torrent tracker, some hero on Soulseek had it. The main drawback compared to torrents is that you're limited to the upload speed of this one person, you can't connect to a dozen people with the same files and combine their power.