Slashdot Mirror
Napster files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy
Joey Patterson writes "CNN Money reports that Napster has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy." Thank god the industry shut them down... now that piracy
has been stopped they can all sleep much better.
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
Napster is gone, legally they're caught, but lets face it, P2P is quickly becoming a killer app, and Napster made that possible. Brian.
Not every good hacker is a good business person.
Not every great idea can be best exploited by its progenitor.
Napster was, at worst, a means for the long-standing fact of exploitation of artists by record labels to become common knowledge. Even teeny-boppers are familiar with the concepts of mechanical royalties, publishing contracts, and "recoupment".
Napster is dead; long live Napster.
If you recall, K-Mart has also filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy to protect them from their creditors while they attemp to reorganize into a profitable company.
Filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy does not mean that the company is gone or is no longer operating. In the case of Napster, the great levels of piracy ended long before today.
end of line
Personally this is my two cents. I really could care less to see napster go. I buy my music, because i like collecting CD's and records. The only reasoned I cared at all about napster is because when it came out. I found it was an awesome way to find new music i hadn't heard... preview it in good quality, listen for a while make sure I wouldn't get bored, then I BOUGHT THE DAMN CD! Alas, I know I am one of the few people who used napster that actually ended up buying more CD's because of it. Thats because radio in this day and age, at least where i lived, which is philadelphia, sucked and still does, and is one sided. BUT that is a whole other rant for a whole other topic.
Anyway so Napster is gone.. I'll just have to go back to free previews on www.cdnow.com to figure out if I like new music that i want to buy.
Who makes you Sig?
Chapter 11 means protection from creditors while reorganizing, which has been the plan. They're not shut down, they've not gone away, they're just shifting debt around and restructuring (i.e. laying off any worker bees left, negotiating terms on debt payment, etc.)
This is hardly a surprise, nor the end of Napster. The only effect against "music piracy" is that Napster, under BMG's thumb, will simply be a store front for their products. In a way, similar to what the Mega-swill Brewers did 10-15 years ago, buying up all those threatening little micro-brews and screwing up their distribution to preserve market for the highly profitable [yecch] that they sell (i.e. you don't become billionaires without putting rice in your mash instead of expensive barley.)
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
If CD's are too expensive, then don't buy em. Instead, buy the music you find acceptably priced. Or listen to the radio where they play music for free.
DNA is the ultimate spaghetti code.
Sure, Napster has gone bankrupt because the efforts of a typically greedy industry, but don't side with their "moral" argument and accuse me or Napster of stealing MP3s. I never stole anything. I copied someone else's zeroes and ones, and zeroes and ones are not music until you interpret them. In fact, I could interpret them in any way I want to. Go ahead and argue that I was in fact always and exclusively interpreting them as musicm but the fact remains: they will never, ever be the music exactly, they will always be a digital approximation, however convincing it is. I will not agree with the stealing argument until the RIAA defines clearly what the music is and what is stealing them. By their argument, am I stealing the song if I sing it? That's an approximation too. You'd have to plug the analog hole in my head and stop me from thinking of the song after listening to it. How close to the song does the approximation have to be until it is considered to be the song? And what defines the song? Is the song zeroes and ones? No, it's a pattern of sound waves reaching my head, but the pattern is never the same as it was in the studio on a digital approximation. What if these zeroes and ones can be interpreted to be the music in mp3 format, but if I change the extension to .doc and open it in word, it's really an informative paper? If you allow people to copyright digital approximations of a song, you effectively allow people to own numbers, which are a natural phenomenon. Look at the case of the people who wanted to translate their DNA sequences into MP3 format for the same degree of copyright protection. You might as well copyright air if you are going to say, "This, and anything I decide is arbitrarily similar to this in a specific interpretation is mine!"
The fact is, stealing is a fuzzy line when you speak in terms of zeroes and ones, and what music is. I believe that due to this argument, the music industry has no choice but to adapt to use file sharing to its benefit, and the RIAA is working against consumer and its own interests in this case.
Hilary Rosen, shut your analog hole.
~Ben
I really want a Humvee, but I probably couldn't even afford the tires for one. Does that mean it's ok if I just rip one off at the lot?
This is comparing apples to oranges. When you steal a Humvee, someone will be missing that Humvee. When you share a copyrighted song, no one is missing the song. The record label MAY be missing revenue based on that song, provided that you were going to buy it in the first place. I'm not saying that trading copyrighted MP3s is right (the RIAA certainly doesn't think so), but if you are going to make a "you steal from me" comparison, you need to be using the correct context.
Oh, and to the original starter of this thread, there is a license for the "GPLing of music": the Open Audio License.
Fully licensed blockchain psychiatrist
According to the previously posted link:
The RIAA also has copyright suits pending against Napster, StreamCast Networks and its Morpheus software, Amsterdam-based Kazaa BV, West Indies-based Grokster, MP3Board and Madster (formerly known as Aimster).
So there. Those are obviously next.
Bodø community site
You raise some good points. However, I think that the real losers here include not only the Napster fans, but the recording industry, and the artists themselves.
I remember reading an interview with one of the Grateful Dead members about their efforts to set up a free archive of their works. The interview was particularly telling because it tackled the question of piracy of music and its effects on artists from a very non-RIAA perspective.
Basically, the Grateful Dead moved beyond tolerating piracy on the part of their fans (in an effort not to drive fans away) to actually appreciating it as a sort of free marketing. Note that the vast majority of the money that most artists make comes from performances and not from record sales.
The real napster issues are really complex and involve the following topics:
1: Unbalanced copyright law.
2: Exploitation of artists by the record companies.
3: Piracy.
Piracy is wrong because it continues to feed the unvalanced system. Copyright law was originally conceived to create a richer culture, not richer media moguls. An unballanced system causes the same sorts of damage as no copyright protection for literary works. This is why fair use is so important.
Piracy also has to potential to cause the same sort of damage by preventing literary works from being created in the first place.
The real issue is-- Napster was the symptom, not the problem, and the RIAA, etc. are strangling our culture (and themselves in the process) trying to enforce their warped view of copyright rights.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
well all is said and done for the people that dont understand that chapter 11's can be a blessing to a company. if you dont have enough money to run the company you go chapter 11 and you have a slime chance but you do have a chance to bounch back. microsoft crony's and the like that want it to be all done and over with are sending out the message the Napster is done for. go to http://www.business.gov/busadv/frame.cfm?urltest=h ttp://www.inc.com/incmagazine/archives/09930861.ht ml&catid=365&urlplace=maincat.cfm
to read more.
Careful what you say around me.. I will assume you mean it.