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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.
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
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.
...another on CNET, for those of you who loathe free registration, or whatever :)
--Kylus
Idiot-proof something, and Life will build a better Idiot.
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?
I think thats a pretty good analysis based on some facts from the article like they still had 70 employees and that Fanning was the CTO. Personally, I don't know of anybody that became a CTO right out of college (or by dropping out of college). Although based on previous articles about the company, it was probably just a token title anyways.
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)
>Leaders of the worlds largest pirate network are resigning [hopefully to go find a real job....] big deal.
I suppose you would say the same things about Yamaha, HP, LG, and Philips if they go out of business.
I mean, they are all piracy boosters. They make CD Recording drives, right?
Or perhaps you should just stop being so... generic?
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
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.
"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...
The net result is that it made the recording industry start clamping down on things like MP3 ripping and CD copying (both of which I do legitimately; I make MP3s of CD's to listen to on the computer/iPaq and copies of CDs to listen to in my car). All that Napster has done for me in that regard is make my life hell if I want to continue doing that with new CDs.
I'm not going to start the argument about "Napster helps CD sales" because it's been beaten to a pulp. My guess is that it cuts both ways (some people would figure "why buy if I can get it off Napster?" others would try it on Napster then decide to buy)
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...
Ignore my previous post. Bad morning so far, and I didn't have my sarcasm detector turned on yet.
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-
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.
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.
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.
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.
I read that page, and I just can't seem to figure out why Google would have a neurosurgeon on staff.
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.
On Wired news there's a very brief history of Napster, from the cradle to the grave. Interesting read.