Napster Reprieve

camusflage writes: "As if to try to prove that Napster doesn't suck, the 9th Circuit Appeals Court overturned Marilyn Patel's July 11th order that Napster remain down. Now they've got the green light to turn it back on, blocking "only" 99% of copyrighted songs, instead of the full 100% Judge Patel required of them. Full details here."

Comments

No need to post anything here...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll save everyone the trouble:

63 "I don't need Napster, I've got WinMX/AudioGalaxy/Gnutella/etc." posts
8 "Like it or not: what you're doing is illegal." posts
38 "Napster was dead a long time ago." posts
24 "I thought this was supposed to be 'Stuff That Matters'?" posts
3 "First Posts"
40 "I hate the recording companies!" posts
58 "I'm sick of hearing about Napster." posts

There. Now we can just end this topic and get on with more important things. What's that? Good software takes ten years?...

Napster, the Motion Picture

[ch-chuck]

right here

work, work, work.

Who Cares

[samael]

Really, who cares? I've got Gnutella and WinMX and I'm sticking to them.

Napster's only chance was to get a tidal wave of defence for its actions, and it failed. In its favour, it inspired a lot of people, and its caused a lot people to rethink their beliefs on intellectual property.

But it's dead and gone now, no point worrying about the corpse.
_____

Re:Who Cares

[wackysootroom]

Just because it is dead and gone does not lessen its importance in the legal arena one bit. The napster case was basically the turning point and testing ground for the DMCA. The recording industry has too much power, and napster proved it.

heh

[British]

This article's been here for a little over 12 hours, and it only has 18 replies.

That speaks louder than the comments.

Re:why?

[Stephen Samuel]

If you look at the larger legal battle over whether or not the DMCA is constitutional, or not, the REAL fight of that question is going to take place in the higher courts (Courts of appeal and Supreme Court). The fight in the lower courts is simply setting the baseline for the larger fight. Yes, he's likely to loose at this level, because the lower courts rarely look at the question of whether the law itself is valid. That tends to happen in the higher courts.

You still have to fight the lower court fight like your life depends on it -- because it does. If you surrender a technicality that turns out to be pivotal issue at the higher level, you lose the greater battle. It can be hard to figure out, at this level, what the pivotal issues are going to be.

This is one of those instances of "somebody's got to do it". Given that the fortune he made was made through the sharing of music, I can see him being willing to tithe a portion of it to the fight over the peoples' rights to share their beloved art. -- and if he wins, he may still make money out of it.

I know that it may not make sense from a pure greed point of view -- but not everybody operates from a pure greed perspective. Some people take on battles for a larger section of society than just themselves. I think that it's something that we should honor -- even if we wouldn't do it ourselves.
--

Sticking to your guns

[codingOgre]

Napster has proven the old addage, "Give someone an inch and they will take a mile". Napster should have *never* given an inch to the RIAA. Once they did the RIAA just kept asking for more & more until Napster was effectively useless. Court orders be damned, let the US Supreme Court decide on the matter and burn up all the VC money and go out like a rock star not a punk :^)