The Liberal Elitist - Napster, Metallica in the News

"I'd Vote Democrat, But I'm Too Rich"

Vol I, Number IV- June, 2000

Napster, Metallica
Merger Announced
In an unexpected move, Napster and Metallica announced their plans to merge today, with the intent to develop a new product that searches your personal belongings for any fan-like items, such as t-shirts, mixed tapes, text-book scribbles of the official metallica logo, etc., and then contacts the appropriate agency to enforce the Metallica trademark or copyright

The Familiar Napster Logo

Proposed New Logo

How to Pirate
Music with Napster
If you've ever used Napster, you're aware of the patent absurdity of the claim that Napster users are rabidly pirating and getting rich from copyrighted music. We thought we'd demonstrate this fact by trying to download and reproduce an entire album by a major artist.

to 5 1/2 minutes long, meaning the downloads would take (with our phone connection and 56K modem) anywhere from 15-30 minutes each. Approximately six hours later, we had all the songs, but three of them were a couple seconds short of the full version (common on Napster) so we searched a little more, but had no luck finding complete versions. This added another 30 minutes to our total Napster time. Next, we had to convert the mp3's to .wav files and burn the C.D. It occurred to us at this point that the pirated C.D. was going to look kind of silly with the "Imation" logo plastered on the front, so we grabbed some spray paint to mimic the texturised disc from the original release. Add another 30 minutes for CD Burning, 30 minutes for drying time, and 10 minutes for adjusting the image size and printing the liner notes. About eight hours later, we had a pretty bad copy of U-2's "Achtung Baby". It occurred to us at this point we could've bought a copy of the C.D., scanned the cover, and duped the disc in about 45 minutes. We knew this was a ridiculous exercise, but thought it might demonstrate a valid point, namely that no-one is using Napster to pirate music and get rich. Any copyrighted material changing hands on Napster is essentially no different than music on mixed tapes made for friends---Free promotion for the artist and the label promoting them. Our personal feeling is

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A Few Words About The Liberal Elitist...

We think it's pretty clear that this is parody. We hope you find it amusing, whatever your political stance. Although we've been accused of being Liberals ourselves, nothing could be farther from the truth. It's just much easier to make fun of extremely priviledged individuals than it is to make fun of nice guys, and making fun of terrorists is way too easy.

What is a Liberal Elitist?

That breed of individual that drives a Lexus, and talks about mass transit. That uses 200 sheets of paper a day at the office, but insists on buying Green Forest toilet paper, even though it's wrapped in plastic.

Direct Your Gripes Here

The New "Naptallica"
control panel in action

We chose U-2's "Achtung Baby", as Bono Vox, lead singer of U-2 was recently quoted, when asked about his feelings on Napster, as saying: "I already get paid too much for what I do...". We began by going to AllMusic.com to round up the U-2 discography, to ensure that our song titles and lengths were in order, and also to snag any cover art that might be available. Then we logged on to Napster and started searching the titles. Most of the tunes are anywhere from 3 1/2

that maybe if the record execs and artists who are so worried that they're losing millions because of Napster and mp3.com had to get a job at Burger King and then try and buy their absurdly over-priced product, the prices would drop, and things like Napster would become irrelevant because the listener would have less of the adverserial feeling they have from being gouged to the tune of $16.98 per C.D., or worse yet, getting sued by the very band they helped make rich...

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