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CEO of MP3.Com Accused of Domain Squatting
Frac writes "
Think Michael Robertson, CEO of mp3.com, is a pioneer of mp3s and nothing else? Think again. Apparently he is a domain squatter of various registered trademarks that don't belong to him, according to Wired News. A search on network solution's whois reveals that he has a large collection of domains under his belt, a lot of which are names of products that he doesn't own. They are registered under his name, and Filez and mp3.com, his companies. Domain names include tu-cows.com, audiograbber.com, talk-city.com, and metacrawler.net. "
...unfortunately you have to wade through *seas* of crap to find it. A while ago, I went off on a "screw record companies" trip and tried finding new music on mp3.com instead. It was a depressing experience. I found pounds of poorly recorded ska and kilos of uninsprired techno. I soon went back to the record store.
mp3.com keeps track of the most popular downloads, which is a pretty good idea. It seems that that would help you zero in on the "good" stuff, right? Unfortunately, I found that it wasn't very useful. Perhaps most people download indiscriminately, or perhaps they have poor taste. Or perhaps there just isn't much to be had at mp3.com
What I've really been longing for is a series of independent websites that act as indices into the massive mp3.com archive. An independent site could post reviews from people they pay to wade through all the noise, searching for the elusive signal. I can understand mp3.com not wanting to post star ratings themself, but it would be very nice if another site(s) could take this up, to give us some clue of what's good and what's not.
Perhaps this could even be a community effort?
dreaming on a Sunday,
--Lenny
If you've ever read an article bio of him, you've probably read how he got started with MP3.com. His field was search engines, and he noticed that one of the most popular searches that people were doing (if not the most popular) was for "mp3." He didn't really know much about MP3s, if at all, but when he noticed what a popular search term it was, he went and registered MP3.com.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
Some more information here from Dimension Music. Apparently Robertson simply refuses and ignores requests to have the rightful domain name handed back to their right owners. The programmer behind Audiograbber is getting pretty upset, since mp3.com wholeheartedly endorses MusicMatch, audiograbber's competitor, and audiograbber.com redirects people to mp3.com.