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Napster Execs Resign, Company Appears to Teeter
renard writes: "The NYT is
reporting that five top executives at Napster,
including founder Shawn Fanning and CEO Konrad
Hilbers, resigned yesterday. This occurs in the
wake of their Board's rejection of the latest
buyout offer from Bertelsmann AG - as Hilbers says, `I am convinced
that not pursuing the offer is a mistake.' Could
this be the end for the upstart MP3 indexing service
that changed everything?"
Napster as a company is irrelevant.
The P2P architecture pioneered by Napster is what matters.
Just like 3dfx (which is no longer) revolutions outlive pioneers.
Let's just hope it doesn't totter as well!
here and here.
---- scrm
And for those who wants to hire Shawn, his CV
is published at todays gnuheter:
http://www.gnuheter.com/article.php?sid=1486
Why should I buy Napster when I just downloaded it from Kazaa??
Attention all planets of the Solar Federation! We have assumed control! - Neil Peart
Napster spent millions
Only the lawyers got rich.
H. Rosen smiles.
Lets see.
Leaders of the worlds largest pirate network are resigning [hopefully to go find a real job....] big deal.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
the napster market share has been taken over by a lot of other p2p applications...
To try to build back a userbase on the napster name would be a mistake imo
It would not supprise me if those 5 execs left at the same time to persue a similar product without the history that napster has had
and Napster will never again regain it's past glory, at least not legally... I'm surprised these rats didn't abandon ship before.
He tried to kill me with a forklift!
Talking about Napster is like talking about Netscape. They are both dead companies that thought the light at the end of the tunnel was daylight when it was an approaching train.
As far as the actual content of the story, it just goes to show what incompetent boobs were running the show. Too much VC money was flowing through them to allow them to give up, I presume.
I have been pwned because my
The courts killed their market and technology. Napster has been history since that ruling, barring an upset by the Supreme Court, which hardly seems likely.
My $0.02 will always be worth more than your â0.02, so
One boy in South Dakota crys at the loss. Hilary Rosen decides to use one of her four remaining orgasms to celebrate. Next expect use, 2024.
Rest of population, doesn't really give a shit. Grandmother unavailable for comment.
Computational Madness in a round package.
Could this be the end for the upstart MP3 indexing service that changed everything?
I thought it ended a long time ago. we already knew it wasn't going to come back in any way shape or form like the good ol' napster.
..they ended a long time ago, the day they first put restrictions on files shared, napster was a poorly developed program since the server was capable of censoring files
This is kind of like the Amiga situation.
The Napster brand has changed owners multiple times. Owners with different agendas have tried (and failed) to shape the brand and the underlying technology to their agendas. During this cacophony, the brand has been rendered irrelevantt in a marketplace of far superior competitors.
Napster is done. It has been rendered irrelevant. Let it die already.
...another on CNET, for those of you who loathe free registration, or whatever :)
--Kylus
Idiot-proof something, and Life will build a better Idiot.
Wired is carrying an article here.
When Napster decided it was going to start filtering its mp3 files, it was doomed. The idea that Napster was costing people and business' money spread, overlooking the increasing sales of CD's. Napster should never had made a deal with the RIAA, as soon as 'subscription based' started getting tossed around, we all knew it was dead. Then you hear about the 5000 song database at the 2002 relaunch, and I nearly choked on the 'itoldyouso' of it all.
So what has the RIAA achieved from this victory?
Although for a short time it was great, and most certainly changed the face of audio entertainment, we can see Darwinism at work. Ideas and implementations which exist in our current tech world, exist in a hostile world, where the single greatest threat comes from the "subpoena attack". Those devices and implementations which are immune to this attack are the ones which will thrive and survive.
If it hadn't been for the destruction of Napster, I doubt there would be the flurishing of the Gnutella clients we see today. And IMHO, although Napster was great for music, Gnucleus is a far better tool for sharing information/entertainment than Napster ever was, or could ever hope to become.
Napster has the distinction of being the first company slain by the serial killer known as the DMCA
Could this be the end for the upstart MP3 indexing service that changed everything?
No, that was March 25, 2002.
Does anyone have any idea why they did that? It cost them dearly, but I've never understood why they made that distinction. Was it to keep porn off the network? Was it to brand the service? What the hell were they thinking?
Seriously, while I didn't ever understand their business model, I mourn the loss.
A year ago I could get any mp3 I wanted. I was just getting into a lot of music (that I have since bought on CD), so this was great.
Even six months ago, when Napster was gone, there was Kazaa.
Now, even that is gone (under Linux).
Gnutella is a nightmare.
I have to say, this is the first instance I can recall where innovation has been squelched by the twin swords of control, legislation and litigation. For some reason, I doubt it will be the last.
The revolution was fast, but the counter-revolution was furious. Let's start preparing for the next round.
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
Just wanted to remind the trolls out there: *apster is not dying.
I find it funny that Napster came and went, the FBI raid came and went and it seems to be business as usual as the new Eminem album is leaked as well as a (bad) cam job of Episode II.
Piracy may never be so widespread and popular again, but it will always exist. Anytime you don't have a free market, a black one will exist.
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
When companies appear to die after turning down offers, I wonder, what do you have to gain by not just taking whatever money and running? Ok, maybe they'll sleep better at night, but somehow I don't feel that figures into it all that much.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
"a sticking point had been Bertelsmann's refusal to indemnify Mr. Barry and Mr. Hummer completely from further lawsuits that the record companies have threatened to file."
Looks like these guys are a little worried that if they take the money and run, the record companies will hunt them down and beat it out of them.
In Soviet Russia, hot grits put YOU down THEIR pants.
Fare thee well.
--
Runnin' around, robbin' banks all whacked on the Scooby Snacks...
There was little point in maintaining the company anyways... from a business perspective, the company possessed little which couldn't or hasn't been engineered elsewhere.
Arguing from a brand name perspective also falls apart as it has been damaged in the eyes of the market and consumers in a number of high profile media reports.
Many of the original millions of users had no intention of contributing financially and have since moved on to other products... it was mainly a way for them to leech music.
This meant that it effectively was running at a loss with little chance of making money from past 'customers' or attracting new customers. The company possessed little valuable assets and legal cases as well as monetry concerns was killing it off slowly.
The biggest surprise was how it has managed to survive this long...
I hope people were able to salt away money as a cushion for their future.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Uh, they were only allowing MP3 files to be transferred on their service. It's not like they could also be used for backing up data files.
Are you going to burn millions of CDs and then mail them out on request, for free?
Having said that, this also makes me kinda optomistic for the future. The future where all the old dinosaurs that are running the world now finally retire, and get replaced with people that have a clue.
When someone yells "Stop" or goes limp, or taps out, the fight is over.
--
Runnin' around, robbin' banks all whacked on the Scooby Snacks...
Can we have a port of the *BSD is dying post to Napster please?
Directly tip/pay musicians (I've said how ad-infinitum here, so I won't repeat my whole rant now). It's not hard to break the payment-system bottleneck and cut out the middlemen, I've been selling the tools for YEARS...
http://101574.clicktwocents.com tips me with my favorite kind of money if you've got any (and around here, I give the stuff away!) but I have 0 musical talent. The Radiators are quite good, though.
JMR
Try e-gold - (contact me). I'm NOT e-
Fun while it lasted. Peace G (Pour some from a 40oz on the ground to honor them).
The Internet is still only ~30 years old. We are still in the "early days." And think about it, when our kids (I'm only 21) use the net, they will be asking us, "What was the Internet like before the government and ACME Corp. screwed it up. You know, in the old days?"
...And when they came for me, there was no one left to speak out for me." - Martin Niemoeller (1892-1984)
"Could this be the end for the upstart MP3 indexing service that changed everything?"
Napster "ended" when they lost their copyright infringement case...
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
Napster was great.
If every musicians in the world went broke from napster, I would still think it was great.
There would be other incentives besides money to create music and life would go on. Maybe there wouldn't be so much of it, but is that such a bad thing?
If I were a musician, of course I'd be pissed, just like anyone else who chooses a profession thats core business model has become obsolete.
I'm sure this post is short sighted, poorly thought out and doesn't consider the massive effect entertainment has on the economy.
I don't care and neither did the thousands of napster users who were told by the recording industry that they needed music in order to live.
The music they forced down the throats of our generation is what encourages this attitude, now they reap what they sow.
The legacy Napster did leave behind is the other filesharing networks (Kazaa, etc.) That's good. However, the genie's out of the bottle, and those services are next.
Time to fire up the ol' FTP client and Usenet reader...
The new, BMG-owned Napster was very much a Responsible Grownup proposition. Responsible Grownups would centralize the files, take them out of that greasy-kids-stuff MP3 format and put them in a Responsible Grownup format with "rights management" that would curtail your ability to format-shift, time-shift and repurpose the music you downloaded. The system really looked like it was going to brutally suck.
So I can't really feel too sad for poor old dead Napster. Death was the best it could hope for now. Dead, its name can remain synonymous with revolutions; had it lived, its name would have been synonymous with crap.
Yes, it is. The music they forced down the throats of our generation is what encourages this attitude, now they reap what they sow.
And may be, just may be some day you will shut the fuck up as no-one wants to hear this shit anymore.
No-one ever forced any sort of music down your throat as it just is not possible but you just wanted the gain without the pain. You are just another ME ME ME weenie, looking for another lame excuse of the day.
Well, that was smart.
I mean, that the DMCA was necessary, of course.
Throw on a new appearance... call it Napster XP and people would start using it again.
Worked for the iMac.
It's just a centralized directory service. Hell, it's as much p2p as your plain vanilla warez ftp site listing in some web server is. If it were "real" p2p it couldn't have been stopped so easily.
Of course, this might be apples & oranges, but at least it's my opinion.
I still butter my own toast with a knife.
I still have to drive a car that's fueled by gasoline and uses the principles of internal combustion to generate horespower to work every day.
Oh, what's that? It changed how music is distributed online? Well, I guess that's not everything, is it?
I'm tired of everything on the internet being a fucking revolution.
what kind of bubble living idiots are on that board ? I'd love to sit in on one of those board meetings.. 'No, honestly, I think we have a good opportunity here to make a come back...'
Uh, they were only allowing MP3 files to be transferred on their service. It's not like they could also be used for backing up data files.
... and it is a dangerous precedent that something is banned simply because it can be abused and some people choose to do so. Apply the same level of justice to other products and you ban VCRs (which the Copyright Cartels tried to do), kitchen knives, and automobiles, to name just three commonly "abused" devices.
The example I'd like to use is my old single I have on the shelf (six inch vinyl record, now hopelessly scratched but still playable, if I still had a record player) of "Too Drunk to Fuck" by the Dead Kennedy's. Not their best work, but I was 16 when I bought it (for juvinile "its got profanity, cool!" reasons), and it introduced me to a great punk band whose other albums I have owned (and seen get destroyed at parties, etc.). Somehow through all that, this one single survives through today.
So I downloaded the mp3 off of the internet, and can now listen to music which I've legally already bought and paid for, but for which the equipment I had is now no longer in service, and the format so dated that the only equipment I can now buy costs a small fortune.
Napster had many legitamate uses
I should note that all of the music on my hard drive is legal. I own a copy, in one format or another, of every single mp3 I've downloaded, and every single ogg file I've ripped myself.
So, which is the more extremist position to take? The idea that music and other information should flow freely, as it arguably did for the 3 million years humanity was around prior to the British inventing copyright as a means of censoring the then emergent printing press (with great success, I might add), or the idea that copy control policing technology should be built into every digital device in America, from your computer to a baby's rattle (as proposed by "Disney" Hollings and promoted by the Copyright Cartels) to prevent the possibility that someone, somewhere, might violate someone's government granted, monopoly entitlement?
I think you need to examine just who you are calling "extremist" and how your defining the word. "I don't think that word means what you think it means."
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
About a year ago I wrote an article about why Napster should have called it quits then, instead of coming to an end this way. I'd like to take this opportunity to say "I told you so." But there's a little more substance and principle to it than that, if you check out the article.
What can Napster do? What DID Napster do? I mean, really, come on. What kind of property did Napster have that they could create a demand for? Music. Okay, now, what could they have done to make money off of other people's music? Obviously, the only thing would be to charge a subscription per month or per downloaded song or something similar. If they did that, then other filesharers would come along that were free. Napster would lose market share. The point is, Napster was dead from the start , just like most the other dotbombs, because Napster did not have a viable way to make money. It doesn't matter what the DMCA did. It doesn't! Even without the DMCA , Napster wouldn't have made it long before they died a bloody and painful death. That's the way it is.
Mags
Shawn Fanning is the one who lost the most on this one. His pet project started as an interesting software hack and went to having millions of users worldwide. It was then destroyed by clueless people who have access to a near-unlimited supply of money who blamed him for users that abused his service. Good luck to him, and it will be interesting to see what he comes up with next.
You mean I won't be able to spend 30 dollars a month to share my files and get files from people? But they promised!
Something like "Napster's recent apparent teetering was, in fact, confirmed by respected industry experts as an actual corporate teeter. 'This was a genuine teeter, make no mistake about that' said Flughart Frockwiffle. 'This, in combination with other recent news, may well put them on track to acheive full-scale beleaguered status'. Meanwhile, both remaining executives are disputing the analysis. 'This is far short of a teeter by any modern calculation. The teeter standards [used here] are more than 20 years old. That's before the Internet even existed.".
Liberty uber alles.
my old Pentium 90 that sits in the closet and from which I pulled the CPU out to make it a key chain.
It is quite amazing to see that even the view of daily activities, like listening to music, improve following Moore's law.
I'm not disagreeing with you, but I thought this might be helpful for you, just in case you have other old albums lying around. It's not worth what they're asking ($130 -- about $75 too much), but it's far short of a small fortune. Not that I would advise buying anything from "Worst Buy" these days....
GreyPoopon
--
Why is it I can write insightful comments but can't come up with a clever signature?
[Bad 5/7/5 syllable free verse snipped]
No season word, no cutting word, therefore no haiku. Lame. (Read More...)
-- PinocchioOf course, when your company is facing lawsuits from every angle as stated here in the Financial Times, you might have a bit more incentive to simply bow out. Especially if the only deal that could save Napster would turn it to crap in the process. I gotta respect anybody who turns down a $20 million dollars on the grounds of principle. Yeah, it hurts, but it sounds like Napster was going to be turned into another proprietary piece of shit service anyway. At least they didn't sell out.
I do like a few quotes from this artical... "The failure of Napster would represent the triumph of Hollywood over Silicon Valley..." Heh... While they're waving their victory flags, the world has gone and passed them by. Also note the quotes by Terry Semel (CEO of Yahoo) and Andy Grove (Chairman of Intel), in the last two paragraph.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
has already come. This is just confirming it.
"Do I dare disturb the universe?"
My guess is that they were the Pioneers... The man on point. They had this really successful, kick ass idea and probably thought they were on solid enough legal grounds to do it. Heck, a lot of sites still think that disclaimer saying "you must erase this within 24 hrs, etc, etc, etc." is enough to keep the legal dogs of war at bay. What they actally thought is a mystery, but when unforseen problems like this do pop-up, the pioneers always take it on the chin.
...at the cost of it's life...
You're right. A strait "File" sharing service should have gotten away with it, but Napster probably would have suffered the same fate eventially simply because an example needed to be made of them. The labels would have ran Nabster into the ground simply by tying it up in legal fees, let alone prosecution. What it did do was tame the wild frontier (cue sad french horns)
You need a FREE iPod Nano
Sure the internet came into being 30 years ago, but do the years from 1972-1990 even mean anything? A bunch of universities and defense contractors on 56k links, with a lot of nodes UUCP only?
The same is true of the "early days of TV" -- sure, it was *invented* and very narrowly used in the 30s and 40s, but for most people the early days of TV means the early-mid 50s when people generally starting buying and watching TV regularly.
The same is true of the internet -- I worked at a major University and we didn't get general internet access (IP connectivity of our computers) until probably '90. Dialup wasn't an option until '91 or '92, and generic consumer access not an option until 93-94, and even then it was limited and expensive.
The "modern" internet as a mass phenomenon (cheap home dialup, most server sites accessed via high speed dedicated connectivity) didn't really start until '94-95 and wasn't even a popular force until a couple of years later.
Counting 72-90 as "the early years" is legitimate only if you're talking about the six geeks who did something with it then.
Bertelsmann poured in excess of $85 million into Napster (that they've declared), and they're getting none of it back, because the fucked up control freak DRM-infected new-Napster technology that it paid for is utterly without a market. That money is gone, burned, buried.
Now... where are they going to recoup that $85 million from? Pay cuts for their executives? Hmmm, I think not.
That $85 million is coming from two places. From their artists, and from us.
You have a think about that the next time the RIAA tells you that you're stealing from artists, and that you'll suffer in the long run. Bertelsmann paid $85 million to come up with a worse system than one 19 year old college dropout knocked up in his spare time. And we're going to pay for it. No doubt they will spin that so that their incompetence becomes our fault for using Napster in the first place.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
In your simple world, it's easy to throw around ideas like that. When people's livelihoods depend on your business, when you must perform for the investors who funded you.. you can't just 'call it quits'.
MOD THIS UP, this is so true that it hurts.
Do you believe in death after life?
Simple...STOP BUYING, STOP STEALING. Let your favorite artists know that you don't appreciate THEIR support of the very mechanism that is serving to systematically dismantle the rights of consumers. Let them know that you believe in this strongly enough to sacrifice any further enjoyment of their work, until they begin looking at alternate methods of distribution. If the people who endlessly complain about the RIAA (and steal as a means of getting even) aren't willing to walk the walk, they really don't have anything to complain about. The festering sore that is the RIAA, and other parties attempting to impose undue restrictions on the use of copyrighted material, will only get worse.
No way this comapny was going to see the light of day under BMG (or any tradition-bound record co's) stewardship: from the Dataplay story a while back, I repeat:
"The RIAA should kiss Shawn's nappy little ass for providing the only true breakthru in music marketing since the music video. But as usual, the industry has figured out how to tie the whole relaunch up in knots because even BMG really doesn't like the whole thing but they smell money. I doubt it was a sanctified "we should be honestly representing our artist's interest" but rather a pant-wetting "holy crap - see these DL logs? can you imagine a dollar sign in front of each of these?" I mean please - it's taken them a year to not get ready, and from the get go they won't be able to write a MacOS client (no mention of any other platforms) and they can't for the life of them figure out how to take credit AND debit cards at the same time. There are one-man roasted cashew operations in East Rainbucket, Maine who can do this.
I gotta go.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
What in heaven's name were/are they doing?!?!
sulli
RTFJ.
Napster wasn't an "upstart MP3 indexing service," it was a "revolution in piracy" that bubbled up to the mainstream. The American Revolution was illegal in it's time, but it did some good. However, in our "civilized" society, Shawn Fanning shouldn't have given Napster out to more than his close friends. He should be held accountable for his role. Consumers should learn to hold the labels accountable for anti-competitive practices in a more legal way than simple looting. Before Napster, we had reasonable fair-use laws. Now we have the DMCA et al. Akamai didn't setup a massive pirate FTP network to get where they did. Good riddance Napster!
Their netblock is no longer announced; have they been blackholed by their upstream provider? If they are not back quickly, we'll have the proof that they're gone for good.. Everything has to end at some point! Now my original Napster shirts are collectors ;)
have you been defaced today?
..okay, not everyone will agree with me here I know. But Napster came along and said 'hey you! the internet is so cool, whats your favourite band? let me get you some rare live concert recordings, from someone else who thinks that band is great to!' Lars Ulrich, the *cough* artist *cough* that decided somehow he was losing money thru napster should be happy now. Of course, he is thinking fuck all those small time bands that could have got big because of napster.
On Wired news there's a very brief history of Napster, from the cradle to the grave. Interesting read.
Hidden Directories my ass. We used to go to a websearch (electronicshopper.com), find music, hammer the ftp site to get in, then download whatever was there.
The nice thing about this was, once logged in, they usually had songs I liked besides the one I searched for. They were then in for 8 hours of leeching.
Napster sucks et al now force me to search for each piece individually.
I don't know why anyone in their right minds would think that anyone (in mass) would consider purchasing music from the internet, let alone from napster, a once free service. I'm sure a great deal of the music listening/ music downloading market does even own a credit card. Most of them are probably still in school like the rest of the little warez kiddies out there. Keep the internet free, and stop wasting your money in your quick little make money fast internet companies.
later