[Napster] 11 - End of the Road.mp3

psoriac writes "Looks like the long sad saga of Napster is drawing to a final close; after being shut down by the courts, losing its execs, filing for chapter 11, and having its sale to Bertelsmann AG blocked, the remaining physical assets of Napster are being sold at auction by Dovebid. The auction site is close to my house; I think I'll stop by and pick up some memorabilia."

Comments

Really too bad...

[Silas]

It's really to bad that things ended this way. I'd suggested back in April '01 that they call it quits on their own before The Gub'ment made everything so difficult. Excerpt: Some things change our lives so significantly that they deserve better than to be trampled out of existence by the changing face of subtle bureaucratic oppression.

A bit dramatic perhaps, but I continue to think that they should have gone out with their proverbial heads held high, instead of after this miserable sequence of events...

Re: Really too bad...

[Black Parrot]

> Excerpt: Some things change our lives so significantly that they deserve better than to be trampled out of existence by the changing face of subtle bureaucratic oppression. A bit dramatic perhaps...

Not IMO. I think this is sad because Napster was the most innovative use of the internet since the WWW came along. And notably, it started out as a garage app rather than as the effort of some big software machine. In the IP age it's the big businesses who are breaking up the machines that scare them.

Re:Really too bad...

[octalgirl]

Some things change our lives so significantly that they deserve better than to be trampled out of existence by the changing face of subtle bureaucratic oppression.

Agreed. To me there are only 3 major breakthroughs in personal computing technology (and Windows isn't one of them). They are Netscape - literally changed the world (doesn't matter that Mosaic came first, Netscape is the one that did it), Doom - literally exploded first person, multi-user gaming and is the foundation of a multi-billion dollar industry, and Napster who completely 'rocked' the world of content connected computing (CCC - did I just make that up?). If you look back at Doom, how grainy the graphics, limited function etc, and compare to today's spectacular graphics, ability to swim, side step, etc. Netscape and the first web pages - grey, simple, one font, no indents or bullets. Now we have interactive pages, e-commerce, etc. Napster never got to become what it could have been. Just like early explorers confronting something with teeth, the **AA shot it dead before finding out if it was friend or foe.

not a big deal

[jacquesm]

You should look at this like the demise of Hispano-Suiza, they were fine cars in their time but when they passed it was not quite the end of personal mobility.

And Napster won't be the last peer to peer technique that goes under, but one of these days we'll cobble something together that is *really* beyond shutdown. The only major problem so far seems to be that for the creator of that piece of software there will be no income to be made (he/she can't control access to it either).

Maybe freenet will be the one, maybe not.

But that is just one aspect of the technological war, the other one is that even a perfect peer to peer protocol / search engine is still vulnerable to all kinds of attacks by those with enough money (such as RIAA) or those with enough time on their hands (like the sicko's that try to destroy IRC) and that will probably be the next frontier,
to maintain data integrity, and to be able to search and destroy bogus clients and their malicious payloads without centralised control.

Bah

[iomega]

i made do before, during and after napster,

there was always a way to get music, and there always will be.

one strange thing is, i dont remember such horrible queing in napster, like there is in kazaa, the wait rivals that of certain extremely busy irc channels.,

And we should be sorry... why?

[IIRCAFAIKIANAL]

Yes, I hate the RIAA and it's ilk. Yes, I hate the way they have dragged their feet with online options. I hate the way they have been pushing copy-protected cd's and I hate the industry in general. I hope it does die and a bunch of smaller labels rise from the ashes - ones that don't buy the souls of the artists that help make them money.

But that doesn't excuse Napster. They were a corporation, not an activist group - they made money by helping people violate copyright. Yes, I am aware that many people used Napster to trade non-copyrighted music - but for the most part, it was all the stuff that is being sold in stores right now (right then).

And to those of you that think that we should be able to just violate copyright because we don't like the content controllers, well, then fuck the GPL, right? Let's just use someone elses work for profit there too!

Re:And we should be sorry... why?

[PaleBoy]

There are a lot of reasons why stealing music is the preferred method for basically this whole upcoming generation.

a)We are aware of actually how much money it takes to create a cd. We all have cd burners, and know how cheap the media is. Many of us even have friends that have their own hobbled-together studios, and can record their music in their basement. We know that we are getting totally and utterly ripped off if we buy a cd.

b)We know that the artist will most likely hardly see a dime anyway. We've watched enough VH1 behind the music to know that even the most successful stars in the most popular music can wind up owing their record label money, unless they throw a tantrum and acquire a new contract. We know that the artists are getting ripped off, too.

c)We know that we aren't actually taking something physical. We are copying an arrangement of bits in a file into a replication on our computer. There is no cost to the company. There is only the supposed lack of profit, which assumes that we would have paid for the album just to hear that one song we downloaded. We are aware that Radiohead "released" Kid A on Napster before it was in stores, and that people went out and made it a collossal best seller. It had no marketing campaign to speak of. The only marketing used was word of mouth from people who had downloaded it.We understand the difference between music downloading and theft, and we aren't afraid to pay for music worth paying for.

d)We respect musicians. We don't really care if the day of super-millionaire pop-stars disappears. What we want to see is musicians with websites, where you can just pay them directly, per song, and support who you listen to, without the huge, outdated, corrupt, technophobic, greedy, bloated middleman that is the music industry. We will wait to support the artist, but we will not stop listening to music.