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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.
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...is that Hilary Rosen probably thinks she's won.
Napster is gone, legally they're caught, but lets face it, P2P is quickly becoming a killer app, and Napster made that possible. Brian.
If I understand this correctly.. Napster is gone... which leaves now... wait.. no it doesn't get rid of sharing software.. instead we now have access to tons of FREE (napster was to be pay) sharing software for MUCH more then napster ever dreamed of when they came out..
Want paintshop? Ok.. let me fire up KaZaa!
Want videos? Ok.. let me fire up KaZaa!
Want sheep? er.. that's not my department but you can probably find that on KaZaa too.
Don't tell me nobody didn't see this coming - the innovator is rarely the successful party in any technology leap, usually it's the follow-ups that jump on the bandwagon and streamline/fine tune a process that make the big bucks.
Napster paved the way for P2P, but really, who thought they'd get rich doing it? Well, besides Shawn Fanning, anyway.
-72
-Those who dance are considered insane by those who can't hear the music.
"Once the RIAA shut down the filesharing service, Napster, Inc. had no means of turning a profit that I could see."
How were they making money before they got shut down? I'm astonished they lasted as long as they did, too.
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pants ahoy
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
They will never again have the opportunity that they let slip through their fingers because they killed Napster. Napster had the widest selection where anyone could find anything, and it worked well. They threw away the opportunity of a lifetime because they got greedy.
Instead of working out a system where they could have gotten paid something somehow, they grasped for millions, throwing away billions
It is a typical case of the big fish in the small pond fearing the ocean
There will probably never be the same chance to create a market and integrate it all into one service again.
There was a pretty good interview with John Lanning on CnetRadio that is worth listening, goes into the history, and where he sees things going from here.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
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
I'm a songwriter, and I considered Napster to be a really great vehicle to get my music to others that would normally not get the opportunity hear it. I own my music, and I wanted to give it away free. That is my right. Are you telling me that this argument doesn't matter? Also, Napster didn't break "a law". There were no laws governing P2P file sharing technology. The people using Napster and downloading copyrighted material that they DIDN'T ALREADY OWN were the ones breaking the laws. Not the company itself....if I use my Jeep Wrangler as a getaway car in a robbery maybe we should sue Jeep for "Breaking Laws" and giving me the opportunity to commit a crime. Those Vehicle Making Bastards.
attention xxAA's, usenet does not exist. it's just an old fairy tale meant to scare you. please move along, nothing to see here...
" Bertelsmann stepped in on May 17 with $8 million to buy Napster's assets. As part of that agreement, Napster was to voluntarily seek bankruptcy protection and emerge as a wholly owned unit of Europe's second-largest media group. "
Everything Jesus did was illegal.
The Boston Tea Party was illegal and involved stealing.
The American Revolution was illegal and would be considered stealing from the king.
Freeing slaves through the Underground Railroad in the 1800s was also considered stealing and illegal.
See a pattern here? In the grand scheme of things, history has been determined by those who followed their hearts and did what they felt was right, rather than following the orders of another man.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
you are comparing music theft with Jesus' acts, the boston tea party, and the freedon of slaves?
Thanks for making my point. You really did just fall off the turnip truck.
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
Whatever you think about Napster, the editor's comment on this story is lame.
Putting a murderer in jail doesn't put a stop to all murders. Does that mean it's a waste of time?
We're blowing this argument, and when we lose, everyone's going to blame the record companies, but it's going to be our own fault.
Defending stealing is wrong, and as much as everyone likes free stuff, it's just not possible that the "stealing is ok" argument is going to fly in the courts and in congress over the long run.
The other lame argument that people make is that "the record companies would be better off if they allowed sharing." Maybe. Probably not. But the point is that it's their property, and they get to decide what to do with it.
There are two issues on the table. The one that everyone talks about is piracy. There's no way to win this in the law, although technology will probably make it possible to steal music and share it over the net for the foreseeable future.
The other one, and the one that is winnable, is about whether or not there will be open electronic distribution systems. Right now entertainment companies control distribution, and that's how they make their money.
Movie studios make money by controlling access to the multiplexes -- indpendent films have to make "distribution" deals if they want to be seen. And if you want your CD in the Virgin Megastore, you've got to cut a deal with a big label. That's the toll booth.
The entertainment companies are using the piracy issue to cover up their other agenda, which is to avoid open distribution at all costs.
And their biggest allies aren't corrupt senators, they're whiny assholes with a sense of entitlement, sitting on their asses, believing that the world owes them free eminem records.
The arguments for stealing marginalizes the people who make it. It marginalizes the public's interest. It's suicidal politically and morally bankrupt.
Take my karma. I don't care.
I'm sure there's something I don't understand about this, but...
Sure they could move their servers offshore. But they still have to have a business located somewhere. If you have an office or employees in a country, you (or at least the portion of the company that those employees work for) need to follow the law in that country. Moving the server to Sealand doesn't mean that your office in New Jersey can't be issued a summons. Even if you incorporate offshore and have your employees telecommute, you need to have at least bank routing to get them their paychecks. The government can impound those accounts.
Sealand only seems to me to be a good place for individuals to host info pages, not to run a business out of.
I'll let the misspelling go, because this is Slashdot. However, you buy "litteraly tons of DVDs". A DVD weighs about 15g. Let's be generous, and assume you were including the packaging in your wight calculations, which would put it up around 150g per DVD. A ton of DVDs would therefore be ~6600 disks and packaging. You have tons, i.e. at least two, so we conclude that you have at least 13,000 DVDs.
Where do you keep them all?
--
E_NOSIG
You're allowed to give your music away. However, the reason Napster was so popular was because of the illegal mp3 trading. There were and are venues (such as mp3.com) that try and keep things constrained to legal mp3s. Furthermore, the filtering imposed on Napster (which is a big part of what killed it) should've theoretically had a minimal impact on legitimate trading (but unfortunately, the filtering was overly broad). So in reality, the only reason why Napster was a good venue for legitimate trading was because it was using illegitimate trading as a form of marketing/bundling.
Also, it's my understanding that Napster did get nailed for breaking laws relating to contributory and/or vicarious copyright infringement. These issues were hashed out on Slashdot awhile back. It basically boiled down to Napster being aware of the copyright infringement going on and unwilling take means to stop it when confronted on the issue.
"Thank god the industry shut them down... now that piracy has been stopped they can all sleep much better."
Remember what happened when Carnegie endowed thousands of libraries across the United States? Well, people could then get their books free! And the obvious thing happened: The book publishing industry never sold another book, except to libraries.
Not!
Then there was that second socially destructive technological advance, TV. Once people could get their entertainment at home, and without paying extra, the movie industry almost completely disappeared, except for sales to TV broadcasters.
Not!
Well, the movie industry was already dead, of course, but another technological advance, the VCR, killed it again. When people found that they could record perfectly good movies on video tape, they stopped paying for movies! It was completely logical and understandable that this would happen.
Not!
The fact is, no one completely understands the issues surrounding intellectual property. We can't write a good law if we don't understand. Someone must sit down and do the thinking, and the thinking hasn't been finished.
The music industry is so abusive that I tend to stay away from music. I find that, when I have access to free music (tapes and CDs from the library), I become interested in a particular type of music and buy more, not less. Maybe there are a lot of people like me, because, during the height of Napster, the U.S. music industry had its best year.
Profit.
Napster's business model was based on stealing. Let me repeat that one more time, just in case you didn't get the point. Napster's business model was based on stealing.
While it's likely that some of the people on the Underground Railroad were in it for the money, helping slaves isn't usually a prime source of income. You'd think turning water into wine would be a money-maker, but Jesus wasn't trying to undercut Manishewitz. And the Boston Tea Party/American Revolution? Becoming independent nearly bankrupted the colonies/states (and many of the Founding Fathers did indeed die broke). Ever heard that popular expression from the 1790's "not worth a Continental?"
Napster deserved to go under. It's a shame that BMG has rescued them. Personally, I think it shows that BMG is either pretty stupid (as there is nothing in Napster's technology that couldn't be replicated in a matter of weeks by a competent programmer) or that they have a LOT of money to throw around.
-jon
Remember Amalek.
Well, the problem with this line of reasoning -- comparing something like Napster to so-called "great" political achievements -- is that I'm not certain Napster is pushing any philosophical, civil, or ethical envelopes. Legal, maybe -- but that's about it.
It's about information sharing, yes. And I'll agree that information sharing is important. But in the grand scheme of things, I'm pretty certain information sharing is not in the same league as civil rights or human freedom. In fact, I *know* it's not the same league -- much as some folks wish it to were so.
We're still too close to the Napster "revolution" (so-called) to know what exactly happened, but my guess is not much. Not much happened.
On a more personal note, I'm repulsed by the notion that "Napster" is in the same league as slavery. It's not. Nor is it anything like a legitimate "freedom" struggle. Information is not the same thing as a human being, and the only real "struggle" at work with this P2P stuff is a struggle for control.
There's nothing particularly interesting, provocative, or important in a struggle that pits big corporate greed against so-called "innocent" youth. The demise of Napster is not even a "triumph of capitalism." Nor is it a "triumph of global corporate control."
It's really a triumph of nothing. And in light of human rights abuses across the globe -- including abuses here in America -- I'm not sure we can really derive any "lesson" from the demise of Napster except that, well, there's other, more important battles to fight.
P2P is not a revolution -- not in the sense, at least, that Napster-advocates would like it to be.
The only "triumph" at work with Napster is the "triumph" of the corporate lawyers. And unless you're one of them, pulling a paycheck from all of this, it's not much of a triumph at all.
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
I've been trying to find blues travelers cover of johnny b. goode for 3 years now. the only place I've EVER found it was on napster. it was from a tape someone made at a concert. imagine john popper soloing on that song with his harp going at 3 times the normal tempo.
I'd gladly PAY for that song, however I've yet to find a place that sells it, including www.bluestraveler.com
Napster served one purpose and one purpose ALONE for me- rare bootlegs of songs the bands never put on cd. Oh, that and john mayer
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Yes, but if you drink at a bar, drive, and kill 20 schoolkids, why is the bartender sued?
--- http://foo.ca
The Boston Tea Party was illegal and involved stealing."
Sure, and everything that Albert Fish, Ed Gein, and Paul Bernardo did was illegal, too. That doesn't mean it was right.
In this case of copyright law, there's this great notion that if you don't agree, you can just refuse to play the game. Just as Richard M. Stallman takes a strong position against commercial software without resorting to piracy, you can elect to only download music from artists who make it freely available. Even better is the fact that you don't have to worry about the interoperability concerns that plague the software realm of this issue -- there's no real equivalent to someone emailing you an MSWord document.
Napster had good effects as performance art, however I always thought that the idea that Napster would make money out of the scheme was kinda wierd.
Napster became popular by offering people something for nothing. While a lot of the criticism of the record industry is valid the justification of Napster rapidly became an exercise in rationalisation 'the record industry rips off artists, so I am morally justified in ripping them off as well'.
The recording industry did not help in their response which completely failed to understand that the principle mechanisms that cause laws to be respected are psychological and not technical.
However the business plans that Napster dreamt up to 'monetize' the user base they built up were pretty slimy, and it is no suprise that their replacements all specialize in propagating scumware that will report your every move to advertisers (and with the recent Ashcroft changes J. Edgar Mueller's FBI), bring up pop up ads at every turn and redirect your DNS to an Idealab! startup so that if and when new.net goes the way of Pets.com your machine will stop working and you won't know how to fix it.
Napster as a political statement worked, but as a business it was never going to survive. Even if it had won the copyright case the inevitable outcome would have been a change in copyright law to outlaw their business - which inevitably would contain even more clauses to push copyright law in the direction of Disney and Time Warner against the public interest.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
Napster's business model was based on stealing. Let me repeat that one more time, just in case you didn't get the point. Napster's business model was based on stealing.
It seems to me that Napster simply provided a service to make easier what was and still is common practice: sharing music. Napster took the practice farther than it had been taken before, and so became a test as to what extent music sharing could be taken and remain acceptable, but it essentially offered nothing that wasn't available before in one form or another.
Fundamentally, there was nothing immoral or unethical about what Napster did. You, I, and the RIAA may all have our own ideas as to what extent the sharing of music should be tolerated. So did Napster. It appears that, in the U.S., the lower courts didn't agree with Napster. But they didn't endorse the RIAA's or anyone else's vision of what should or shouldn't be allowed either. The question remains unresolved, but certainly Napster served to bring the question into the public eye.
The aftermath of Napster has brought many public policy questions to the forefront, most of which remain unanswered. While the RIAA may have preferred that the questions remained unasked, I happen to disagree and think that Napster did us a great service by forcing the issue. (The fact that I was able to locate some old tracks that I had until then never been able to find anywhere was a pleasant side benefit.)
Stealing and theft are heavily loaded terms which imply that one has already made a moral judgement about an issue which is far from cut and dried. Downloading music is only stealing if society collectively decides that it is. And that decision has yet to be made.
There's no such thing as Scotchtoberfest!
It seems to be a far cry from the old days when the free software/open source movements were about letting the creators of a work choose the license and the distribution methods.
Apparently, some of us have decided that that is a freedom that should be reserved for some of us, and not for everyone.
If the large corporations in the music industry want to limit their distribution method and use antiquated licenses, we should respect their decision. They do not have a monopoly on music. There are alternatives and just as the open source community would prefer people using open source software, other musicians would like to get their music heard.
For once, lets consider treating others the way we want to be treated.
No Zen is good zen
More than civilly liable. Here in Colorado, it is a CRIME for a visibly-drunk person to be served alcohol on licensed premises. Bartenders (in theory) can go to jail and businesses (in practice) can lose their liquor licenses.
It's akin to shooting an intruder more than once - once is considered self defense, more than once can be considered murder.
They're not that close. Especially because the alcohol thing is true and the "if you shot him once you meant to murder him" is crap and nonsense. If you were legally justified in using deadly force to protect yourself, then you were legally justified in shooting as many times as was required to control the threat.
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.