Napster Clawing Back

Posted by timothy on Tuesday September 25, 2001 @08:48AM from the long-odds-short-memories dept.

D Anderson n'Swaart writes: "As the BBC reports in this article, Napster is set to return shortly, as a subscription-based sharing service, a concept facing a less-than-rosy future. The report gives a brief history of Napster, and the current state of the various lawsuits that were brought against it. The briefs: Napster is going to have to fork over a total of around $36M USD, $10M of which is downpayment on future royalties." And whatAnotherAolUser writes that the company "agreed to pay $26 million to settle a copyright lawsuit with songwriters and music publishers, and to make royalty payments to the writers and publishers once it started a fee-based service." Guess it depends where you start counting.

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And an added note... by Masem · 2001-09-25 08:50 · Score: 5, Informative

Note that the $26 million settlement is only with publishers and songwriters; there is still the distributers (aka RIAA) that have ligitigation against Napster that must be overcome before Napster can continue with the subscription service.

--
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
Re:Morpheus... by wurp · 2001-09-25 09:30 · Score: 5, Informative

As reynaert pointed out, there is also an open source client (called giFT) for FastTrack, the protocol that Kazaa/Morpheus/Grokster use.

I'm reposting it since reynaert gave a bad link to it ;)

I haven't tried out giFT yet, but I use Kazaa occasionally, and the number of files and users on the network is astounding (~half million!) You can also regularly find movies on FastTrack that are still in theaters, but don't tell anyone you heard it from me ;)