MP3 Quickies On The Edge Of Forever

bbt wrote in to tell us about Gnute, Rolls wrote in to tell us about the Tabloids' Web site promoting Napster mischief, and Jeckle shared the Washington Post article about the Canadian band, Kittie, using the web to propagate their music. I love Kittie. Oscarfish wrote in about a fantastic "Wall Street Journal article at ZDNet reporting that Napster executives are in meetings with record label executives. This here is a good one. KingOfBongo told us about the Economist article that suggests "...the music industry could easily build a closed commercial news distribution service superior to rogue freeware Napster."

Comments

Re:Napster will SELL-OUT just like mp3.com

[drix]

Time to check some facts.

Napster is not publicly traded and does not have stockholders to answer to. If they did, this saga would have ended a long, long time before they had multiple, concurrent lawsuits piling up.

In Microsoft terms, RIAA is not playing "embrace and extend." Apparently you do not understand the meaning of that phrase, which refers to Microsoft's repeated obfuscation of open standards into proprietary ones which work with only Microsoft products. How you got that out of the RIAA situation is beyond me. All the pot in Mexico couldn't help me find a link between the two.

Wireless TCP/IP is an oxymoron, considering that wireless would seem to pertain to an entirely different layer of the OSI model (e.g.: one) than the TCP/IP suite. I'm still struggling to make the connection between TCP/IP radios, "pirate" radio (which, by the way, was basically legalized at the beginning of this year by that same pesky, greedy FCC that you speak so highly of), and government censorship. Again, it ain't happening.

Again with your "anti-trust" rant we see that you have little to no factual knowledge of the subject matter about which you are writing. The Big 5 record labels that are RIAA have existed for half a century without government prodding - and that harkens back to the 50s and 60s when there were literally no indie labels to speak of and they owned every avenue to distribute and publicize music available. If anything, the climate has gotten more competitive over the years, not less. All history aside, I fail to see how cooperating with Napster, RIAA, Napster and RIAA, Napster, RIAA, CuteMX, iMesh, and Scour combined would net them any sort of anti-trust violation. Perhaps you could elaborate more.

I guess what really annoys me about this post is how it got moderated up to 4 (and probably 5) for basically taking a bunch of buzzwords - "embrace and extend", "wireless TCP/IP" - injecting a healthy dose of anti-government sentiment, capitalizing some random and stigmatized words like KILL or FORCED, mixing them up, and praying for the best in terms of currying mod points.


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Too little too late?

[DrPsycho]

"...the music industry could easily build a closed commercial news distribution service superior to rogue freeware Napster."

Who was the research genius who thought up this brilliant earth shaking concept? Of COURSE the music industry could embrace digital distribution of their content, and because they're fuelled by so much capital, they could probably put together a really slick and well marketed system. People would flock to it.

But they haven't. They've been content with their high priced markups on CDs, and until now haven't really been pushed to do anything about that. Sure, distro channels like Napster encourage illegal distribution of copyrighted material, but legalities aside... I'm just glad it's giving the music industry a sufficient kick in the bloated backside to compel them to do something substantial in the way of innovation.

It will be interesting to see how this pans out. I'll be keeping track of the news while listening to my MP3 collection with XMMS. :^P