Shawn Fanning Interview

peter303 writes "The Wall Street Journal (via MSNBC) interviewed Shawn Fanning, the founder of Napster. Shawn talks about the end of Napster and his personal plans."

Comments

Good article

[tezzery]

A very good article. I think if anything Fanning will be remembered for jump starting the p2p revolution, getting the attention of the RIAA who had obviously underestimated the power of technology, as well as bringing awareness to a lot of average consumers on certain unfair aspects of the way the 'music industry' works, and last but not least introducing a lot of us to a lot of wonderful, independent music. Anyone know where he's working these days? The article didn't mention it.

Napster didn't learn from history?

[joneshenry]

Napster missed its chance to truly revolutionize the music industry. Had Napster simply chosen opt-in instead of opt-out, the standard that is proposed for every other Internet issue, Napster could have repeated the success of pop music on the radio.

From what I've read radio faced a similar problem of music licensing, only at that time the issue was the licensing of copyrighted classic music recordings. The solution was to open a new genre of music, pop music.

However, this would have required Napster's founders to have actually done some work that they probably didn't want to do, such as interacting with social classes of people who were ignored by the mainstream. But that's just not what people who want to only have clean hands programming want to do. Too bad, Napster blew the biggest opportunity in this generation to dominate a new medium.

Lets be honest here

[Mr_Silver]

The recording industry says its data show consumers who download music from the Internet are purchasing fewer CDs.

Let be honest here. Getting single tracks off P2P networks works pretty well.

But, I would just love for someone within the RIAA (or BPI - UK version) to actually sit down with a list of 5 albums and try to download entire CD's.

It's barely possible. The chances of finding 10 tracks in the same album which aren't badly encoded, labelled wrongly or sampled at 96kbps is extremely high.

Now that doesn't mean that what is happening is ant the less worse (after all, it's a free for all sharing of copyrighted material than many people do not already own) but personally I think that it's only really single sales which are damaged as much as the RIAA/BPI make out to be.

Getting all the tracks of an album decently encoded is bording on the impossible most of the time.

Re:Dear Shawn

[OwnedByTwoCats]

Dude, there's a big difference between business practices that cross the line into price fixing and simply walking out of the store with a CD you didn't pay for.

Yes. Price-fixing is a felony. Shoplifting a CD isn't.

When you download a song off of the Internet, you're shoplifting, plain and simple.

No you're not. Downloading a song off the internet is, at its worst, making an unauthorized copy. The law allows for that under some circumstances. If you send it to cassette tape, then you're covered by the AHRA...

Mr. Fanning

[Petronius]

I have an immense respect for Mr Fanning. Here's a guy that quits school to try to write code on his own and changes the world. You think the word is too strong? Everybody remembers the Napster days. People burning CDs like crazy, sharing rips of old albums, live concerts, weird one-of CDs picked up in cut-out bins. I made my best compilations during that time. I received awesome CDs from my friends, packed with stuff I had never heard. A guy at work started making CDs with kids songs. Another made the most hilarious Christmas songs compilation. These were people that had almost no interest in music before Napster arrived. I could go on and on... I miss Napster. Every day.
Thank you Mr. Fanning.