Apple’s customers, embracing the simplicity of its products, want to move their music and movies around (particularly ones they actually pay for) unfettered by DRM: Apple says no. With its market clout, Apple has the opportunity to take a stand against the music insultry and the movie biz. It has consciously chosen not to.

Apple’s customers want to buy its slick new iPhone and use it anywhere in the world, on the network of their choosing. Apple says no. With its brand power, Apple could have created and released an unlocked phone (like, say, Palm) and allowed the market to embrace it as a platform. And as users and hackers have developed workarounds to get what they want, Apple is attempting to punish them by frying infringing iPhone firmware.

In the case of iTunes, the market has been free to work around Apple’s ignorance as there has long been a thriving DIVX and MP3 bazaar thanks to a number of file sharing networks over which to exchange them, and with some effort those are playable in iTunes and transferable to iPod. In the case of the iPhone, though, Apple has inadvertently catalyzed a real revolution. From the iPhoneSimFree.com web site today:

“…for our customers who have no immediate need to use alternate providers and are still using their AT&T card, you are welcome to update your phone. For the rest please be patient, as the jailbreak issue is something that affects much more than just the unlocking. The thousands of open source developers who have put a cumulative 10s of thousands of man hours into various apps and tools now have no way to get them onto the phone as well. We are all looking into the jailbreak issue as it affects us all, and we will keep updating our site as well as the open source community at large with any information we can about this.”

In both operating modes, Apple has partnered with a cabal and taken their side, rather than the market’s side. They’ve thoroughly misjudged the ingenuity of the mob and the ill will that has been built up over decades between the market and the companies that service them. And by sitting at the wrong side of the table in the ongoing war, Apple has not only passed over a perfect opportunity to affect positive change, shift the lumbering elephants of industry, and stimulate growth, but it has jeopardized its credibility and brand equity.

Apple doesn’t just need to “Think Different” … it needs to “Act Different”. People will not forget their behaviour through this era, just as Mac enthusiasts still vilify John Sculley for rejecting numerous fundamentals that made the original Mac (even in its time) as successful as it was.

Thinking Different was supposed to be Apple’s raison-d’etre. Here’s the text from the icon above, originally penned by Jack Kerouac, which is the TextEdit icon in OS X Leopard:

“Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes – the ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules and they have no respect for the status quo. You can praise them, disagree with them, quote them, disbelieve them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing that you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things.”

This was the cornerstone of Apple’s 1997 “Think Different” campaign, and it’s unsurprising that it lives on as an Easter Egg nestled within a core application of their operating system. Since the 1980s, Apple has leveraged its entire brand identity on rebelliousness. Every campaign, up to and including the smug, polarizing “I’m a Mac” series have extended this equity, largely with products that truly were “different”.

In dancing with the devil by partnering with the Movie, Music, and Wireless industries, Apple has achieved things that few other companies could have and to a limited extent has torn down some walls.  But the compromises, such as its revenue sharing arrangement with wireless carriers, are downright faustian.  And as Apple has been attempting to “evolve” these arrangements to greater customer-friendliness and openness, they are learning the price one pays when one’s business (and quarterly reporting) becomes enmeshed with the whims of a dinosaur.

The iPhone takes this the furthest at both extremes: It’s the most limited platform Apple has created, and it’s also the one with the most potential to be revolutionary. Like a date with Ann Coulter, buying and using an iPhone begins all shiny and pretty and ends up on the rocks amid a boil of hostility, frustration and creative limitations. That the source of all of that negativity is the smoldering heap of what used to be Cingular wireless is not something that the market will acknowledge or forgive.

With these two bubbling issues, Apple is quickly approaching a brand crisis. It has drawn to its corner just the sort of people who are revolutionaries, who affect change, and who decry cronyism. These people have actively laboured to help Apple to continue to push the envelope there, but at the same time they are prone to fickleness.

Miller Brooks, an ad firm, points out that a Brand Crisis can hit any company, no matter how well-entrenched — and quickly. They recommend starting to manage the situation by finding your ethical compass, and then rapidly thereafter accepting reality. Apple is fortunate in that it need only look to its users to find its ethical compass. Many of them are bloggers. All of them are vociferous. 🙂

Apple needs to listen to the wisdom of the crowd. I believe they are at a critical fork in the road. “Brand Crisis” and “Apple” are not terms usually read in the same paragraph, but perhaps this is a sign of things to come.

When the Fake Steve Jobs is more in touch with the market than the Real Steve Jobs, Apple may have officially jumped the shark.

Over at NewTeeVee there’s an interesting post by Jackson on the struggle that the MPAA et al have had coming up with a specification for allowing you to make “managed copies” of your purchased content. Of course, the fact that each successive specification is cracked within weeks of its drafting would deter the efforts of any organization compelled by logic and customer responsiveness, but this is the MPAA we’re talking about.

The problem is that the RIAA/MPAA cabal have effectively tied their own hands, by petitioning the supreme court in their fruitless pursuit of Peer-to-Peer networks for a judgment. They may have, way back in 2005, gotten more than they bargained for when Supreme Court Justice David H. Souter said:

“We hold that one who distributes a device with the object of promoting its use to infringe copyright, as shown by clear expression or other affirmative steps taken to foster infringement, is liable for the resulting acts of infringement by third parties.”

Oops. Now the MPAA and electronics manufacturers, under such a sweeping definition, could themselves become liable for the copying and redistribution of material. In fact, they can’t produce a standard which they know has been haxx0red and unleash it on the market.

And as EFF’s Susan Crawford has pointed out, they’re in league with even the network carriers to take us all backward in time. In draft language, the FCC is asserting that it:

(a) has authority to adopt such regulations governing digital audio broadcast transmissions and digital audio receiving devices that are appropriate to control the unauthorized copying and redistribution of digital audio content by or over digital reception devices, related equipment, and digital networks, including regulations governing permissible copying and redistribution of such audio content….

This means that they will be ceaselessly back to the drawing board perfecting easily-hacked technologies, and layering their media with difficult to use interfaces, handshakes, and protocols (as I found out when I had my my run-in with HDCP). The result is that media coming through official retail channels such as Best Buy or the iTunes Music Store that you try to watch on your PVR or HD-DVD player will be more difficult to view and manipulate than the DIVX-encoded material you download by fiddling with a BitTorrent client.

P2P has traditionally existed aside from the mainstream by nature of the fact that it’s a fairly high-friction model for obtaining and viewing digital content. You might not have the right CODEC libraries to view your favourite British TV show, or you might have trouble configuring your linksys router so that all the P2P traffic passes through to the right computer in your house optimally, as examples.

Traditional media (DVDs, Cable TV, etc.) have always dominated the mainstream because they’ve been easy to handle, easy to watch, and of course easy to get. For some of us, that convenience in itself is the primary value of such media, and why lots of us still buy stuff at Best Buy even when we can and do also use file sharing networks like eDonkey.

But imagine if the stuff you bought at Best Buy no longer worked together without Herculean effort. Imagine if the HD-DVD you brought home or the Streamed HD Movie you paid for on your PVR were hobbled by characteristics that made them hard to use. Furthermore, ask yourself why, after ten years of Pay-Per-View Movies, we still have video rental stores?

The answer is the consumer market’s innate resistance to difficulty, and our desire to not have the means in which we consume information dictated by the CEO of some sandbagged, heretofore unknown, media company.

When the media companies set the barriers higher and higher for consuming their material the old-fashioned way, they’re practically begging the mainstream, using the Internet, to route right around them. When they make us all experts in HDCP handshaking, HDMI systems integration, and the finer nuances of Dolby versus DTS Surround Sound, they lower the barriers to grabbing and viewing our entertainment and information on that most dreaded of all platforms: the computer, and the internet.

And despite 20 solid years of effort, media companies have been profoundly unsuccessful in combating what we do on our computers once we get their stuff in our hands. And even with a Bush government, the DMCA, and legions of lawyers they have had little concrete impact except to increase the friction and lower the value of the mainstream consumer media.

I can see this through to its logical conclusion. Computers, software, and the internet will increasingly transact our consumption of movies, music, and what we will one day say we used to call “TV shows”. The big media distribution companies will increasingly become unnecessary, and will have cut themselves out of the action.

And in my view, they’d deserve it.

-Ian.

Give people choice and freedom and they’ll pay. Try to sue your own frickin’ customers into oblivion and we’ll see you in bankruptcy.

-Ian.

—— http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&u=/washpost/20030909/ tc_washpost/a47297_2003sep9&e=1 RIAA vs. the People Tue Sep 9,11:06 AM ET

By Cynthia L. Webb, washingtonpost.com Staff Writer

The Recording Industry Association of America ( news -web sites )made good on its promise to prosecute Americans who engage in the illegal downloading and trading of pirated music, filing 261 copyright violation suits yesterday.

“Legal actions have been taken on a sporadic basis against operators of pirate servers or sites, but ordinary computer users have never before been at serious risk of liability for widespread behavior. The RIAA said that’s the point it’s underlining with the unprecedented legal action,” CNET’s News.com reported.

But in an editorial today, the San Jose Mercury News said the RIAA’s legal campaign is bad policy: “Suing your customers, as a long-term strategy, is dumb — even if they bring misfortune upon themselves. … The suits are the unfortunate, but predictable response of an industry that failed to see the Internet until it stared it in the face. Since Napster ( news -web sites ) first appeared four years ago and declared the death of the compact disc, music CD sales have fallen more than 25 percent. A generation of music fans don’t think twice about copyrights, which they associate with overpriced CDs and parasitic studio execs.”

According to the Mercury News editorial board, the music labels “won’t win back many of those customers until they make their full catalog of tunes easily accessible over the Internet, in formats that people want, at prices they’re willing to pay. That’s starting to happen — Apple Computer ‘s iTunes Music Store and BuyMusic.com are offering songs from 49 cents to $1 — but the offerings are limited. The music studios are still dragging their feet. For now, the big labels hope to scare people straight, particularly parents, since copyright owners can sue children for theft.”

The New York Times pointed out an even larger implication of the RIAA suits: “With the club of lawsuits and the olive branch of an amnesty program, the music industry is waging a campaign against online piracy that relies on both public relations and economics to attack the idea that everything in cyberspace can be free,” the article said. “That will not be easy. The Internet sprang from a research culture where information of all kinds was freely shared. That mentality still resonates with the millions of Internet users who routinely download music onto their computers. But the emphatic message of the music industry’s two-step program announced yesterday is that the days of plucking copyrighted songs off the Internet without paying for them are numbered.”

An Escalating Fight Against Ordinary People

Thousands more lawsuits against fileswappers are expected in the coming months as the RIAA looks to make examples of the worst digital pirates: People accused of downloading and sharing on average more than 1,000 illegally downloaded songs, thanks to Gnutella ( news -web sites ),Kazaa ,Grokster and other popular file-trading services.

The Washington Post said the “legal offensive aims to stem the tide of online song sharing launched by Napster in the late 1990s, and it is likely to strike fear into the hearts of parents who have not closely monitored their teenagers’ computer habits. That’s because the lawsuits were filed against the holders of Internet service accounts, regardless of who in the household was responsible for swapping the songs.”

The Los Angeles Times said the “cases — the first of thousands the labels expect to file in federal courts — mark a turning point in the music industry’s four-year battle against rampant piracy on the Internet. For the first time, the recording industry is training its considerable legal firepower on individuals, not the companies profiting from the public’s hunger for free music,” The Los Angeles Times said. “One quirk in the process, though, is that the defendants named aren’t necessarily the people using file-sharing networks. That’s because the Recording Industry Assn. of America’s investigation identified only the people whose Internet access accounts were being used to share files. They might be the parents, roommates or spouses of the alleged pirates.”

The RIAA suits hit the young and old and stretched across economic lines too. Among those sued is the Bassett family from Northern California. ” Scott Bassett said neither he nor his wife used the family PC in Redwood City, Calif., for music, but their teenagers and dozens of their friends do. Had he known what was going on, he said, ‘I would have pulled the plug,'” The Los Angeles Times reported, quoting the former junkyard operator who, like other targets of the suits, was confused about what to do. “Do I really need to hire a lawyer? Can I just call them up and say I’m sorry and give them back all the music that was downloaded? I’m just a little guy,” Bassett told the paper.

The Bassetts were darlings of the media yesterday, appearing in a number of articles, perhaps since they illustrated so nicely the ironic twist of the suits, which can target people who own the ISP accounts, not necessarily the file-swappers themselves. “I can’t believe this,” Vonnie Bassett , mother of a 17-year-old file-swapper, told The San Jose Mercury News. “To think I might actually have to pay money to these people. I think it’s the stupidest thing that the recording industry would do this.”

Lisa Schamis , a 26-year-old New Yorker, “said her Internet provider warned her two months ago that record industry lawyers had asked for her name and address, but she said she had no idea she might be sued. She acknowledged downloading ‘lots’ of music over file-sharing networks,” the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported. “This is ridiculous,” Schamis said. “People like me who did this, I didn’t understand it was illegal.” Neither did Nancy Davis , a Sanol, Calif. schoolbus driver. “From what I understood — and I’m not the most computer-savvy person in the world — I thought it was becoming legal,” Davis told The San Francisco Chronicle. “I’m completely shocked by the whole thing,” Heather McGough , a single mom of two children from Santa Clarita, Calif., told The Los Angeles Times. She “figured that the music-sharing services that survived after Napster was shut down must be legal. She said she let a friend install a program for the Kazaa file-sharing network on her computer so that she could listen to music — songs she already owned on CDs — while she worked.”

Paying the Piper

So what’s in store for those snared in the RIAA lawsuits? “The RIAA suits seek an injunction to stop the defendants’ file sharing, as well as damages and court costs. Copyright law allows for damages of up to $150,000 per infringement — in other words, per swapped song,” The Washington Post noted. More from The Boston Globe: “Accusing the defendants of copyright infringement, the music association is requesting statutory damages of $750 to $150,000 for each song, bringing the potential liability of some file-sharers into the millions of dollars.”

“Individuals, I’m sure no matter who they are, simply don’t have that kind of money,” Atlanta attorney Doug Isenberg , who specializes in Internet law, told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “And there’s no way possible the RIAA can sue even a meaningful number of people, because there are tens of millions of potential defendants.”

Perhaps some good news for those being sued: The Philadelphia Inquirer reported that the “RIAA has been settling for less: Yesterday, it announced $3,000 agreements with fewer than 10 people whose Internet service providers had received subpoenas.”

RIAA President Cary Sherman told The Los Angeles Times “he would welcome cases going to trial because it would help establish for the public that file sharing is illegal. The proceeds from any trials or settlements will be kept by the RIAA to cover the cost of its anti-piracy campaigns, he said, rather than being used to compensate labels and artists. Several lawyers warned that the RIAA’s amnesty offer may be a bad deal. Those who apply for amnesty from the RIAA must confess their past transgressions, but that won’t protect them from being pursued by music publishers, independent labels or even federal prosecutors.” The RIAA is offering amnesty to those who admitted to file-swapping, erase their digital libraries of songs and sign a notarized promise not to do it again.

Criticism From the Usual Suspects

Critics of the RIAA’s move were vocal in their objections to yesterday’s developments. The Electronic Frontier Foundation clearly hates the idea of the lawsuits. “Does anyone think that suing 60 million American file-sharers is going to motivate them to buy more CDs?,” EFF Staff Attorney Wendy Seltzer asked in a statement . “File sharing networks represent the greatest library of music in history, and music fans would be happy to pay for access to it, if only the recording industry would let them.”

Bill Evans , founder of Boycott-RIAA.com , told The Baltimore Sun that the lawsuits amount to a witch hunt. “They are trying to intimidate people and to stop file-sharing because they can’t control it,” Evans said. “If that’s the case, we believe they should take over a portion of the market and make it more affordable to people.”

Elan Oren , chief executive of file-sharing site iMesh , told The New York Times that “rather than filing huge lawsuits, record labels should work with file-sharing services to devise a method of compensation in exchange for legally distributing their music over the peer-to-peer networks. But record companies say creating a compensation system for file sharing — for instance, imposing a tax that could be redistributed to copyright holders — would be extremely difficult.”

“Michael McGuire , research director at the GartnerG2 research firm, said the threat of legal action needs to be just one part of a more widespread effort by the recording industry to deal with illegal Internet music swapping,” The Chicago Tribune said. “Are hard-core traders going to see the light and see the error of their ways?” McGuire told the paper. “I don’t think so.”

RIAA Strategy Paying Off

The music industry’s tactics, while controversial, have made a dent to some file-swapping. “Still, there is little agreement about whether the industry’s tactics are having much impact on music piracy. The recording industry has cited data from research firm NPD Group that estimated the number of households downloading music from the Internet declined 28% to 10.4 million in June from 14.5 million in April, around the time music companies began publicizing a campaign to target individual file sharers. Music companies have also been trying to wean music fans off file-sharing programs by licensing their songs to commercial music sites like Apple Computer Inc.’s Music Store,” The Wall Street Journal reported. “But services like Morpheus, LimeWire and Grokster all report that usage of their services has grown, especially as students have returned from vacation.”

But the music industry has a long way to go before it stamps out piracy. “From the rise of Napster until today, tens of millions of people have started trading songs, movies and software online through services such as Kazaa with little thought for the legality of their actions,” News.com noted. “Even as the threat of Monday’s lawsuits loomed, more than 2.8 million copies of the Kazaa software were downloaded last week, according to Download.com , a software aggregation site operated by CNET News.com publisher CNET Networks . Indeed, a recent study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project found that 67 percent of people downloading music said they did not care whether the music was copyrighted or not.”

The Future of E-Music?

Apple’s iTunes is being held up as a successful, legal alternative to secret file-swapping. The pay-for-play service has been a hit with music fans and everyone from Sony to Microsoft is looking for a comparable match to compete with the service. Apple’s service has sold 10 million songs since its launch in May. “Legally selling 10 million songs online in just four months is a historic milestone for the music industry, musicians and music lovers everywhere,” Apple head Steve Jobs ( news -web sites )said, according to BBC News Online, which noted (how ironic, in light of the complications of the RIAA’s legal suits) that the 10 millionth song sold on the service was “Complicated,” by Avril Lavigne .

> From: Gregory Alan Bolcer
> Date: Sat May 31, 2003 3:57:02 PM US/Pacific
> To: FoRK
> Subject: Re: waste testbed
> Reply-To: gbolcer [at] endeavors [dot] com
>
> Wow. Deja Vu all over again. Those dang
> Nullsofter’s causing the exact same problems they
> did 3 years ago.
>
> Greg
>
> Elias Sinderson wrote:
>>
>> Part 1.1 Type: Plain Text (text/plain)
>> Encoding: 7bit
>>
>> AOL pulls Nullsoft file-sharing software
>> By Jim Hu
>> > e-sharing%20software>
>>
>> Staff Writer, CNET News.com
>> May 30, 2003, 2:06 PM PT
>> http://news.com.com/2100-1032-1011585.html
>> <3189 https://ianbell.com/2002/09/30/starving-music-fans-cling-to-former-glory/ Mon, 30 Sep 2002 23:08:02 +0000 https://ianbell.com/2002/09/30/starving-music-fans-cling-to-former-glory/ Nasty URL below.

—— http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/ Article_Type1&c=Article&cid26145760957&call_page=TS_News&call_pageid968332188492&call_pagepath=News/News&col–8793972154

Sep. 28, 05:24 EDT Nirvana reborn with a powerful song Ben Rayner

The song “You Know You’re Right” is a powerful reminder of Kurt Cobain’s talent. It says a lot about how desperately rock ‘n’ roll yearns for another “revolution” akin to the grunge boom of the early 1990s when an eight-year-old track from a defunct band with a long-dead singer ranks as, quite possibly, the single most anticipated release of 2002.

Nirvana was that good, though. And while we were all, perhaps, jumping the gun just a bit by proclaiming it the band that defined a generation — and the late Kurt Cobain the voice of that generation — the ensuing years have proven Aberdeen, Washington’s most famous sons to be much, much more than a footnote in rock history.

The accolades for the band happened even before a single, infamous shotgun blast sent everything spinning out of control and cemented Nirvana’s legendary status in April of 1994.

The online leak this week of the unreleased Nirvana song “You Know You’re Right” comes after years of flaccid, but highly popular grunge pretending by “Seattle sound” acolytes like Creed, Puddle of Mudd and Alberta’s Nickelback.

Last year witnessed the publication of an extensive Cobain biography, Charles R. Cross’ Heavier Than Heaven, and the awarding of $4 million to Cobain’s widow, Courtney Love, for the publication rights to her husband’s diaries. Cobain has been on the covers of both Spin and Rolling Stone during the past year. The band might be dead, but its legacy is everywhere.

Now, however, it appears that Nirvana might soon be everywhere again, too.

“You Know You’re Right” surfaced on the Internet last Saturday, just a day after Love announced on Howard Stern’s morning radio show that “lots and lots and lots of money” had settled her long, nasty legal dispute with surviving Nirvana members over who will administer the band’s posthumous business dealings. Love told Stern that a Nirvana retrospective would be in stores by the Christmas holidays.

There is, apparently, no shortage of unreleased Nirvana material to plunder. Guitarist Eric Erlandson, Love’s bandmate in Hole, told Spin in June he’d found a box containing 109 cassettes — demos and early mixes of Nirvana songs, live material from rehearsals and jams with friends, some home recordings of Cobain alone — in Cobain’s house shortly after the singer’s suicide.

“You Know You’re Right” is certainly a keeper. A ragged, discordant howl of pain — quite literally: Cobain repeatedly twists the word into a tortured, 10-second refrain — cut from the same battered cloth as 1993’s bristling In Utero album and riding a bassline that recalls fellow Seattle casualties Alice in Chains’ “Would,” the song was recorded three months before Cobain’s death, yet still sounds as vital and as immediate as anything making the rounds today. If there’s more where that came from, it’s probably worth raiding the vault.

Digging too deep into Nirvana and Cobain’s unreleased catalogue could, of course, sully the brilliant work produced during their abruptly truncated careers if quality control is superseded by the drive for profit and the market is flooded with substandard material.

The mercurial Love, long regarded by many as a careerist and an opportunist looking to cash in on her husband’s valuable repertoire, has already been accused by some observers of using her stake in the Nirvana songbook as a bargaining chip in her own lawsuit to free Hole from its recording contract with Geffen.

It’s tempting, too, to regard the conveniently timed arrival of “You Know You’re Right” on the Net as a shrewd, surreptitious attempt to stoke renewed interest in the band before the greatest-hits package lands in stores later this year. Still, it’s a great tune, an almost shockingly powerful reminder of how singular Cobain and Nirvana’s talent really was that takes but 3 1/2 minutes to destroy all the pale imitations that followed in Nevermind’s wake.

However it got there, sharing the song for free on the Internet is wholly in keeping with Cobain’s everyman ethic. You know the guy would have been down with Napster.

———–

I use LimeWire.

For the uninitiated, all of the clients we’re discussing use the same GNUtella code base which was developed by the the WinAmp guys, NullSoft. Ironically, they released GNUtella six months after they were bought by AOL, which became AOL Time-Warner.

Here’s a quick Ascii Diagram to help you out:

[LimeWire] [BearShare] [Morpheus] [XoloX] [Shareaza] \ [Swapper] | [Gnucleus] | [Phex] | [Qtella] / \ \ \ | | | / / / \ \ \ \ | / / / / \ \ \ \ / / / / / \ \ \ \ / / / / / \ \ \ \ / / / / / \_____\______[GNUtella]__/____/____/

🙂

It’s all the same thing…

-Ian.

On Thursday, September 5, 2002, at 11:49 AM, Adam Wood-Gaines wrote:

> Curiously, I decided to check out Morpheus.
> But it doesn’t look like it’s getting good reviews.
>
> http://download.com.com/3302-2166-10141574.html
>
> And what’s the deal with it being flamed “spyware”?
> That’s seems tres uncool. Are these accusations founded?
>
> I have little experience with file sharing networks, but
> I’m curious to check ’em out on my OSX box.
>
> –Adam
>
>
> — Mark Bussanich wrote:
>> Of course, I would never do anything illegal like download copywritten
>> materials but, in response to Mark’s question regarding alternatives,
>> I am
>> told that Morpheus is a pretty good service. http://www.morpheus.com
>>
>> After all, it’s good to share.
>>
>> Mark (the other)
>>
>> —– Original Message —–
>> From: “mark winder”
>> To: ;
>> Sent: Thursday, September 05, 2002 10:46 AM
>> Subject: Re: @F: [GEEKS] Napster Goes Unmourned to the Grave
>>
>>
>>> I hvae to disagree somewhat – companies dying that had no business
>>> plan is
>>> old news – SO 2000 ;o)
>>>
>>> Personally, I think that what’s really noteworthy is that by going
>>> to the
>>> Napster website (http://www.napster.com – for those of you who need
>>> the
>>> reminder…) one can still find utility in the site. For instance,
>>> the
>>> “Napster was here” image can really spruce up an otherwise drab
>>> desktop
>>> pattern on you PC. You can also… well… actually, I guess that’s
>>> about
>>> it, really…
>>>
>>> …so Napster was fun – what are people now using to get tunes and
>>> videos
>>> off the net?? Any front runners??
>>>
>>> okbye,
>>>
>>> – Mark.
>>>
>>>
>>>> From: Ian Andrew Bell
>>>> To: foib [at] ianbell [dot] com
>>>> Subject: @F: [GEEKS] Napster Goes Unmourned to the Grave
>>>> Date: Thu, 5 Sep 2002 10:40:34 -0700
>>>>
>>>> The death of Napster is not so much a signifier of the victory of
>>>> the
>> RIAA
>>>> over the infidels as it is of the defeat of companies which had no
>>>> identifiable business plan..
>>>>
>>>> -Ian.
>>>>
>>>> ———–
>>>> http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/20020904/wr_nm/
>>>> media_napster_reaction_dc
>>>>
>>>> Napster Goes Unmourned to the Grave
>>>> Wed Sep 4, 1:38 PM ET
>>>>
>>>> By Bernhard Warner, European Internet Correspondent
>>>>
>>>> LONDON (Reuters) – Like so many one-hit wonders before it, the
>>>> demise of
>>>> the once iconic online song-swapping service Napster ( news – web
>>>> sites)
>>>> has failed to stir much sympathy.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> “Really, who cares?” Sebastian, a student at the Technical
>>>> University of
>>>> Darmstadt, Germany, told Reuters as he heard that Napster would
>>>> likely
>> be
>>>> forced into Chapter 7 liquidation as early as Thursday.
>>>>
>>>> “Everybody’s moved on to other file-sharing (services). The
>>>> interest for
>>>> Napster in the Internet community just wasn’t as high as everybody
>>>> originally thought,” said the 28-year old student of IT engineering.
>>>>
>>>> During its heyday in 2000, Napster attracted tens of millions of
>>>> music
>>>> fans who traded all manners of recorded music from Eminem ( news –
>>>> web
>>>> sites) singles to rare concert recordings of the Dave Matthews Band.
>>>>
>>>> To the chagrin of the media establishment, Napster introduced the
>> concept
>>>> of file-trading to a generation of youths who now exchange a wide
>>>> range
>>>> copyright-protected materials from feature-length movies to video
>>>> games,
>>>> drawing Hollywood and lawmakers into the fray to corral the
>>>> activity.
>>>>
>>>> NO CHANCE
>>>>
>>>> While the legacy of Napster thrives, the service itself became a
>>>> non-entity as it shut down a year ago amid mounting legal troubles.
>>>> Thursday, Net discussion groups were largely devoid of commentary
>>>> on the
>>>> online service that major music labels once considered to be public
>> enemy
>>>> number one.
>>>>
>>>> “Well, it’s official,” read one discussion group posting, summing
>>>> up a
>>>> demise that has long had an air of inevitability — as an
>>>> underground
>>>> service it was a hit, but as a business it had no chance.
>>>>
>>>> The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, one of
>>>> Napster’s chief nemeses, gave a bitter-sweet obituary to the defunct
>>>> service.
>>>>
>>>> “Napster had a great technology but it was never going to be
>>>> successful
>>>> until it managed to turn that technology into a legitimate business
>> model
>>>> that respected the copyright of artists and record companies,” the
>>>> IFPI
>>>> said in a statement.
>>>>
>>>> Napster’s fate was sealed Wednesday when a U.S. bankruptcy court
>> rejected
>>>> German media group Bertelsmann’s bid to buy Napster. Record labels
>>>> and
>>>> songwriters had opposed the deal, saying the price was unfair.
>>>>
>>>> IMMINENT LIQUIDATION
>>>>
>>>> The decision leaves Napster, which had been grounded since July,
>>>> 2001,
>>>> with no choice but to pull the plug on the operation.
>>>>
>>>> Napster, which still has a large copyright-infringement suit hanging
>> over
>>>> its head from the labels, is expected to file for Chapter 7
>>>> liquidation
>>>> Thursday, sources said.
>>>>
>>>> A statement from Napster Wednesday said the company had fired staff
>>>> and
>>>> shut down the operation. A trustee will auction off Napster’s assets
>> that
>>>> include its globally recognized brand name, Web addresses and
>> proprietary
>>>> technologies.
>>>>
>>>> The Napster Web Site now consists of two pages — “Napster was
>>>> here” on
>>>> the home page, linking only to a crude tombstone bearing the
>>>> trademark
>>>> headphone-wearing cat and the legend “Ded kitty.”
>>>>
>>>> Wednesday, officials at some of the music labels told Reuters they
>>>> did
>> not
>>>> think the fall of Napster would have any meaningful impact on the
>>>> file-sharing and music piracy craze.
>>>>
>>>> The labels may have triggered Napster’s demise, but it leaves
>>>> behind a
>>>> more powerful crop of imitators including Morpheus MusicCity,
>>>> Grokster
>> and
>>>> Kazaa, sites which have succeeded in driving the activity further
>>>> underground.
>>>>
>>>> As a posting by a person nicknamed “PianoMan” said: “They will never
>> stop
>>>> it. Or even slow it down. And as you may have guessed, I’m not
>>>> sympathetic.”
>>>>
>>>> Henry Wilson, founder of Grokster, a peer-to-peer network named in a
>>>> lawsuit by Hollywood and the labels for copyright abuse, pointed out
>> that
>>>> Napster went out of business before the courts could make a final
>>>> ruling
>>>> on the legitimacy of file-sharing networks.
>>>>
>>>> “I don’t think you can say this is a win for (the labels) on the
>>>> legal
>>>> front,” Wilson told Reuters.
>>>>
>>>> ———–
>>>> FoIB mailing list — Bits, Analysis, Digital Group Therapy
>>>> https://ianbell.com:8888/foib.html
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> – Mark
>>>
>>> —
>>> Mark Winder
>>> me [at] markwinder [dot] net
>>>
>>>

-Ian.

———– http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/20020904/wr_nm/ media_napster_reaction_dc

Napster Goes Unmourned to the Grave Wed Sep 4, 1:38 PM ET

By Bernhard Warner, European Internet Correspondent

LONDON (Reuters) – Like so many one-hit wonders before it, the demise of the once iconic online song-swapping service Napster ( news – web sites) has failed to stir much sympathy.

“Really, who cares?” Sebastian, a student at the Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany, told Reuters as he heard that Napster would likely be forced into Chapter 7 liquidation as early as Thursday.

“Everybody’s moved on to other file-sharing (services). The interest for Napster in the Internet community just wasn’t as high as everybody originally thought,” said the 28-year old student of IT engineering.

During its heyday in 2000, Napster attracted tens of millions of music fans who traded all manners of recorded music from Eminem ( news – web sites) singles to rare concert recordings of the Dave Matthews Band.

To the chagrin of the media establishment, Napster introduced the concept of file-trading to a generation of youths who now exchange a wide range copyright-protected materials from feature-length movies to video games, drawing Hollywood and lawmakers into the fray to corral the activity.

NO CHANCE

While the legacy of Napster thrives, the service itself became a non-entity as it shut down a year ago amid mounting legal troubles. Thursday, Net discussion groups were largely devoid of commentary on the online service that major music labels once considered to be public enemy number one.

“Well, it’s official,” read one discussion group posting, summing up a demise that has long had an air of inevitability — as an underground service it was a hit, but as a business it had no chance.

The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, one of Napster’s chief nemeses, gave a bitter-sweet obituary to the defunct service.

“Napster had a great technology but it was never going to be successful until it managed to turn that technology into a legitimate business model that respected the copyright of artists and record companies,” the IFPI said in a statement.

Napster’s fate was sealed Wednesday when a U.S. bankruptcy court rejected German media group Bertelsmann’s bid to buy Napster. Record labels and songwriters had opposed the deal, saying the price was unfair.

IMMINENT LIQUIDATION

The decision leaves Napster, which had been grounded since July, 2001, with no choice but to pull the plug on the operation.

Napster, which still has a large copyright-infringement suit hanging over its head from the labels, is expected to file for Chapter 7 liquidation Thursday, sources said.

A statement from Napster Wednesday said the company had fired staff and shut down the operation. A trustee will auction off Napster’s assets that include its globally recognized brand name, Web addresses and proprietary technologies.

The Napster Web Site now consists of two pages — “Napster was here” on the home page, linking only to a crude tombstone bearing the trademark headphone-wearing cat and the legend “Ded kitty.”

Wednesday, officials at some of the music labels told Reuters they did not think the fall of Napster would have any meaningful impact on the file-sharing and music piracy craze.

The labels may have triggered Napster’s demise, but it leaves behind a more powerful crop of imitators including Morpheus MusicCity, Grokster and Kazaa, sites which have succeeded in driving the activity further underground.

As a posting by a person nicknamed “PianoMan” said: “They will never stop it. Or even slow it down. And as you may have guessed, I’m not sympathetic.”

Henry Wilson, founder of Grokster, a peer-to-peer network named in a lawsuit by Hollywood and the labels for copyright abuse, pointed out that Napster went out of business before the courts could make a final ruling on the legitimacy of file-sharing networks.

“I don’t think you can say this is a win for (the labels) on the legal front,” Wilson told Reuters.

———–