Slashdot Mirror
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?"
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.
Just wanted to remind the trolls out there: *apster is not dying.
Here's the real problem with Napster IMHO. No business model - no income. This is why there's no love lost from me now that napster's finishing its death throes.
How exactly are you going to make a profit with something like Napster? Please don't tell me through ads. It's only now that people are figuring out ads don't provide enough revenue to run a business. Look at Kazaa (nevermind the capitalization thing - that is so stupid). Kazaa had banner ads in its client. Didn't make them enough money, so they resorted to bundling their product with spyware. This will also inevitably fail.
If Naptster had gone to a subscription-type service (in its heyday, when it actually had music on it), it would have failed. The only reason Napster was successful, IMHO, was that, by default, it would share any files you downloaded. Thus, people who don't dig through options dialogs before using a program ended up sharing all their files, unwittingly. The Tragedy of the Commons is the principle that one should apply here - if you give people the choice between sharing their files (and their bandwidth) and just leeching off others, they'll leech, and they won't even feel guilty about it.
Now, if you would actually pay for a service like Napster, you would have to evaluate why you're paying for the service and what you're getting for your money. Word would get out that sharing doesn't help you in any way, and in fact can hurt you as it takes away bandwidth.
If Napster had gone to a subscription service where you would pay less if you were sharing more files, people would begin crapflooding it. Taking stuff from /dev/random, appending an ID3 tag and sticking .mp3 at the end. I can do this with dd and perl, but, for the windows users, all sorts of little utilities would pop up on tucows.com that allowed them to do this.
If they had gone to a subscription service where you get unlimited bandwidth for paying (and everyone who doesn't pay has a download rate limit), people would end up hacking clients to get rid of the limit if it were client-side, and sharing Napster accounts (perhaps even on Napster) if the limit were server-side. I can think of a bunch of technical things you could do to combat this, but the point is that people would try to find a way around it. And especially if you're paying for Napster's bandwidth you would evaluate whether or not you want to allow downloads.
Subscription models were possible with Napster as it kept data on its servers; this is not really possible with Kazaa or the other modern p2p networks. However, this is a double-edged sword - the RIAA proved that Napster was responsible for its data since it was server-side, and with a subscription model, Napster would not just be gratuitously providing data, but would be actively selling copyrighted materials. I don't know if there's really a big legal difference here, as the RIAA can force whatever court outcome it wants.
Also, keeping the data server-side meant that Napster had to pay huge bandwidth bills. With Kazaa, they pay much smaller bandwidth bills as they only send authentication and search queries from their servers, not the actual mp3/mpg/whatever data. Bandwidth is very expensive.
I'm glad these p2p network companies are dying. However, I don't like why they're dying. They shouldn't die because the RIAA has enough cash to force any legal outcome; they should die because they have no business model. I'd like to see the free market, not the monopolistic RIAA, determine the outcome.