All The Rave

livegoats writes "No self-respecting culture maven can deny their love affair with Napster. If you weren't spending your spare time in the years 99-00 downloading MP3s like a champ, it's likely you were still in diapers or dancing with wolves. Oh, Napster, we loved ye when. Joseph Menn's All The Rave: The Rise and Fall of Shawn Fanning's Napster carefully chronicles the life of the company -- from its age of innocence, though its battle with the powerful music industry, to its slow unraveling in 2001, a foreshadowing event for the rest of the dot-com world." Read on for Livegoats' review. All the Rave: The Rise and Fall of Shawn Fanning's Napster author Joseph Menn pages 368 publisher Crown Publishing Group rating 7 reviewer Libe Goad ISBN 0609610937 summary If you love to read about the dot-com bust -- over and over -- this meticulously researched tome is for you. Keep a drink handy, however, it gets dry in parts.

One thing's certain: Menn, who covered Silicon Valley for the Los Angeles Times, meticulously researched his subject. The book is loaded with facts and figures, but more impressive is the level of National Enquirer-worthy details Menn milked from mountains of transcripts and one-on-one interviews.

Menn's discoveries can be described as nothing less than shocking, at least for anyone who hasn't followed the story blow-by-blow. We learn about Shawn's money-grubbing uncle, John Fanning, whose shady business practices cost the company numerous investors, but also the respect of his own family. Menn writes that at first Shawn Fanning was pleased when his uncle drew up papers incorporating Napster, Inc. Then the elder Fanning told Shawn he would be getting only 30 percent of the company. John Fanning would keep the rest. Shawn was stunned.

Menn also exposes Napster executives' ignorance of copyright laws, the company's pay-off to rapper Chuck D so he would publicly support file sharing and rockstress Courtney Love's flirtations with Shawn, whom she once introduced at an award show as her future husband.

With a boatload of rock stars and other curious characters, you'd think the spectacle of it all would overshadow the book's business patois. Menn attempts, valiantly, to do so, but it's still evident that All the Rave is a long-handed exercise in business reporting rather than a drama-filled account. There is little surprise in the overarching Napster story because most readers will know how the story ends before cracking open the front cover.

If you're still committed to All the Rave, the best reading takes place in two separate sections: the first on the peer-to-peer program's incubation, and the second on Napster's attempt to take on the well-muscled music industry.

In Chapters 1 and 2, Menn introduces Shawn Fanning, an unassuming high school kid who comes from humble beginnings. Though his life doesn't exactly make for a Horatio Alger story, it's interesting to see how Shawn stops pursuing a sports scholarship for college and instead focuses on computer programming.

After his uncle John gives Shawn his first computer, the aw-shucks kid from Massachusetts comes across a brilliant idea, peer-to-peer file sharing, which he develops with the help of friends in several online communities. The story is touching, and it's fascinating to take a behind-the-scenes look at how the program originated, first through Shawn and then as the product of a tight-knit online community.

Techies of all stripes will be amused as Menn attempts to make computer programming jargon edible to the mainstream reader. Just imagine explaining terms like IRC and warez to your grandma, and you'll have a good idea of the language in these beginning chapters. Despite a few cornball explanations, however, it's still refreshing to see past Napster's media hype and to see Napster for what it started as: a labor of love created by a kid who wanted nothing more than to take advantage of the online universe.

Following chapters barrel through the company's beginnings, dedicating much space to vilifying John Fanning, who seems to deserve every bit of consternation the reading public can muster. After the shock of the elder Fanning's behavior wears off, however, you'll find yourself dragging through painfully detailed accounts of acquiring executive and meetings with skeptical venture capitalists. Anyone who isn't utilizing All the Rave as a handbook on how not to run a business can skip to Chapter 7, in which Menn shifts the book's focus to Napster's delicate dance with the music industry. It's a Davey and Goliath tale for the 21st century. To accent the vastness of the undertaking, Menn dishes out a brief history of the music biz, offering such a compelling analysis of the Napster/music industry camps that it could easily be expanded to fill an entirely different book.

If you don't want to read at all, you can simply look at the pretty pictures midway through the book. Talk about a yearbook: there are pictures of Shawn's hacker pals, a photo of a wilting Lars Ullrich from Metallica, Jack Valenti and other corporate clowns, smiling like there was something to be happy about.

And maybe there was. In the end, Menn shows how Napster was, like other dot-coms, "little more than a publicly supported pyramid scheme, built on the long-true presumption that an even dumber investor was just down the road."

If you want a solid study on copyright law and running a business, Menn's read will not disappoint. If you're looking for a fluffy piece of literature that will keep you awake into the wee hours, try the one with the bespectacled boy on the cover. You probably know the one I'm talking about -- Harry something or other...

You can purchase All the Rave from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Comments

Wha???

[GuyMannDude]

No self-respecting culture maven can deny their love affair with Napster. If you weren't spending your spare time in the years 99-00 downloading MP3s like a champ, it's likely you were still in diapers or dancing with wolves. Oh, Napster, we loved ye when.

When the hell did Jon Katz start submitting slashdot articles again?

GMD

Re:Wha???

[Kai_MH]

That's kind of off-topic, yes? Who cares, anyways? The book review is here, and now I must go out and find this book.
I for one loved Napster, and continue to love Kazaa and IMesh, though they suck compared to Napster. Napster is the one... true... lust... I must have it back!

Re:Wha???

[GuyMannDude]

But on to the topic at hand -- um... I really never used Napster. I tried once and found that it didn't really have much worth downloading. Napster was good if you only wanted the top-40 of the day and didn't care if you got a song that was mislabeled, corrupted, incomplete or otherwise not worth a normal person's time.

Really? I always thought it was pretty good at helping me find obscure stuff I never would have thought of. I remember being bored one time and doing a search for "Star Trek" audio files. It popped up with a song named "Futile (Star Trek mix)" by a band named "Velvet Acid Christ". The Star Trek reference was because the song contained numerous samples from the ST:TNG episode "Best of Both Worlds" dealing with Picard's abduction by the Borg. I listened to the song and thought it was pretty cool. So I started looking around for more info on this band.

Needless to say, I would have never even heard of Velvet Acid Christ if it wasn't for Napster and the ability to search for any keyword whatsoever.

GMD

Re:Wha???

[GuyMannDude]

No shit. livegoats just made it to my foes list. What a moron.

That opening blurb just reeked of the same amateurish journalistic style as Katz. I don't see why he felt it necessary to make such a sweeping, rediculous and borderline insulting statement to start his review. Is it to try to convince us that Napster was some kind of important historical phenomenon and, therefore, we should read this review of a book about it? And if we didn't use Napster we were infants in diapers? Please. That kind of nonsense is not the way to start off any kind of article. That's pretty much the same kind of statement as Katz' "We can all agree that Columbine has changed the way that every single human being on the planet thinks about public education."

Story submitters: it's not necessary to try to place your articles in a larger context. We can do that for ourselves.

GMD

Re:Wha???

[daeley]

No shit. livegoats just made it to my foes list. What a moron.

Let's see...User number over 600000 and no comments. Hey, it could be Jon Katz in disguise! ;)

Re:Wha???

[fyonn]

while napster was great, I personally preferred audiogalaxy. I found that a lot easier to find more obscure music on, not to mention that it had an open source client and you could use it at work and come home to find the files waiting for you. not to mention the great community that was there, and the suggestions of other tracks to listen to

I don;t suppose any of the current file sharers work like the old AG did do they?

dave

Re:Wha???

[betis70]

>>Anything that you have to go to the store to buy, packaged in cellophane on a CD is not culture.

Sure it is. Part of the culture is the fact that we generally have to buy our material needs at a store. The clothes we wear, the way we interact with people, the fact that we drive cars instead of using sandled feet--all part of our culture. It may not be a part of our culture we like or feel a particular affinity towards, but it still is part of the culture.

But I'm only a trained anthropologist. What do I know?

Decent book review

[preric]

I've already read this, and would say that's a pretty decent review, once you get around the fact that you just PAID for a book about napster

Re:Decent book review

[reallocate]

Maybe you oughta shoplift it. After all, that was the napster business plan.

Re:Decent book review

[Anonymous Coward]

Go to the library. Yanno the library (a govt. institution) has a lot in common with Napster. In fact considering the only reason you need to return a book to the library is so that other people can use it (same thing as sharing the file after you've d/led it) I'd say the library is quite the file sharing program. Too bad the library doesn't bring the books to your house.

M.D. Inc

Re:Decent book review

[fobbman]

If we did steal the book, would Crown Publishing Group start printing up versions of the book with the lone phrase "What the fuck do you think you're doing?" printed repeatedly in it?

Re:Decent book review

[Surak]

I've already read this, and would say that's a pretty decent review, once you get around the fact that you just PAID for a book about napster

I just got it off of Kazaa!

Re:Decent book review

[_Sprocket_]

If we did steal the book, would Crown Publishing Group start printing up versions of the book with the lone phrase "What the fuck do you think you're doing?" printed repeatedly in it?

I downloaded "All_The_Rave_-_Joseph Menn(OCR,PR.V.1.0).pdf" and all it was just 863K of the phrase "What the fuck do you think you're doing?" repeated again and again. Maybe someone OCR'd the wrong book.

Or it might have been Madonna's little known SEX2 book.

Culture maven

[easter1916]

A few points:
1) The word maven is very irritating
2) I used Napster only a handful of times because I regard illegal filesharing as theft
3) I don't consider myself a culture "maven" but I am into music
4) Dancing with wolves? What on earth are you talking about?

Re:Culture maven

[Anonymous Coward]

Copyright infringement, yes. Illegal, yes. Theft, no.

Re:Culture maven

[Xerithane]

2) I used Napster only a handful of times because I regard illegal filesharing as theft

It's not theft, but it is stealing. Theft is removing property, so that every part of the property is removed from it's former position. Steal is to take without right or leave the property of another.

My grassroots campaign to try to get people to acknowledge they are, in fact, stealing when they download music without license to that media. Join my campaign :)

3) I don't consider myself a culture "maven" but I am into music

I consider myself a culture muppet, and I love music.

4) Dancing with wolves? What on earth are you talking about?

Jon Katz, describing hippies.

Re:Culture maven

[e2d2]

So you only stole files a few times? Hey I only beat a few people up so I'm clean like you..

The other sick depraved bastards stealing music from the mouths of those poor music industry blue-collar types. Not us though, me and you are the last of our type.

Re:Culture maven

[mark_lybarger]

hey dude, obviously you don't get the point. you still obtained some songs using napster. weather it was 3 or 30,000, it's all copyright infringement (not theft). and that's what's illegal. it doesn't matter if you drive 80 to work every day or only the one day you were running late last week. it's still speeding and you can still get a ticket. etc, etc.

there's no implicit pardons for lack of volume copyright infringement, but typically them there law-yers are going to only prosicute those who will give them the biggest bang for the buck.

Diapers?

[KillerHamster]

If you weren't spending your spare time in the years 99-00 downloading MP3s like a champ, it's likely you were still in diapers or dancing with wolves.

Or maybe you hadn't yet convinced your old-fashioned parents to buy a computer...

wolves?

[sporty]

If you weren't spending your spare time in the years 99-00 downloading MP3s like a champ, it's likely you were still in diapers or dancing with wolves. Oh, Napster, we loved ye when.

Or using ftp, irc or usenet. Or not using them at all.

I prefer whole albums myself. Napster never made that easy.

Re:wolves?

[retto]

What abuot Scour? Or just burning the CD?

In 99-00 I was in college and Napster was blocked there, but Scour and iMesh weren't. I never did try Napster.

Of course, just coping the CD from someone will a helluva lot easier.

Ahh the good old days...

[mtrupe]

Its such a shame how we cannot get free music anymore now that Napster is dead. Err, uh. Nevermind.

not me

[Jucius Maximus]

"No self-respecting culture maven can deny their love affair with Napster. If you weren't spending your spare time in the years 99-00 downloading MP3s like a champ, it's likely you were still in diapers or dancing with wolves."

Or on dialup. 28.8 dialup. On a 5 machine home LAN.

It is painful living in a rural area, there's still no broadband.

Napster will be remembered as brilliant

[192939495969798999]

I can't think of a better way to find out about a new band than on Napster (the way it was). I heard about numerous bands that I would have had no exposure to otherwise. While I think it is wrong to steal people's work, I think it is really important for music to circulate to its audience -- If Napster could sell ads, why couldn't they just use that to pay royalties? Besides, for the 999th time, no one is paying 18 bucks for a CD with one good song on it.

Shawn's computer pals

[GuyMannDude]

After his uncle John gives Shawn his first computer, the aw-shucks kid from Massachusetts comes across a brilliant idea, peer-to-peer file sharing, which he develops with the help of friends in several online communities. The story is touching, and it's fascinating to take a behind-the-scenes look at how the program originated, first through Shawn and then as the product of a tight-knit online community.

Did the members of this "tight-knit online community" become employees of Napster Inc. or did Shawn just ditch them once he realized just how big a thing p2p could be? I'm not trolling, I'm asking. I don't recall Shawn giving a lot of public thanks to his computer buddies during Napster's hayday.

GMD

Re:Shawn's computer pals

[dr ttol]

Yeah. One of them is Jordan Ritter who is also a co-founder. He actually did all the backend server stuff. He's now over at Cloudmark doing the SpamNet thing, which is pretty big. And yes, I did some stuff for Napster. Jordan rules by the way.

Napster changed my life

[Jad LaFields]

I essentially didn't listen to music before napster. The occaisional random CD, but I (for some reason) never listened to the radio, never watched MTV, etc., and was pretty much entirely out of the loop regarding popular music. Actually even unpopular music.

Now I have a 20gig mp3 that I quite literally carry around with me *everywhere* and I have a much more diverse music tastes (can listen to rap-rock, baroque, ska, and big-beat sequentially without batting an eye) than I could ever have gotten through normal music-discovering means (radio, MTV).

Thank you Napster.

Bring on the MPAA / RIAA discussions..

[saintjab]

And the book isn't even about that. It's more of a post-mortem business analysis; and could/would prove very handy to someone looking to get into internet ventures. This is a great idea becaues it may help to broaden the pulic's (Joe Sixpack's) understanding of what is going on with all this online P2P contreversy stuff. It could prove very beneficial to the cause of P2P supporters; while maybe shedding some light on just how corrupt the music industries tactics can be. I think this is great idea for a book and there should be more like them.

Re:Napster? Feh.

[tuffy]

I consider the copying of music and other digital media to which I do not own the copyright or to which I have not been given the express permission by the owner of said copyright to be theft.

I consider wandering off with a CD I haven't paid for to be theft. I consider downloading songs I haven't paid for and don't have permission to download copyright infringement, because that's what it is. I don't consider either to be acceptable, but neither to I consider both of them to be identical.

I really hate it when ...

[Chromodromic]

... people refer to events that happened two years ago as something akin to "back in the days of yore" or as in this case "when loved ye when". Jesus. It was two fuckin' years ago.

Otherwise Napster Shnapster. Somehow, all the people I know are *still* getting buttloads of free music, and, somehow, I think they will continue to ...

Re:you know it's true

[egomaniac]

and copying music is NOT stealing in any sense of the word "stealing"

Excerpt from Merriam Webster:

steal, v:

1 : to take the property of another wrongfully and especially as an habitual or regular practice

...

1 a : to take or appropriate without right or leave and with intent to keep or make use of wrongfully

Sounds like stealing to me. Of course, next you're going to argue that the first definition doesn't apply, because music isn't "property". Thankfully, I've got that covered too.

property, n:

2 c : something to which a person or business has a legal title

Next, you're going to argue that it still doesn't count, because you didn't "take" it, you just "made a copy of it", to which I answer: shut up. You didn't make the music, and you don't have a natural right to listen to it. I don't see what is so wrong about others expecting to be paid for their efforts, despite the fact that the product of those efforts is intangible. If you don't want to pay for it, feel free to not listen to it.

Napster is long dead, Opennap lives on.

[Wally_bear]

Sure, it's not as big as Napster in its heyday, or even Music City (running Opennap) before the traitors went to other things, but Opennap is still alive and kicking, I exclusively do my downloading from Opennap and Slavanap (ugh) servers.

As someone already mentioned (fairly cluelessly however) that WinMX is "napster like", it's connecting to Opennap servers and they likely don't even realize it.

Lopster and Lopster for windows are two clients I suggest, given your preferred OS (not sure what to suggest for Mac honestly..)

Sure, irc trading has gone on for years, BitTorrent recently, but at least on Opennap you can also chat and have some sort of knit community outside of a Forum.

Actually, I never liked Napster.

[mcc]

Except for a very very small block of time RIGHT before they shut down (during which time they were quite enjoyable to use and featured a wide variety of music) Napster always struck me as having shitty, uber-mainstream selection, annoying users, download speeds that seemed to almost always drop to 0.2k/s or just drop altogether once the file was half-downloaded, a total of zero users who were correctly reporting their (modem or cable?) download type, and an absolutely horrid (at least at first) macintosh implementation. Moreover, finding a full album on napster was absolutely impossible, badly encoded mp3s were everywhere, and WELL, WELL over half of all mp3s available on napster were incompletes-- but NONE were labelled as such.

I hated napster.

I spent the entire Napster period downloading mp3s, just as i had for a very very long time before Napster was ever invented-- from search.oth.net and other FTP-search based sources. Yeah, Ratio was a bitch, but at least you KNEW the server was going to stay up for a few hours at least, and you knew nobody was going to put an mp3 in their main collection if it was an incomplete.

Also, there was this convenient thing in that basically, the majority of ftp servers had a 1:5 U/D ratio set; the vast majority of ftp servers had exactly one file that i wanted to download of about 6 or 7 megabytes; and i had an mp3 of cookie monster singing "C is for Cookie, that's good enough for me" that was 1.5 megabytes. So i could zap up cookie monster, grab what i wanted, and get out quick. What was wierd, though, was that i think i started something; once i started doing this, the cookie monster mp3 started spreading quite a bit. I would sign onto mp3 servers i'd never been on before and find my cookie monster mp3 already there-- and not in the upload folder either, in the actual sorted mp3 collection. Hmmmm.. ^_^

Uh, and since i see to be admitting to illegal acts above: i downloaded mp3s solely to sample music which i was considering buying or which was not available in america, i was too young to be legally tried as an adult when the events described above happened, i never downloaded mp3s, this post is fiction posted for humorous purposes, i don't even know what an "mp3" is, and i don't own or know how to use a computer.

Oh, and slashdot claims that this is my 700th post posted with my account, though i notice a lot of my earlier ones aren't in the archive.

It's a Davey and Goliath tale for the 21st century

[haa...jesus christ]

Uh, you should probably say 'David and Goliath'. 'Davey and Goliath' connotes Napster users as button-down Christians and the music industry as a big dumb dog.

Okay, it's half right.

Re:Interesting..

[wzm]

And that was a similar situation, interesting comparison. Bonnie & Clyde, Dillinger, etc. were all worshiped as heros, because the banks of the period appeared to have screwed over the common man, both through the events of the dust bowl (evicting people from their homes), and at the start of the depression, with the stock market collapse. Gangsters were viewed as fighting back for the common man.

Maybe people doing the same thing for groups such as Napster implies that a similar sentiment exists towards the RIAA/MPAA etc. Obviously the "crime" of those media industries is far less (abuse of artists, homogenization of radio, high costs), but a similar, though smaller, backlash is present.

Re:What's the appeal

[Jucius Maximus]

"I never understood the appeal of Napster. I tried to use it a few times, but the signal to noise ratio was so pathetic it wasn't worth the effort. Nice try, interesting concept, largely unusable in my experience."

This is why I love bittorrent. It's not one large searchable network but the signal to noise ratio is extremely good. I have never gotten anything that was mislabelled and the actual quality of what you download is really high. And if you go to one of the 'torrent sites' you can search a large number of back-archives of old torrents, effectively creating a lot of searchable mini-torrent networks. Different sites specialise in different thigns: Apps, Movies, Music, Anime, Pr0n, etc. And no, I will not overload my favourite sites by providing links here. Go an google for them.

The other great thing about bittorrent is that there is a lot more 'sharing ethics' in the community. People seed files using their own bandwidth just for the heck of it, they don't just download and disconnect. One 2 GB Anime chunk I finished downloading 10 hours ago is still seeding on my machine because I want to help other people get it. I would have have shared something like that on Napster or Kazaa.

Re:you know it's true

[Soko]

and even if you are tired of hearing it, it doesn't make it any less true:

ALL COPYRIGHT = GREED

Really? So the GPL == GREED too? After all. the power of the GPL comes from Copyright Law, even though it's used to grant freedoms instead of restrict them.

and copying music is NOT stealing in any sense of the word "stealing"

PERIOD


Here nor there - it's still not legal. You're either on a crusade to "stick it to da man" or you yourself are GREEDY.

Kids. Sheesh.

Soko

puh-lease

[j4ck50n]

"If you weren't spending your spare time in the years 99-00 downloading MP3s like a champ, it's likely you were still in diapers or dancing with wolves. Oh, Napster, we loved ye when."

No self respecting geek would use Napster EVER, no one I know ever touched it, and we all downloaded MP3's *like a champ*.

It's called usenet...premium servers please. All of us *in the know* knew that once Napster went under, and it most definitely would, that all the kids hyped up on *free* would be flocking to usenet, flooding the groups with crap posts, begging for instructions and calling everyone *fag*. Sure enough, they did.

Napster single handedly brought piracy to the masses, made it a household word and brought the ire of RIAA etc. upon us all.

I cant believe that this story was intro'd like this. Napster is, was and always will be a blight and a bad bad period in mine and others opinions.

"...in diapers..." man, gimma a freekin break.

Humbug

[Jahf]

If you weren't spending your spare time in the years 99-00 downloading MP3s like a champ, it's likely you were still in diapers or dancing with wolves.

Or maybe you were just a conscientious person who instead of ripping off your favorite artists (yes, they do get SOME of that money, just not much) were buying their discs and ripping them from legitimately purchased media and thereby also helping make sure that the labels saw how much they were selling.

Now porn on the other hand ...

Re:you know it's true

[operagost]

Said just like someone who has never created ANYTHING of his own. Imagine if you did- would it be fair that the day after you introduced your art/invention to the world, a hundred others copied it and you never profitted? That you enriched the world for free is small consolation while you lie penniless in the gutter.

Copyrights and patents are not inherently evil, but like many things they can be abused and used for ill purposes. For example- by extending them in perpetuity.

Looking back...

[Otter]

And maybe there was. In the end, Menn shows how Napster was, like other dot-coms, little more than a publicly supported pyramid scheme, built on the long-true presumption that an even dumber investor was just down the road.

A few months ago, there was an interview with Shawn Fanning linked here, where he was asked to marvel at how he's not a billionaire. I was marveling that there was a time when it seemed perfectly reasonable that a company with no source of revenue and whose only activity was facilitating massive violation of the copyrights of enormous companies should, of course, be making a fortune for its founders.

Although the same interview had Fanning talking about growing up on Cape Cod in Hull, MA -- apparently unaware that his home town is nowhere near Cape Cod.

Menn also exposes...rockstress Courtney Love's flirtations with Shawn, whom she once introduced at an award show as her future husband.

This might make sense, if you're one of the people always mentioning Courtney Love as a supporter of Napster, except that Love's plagiarized essay actually denounced Napster and supported Lars Ulrich. I suppose that's her being her.

A lot of folks are missing the point completely -

[oldwarrior]

It's the income that is theft/stolen (revenue) not the music/cds/files.

It's not the same as walking out with stolen cds but it is the same as ruining some farmers crops or giving them away when the family isn't home. The hard work pays off with return that feeds the kids and that's what you steal when you napster/gnutella/morpheus/kazaa music. QED.

Re:A lot of folks are missing the point completely

[Mr_Silver]

It's the income that is theft/stolen (revenue) not the music/cds/files.

Actually, it's the potential income that is stolen.

The problem is that it's very difficult to prove that had a user not been able to download the song, that they would have gone out and bought it.

WTF?

[Chasuk]

Methinks Mr. Livegoat needs to put away the thesaurus when he is writing a book review, at least until the words it recommends fit comfortably within his own vocabulary.

... dedicating much space to vilifying John Fanning, who seems to deserve every bit of consternation the reading public can muster.

The word you wanted was condemnation, Mr. Livegoat. Consternation is the rough equivalent of confusion, which doesn't fit the context of your sentence at all.

Techies of all stripes will be amused as Menn attempts to make computer programming jargon edible to the mainstream reader.

Edible? Try intelligible.

With a boatload of rock stars and other curious characters, you'd think the spectacle of it all would overshadow the book's business patois.

Patois, which means roughly the same thing as jargon or lingo, is nonsensical in this sentence. The spectacle of rock stars overshadows jargon? Really?

An informative review, if one can overlook these bloopers.

Re:WTF?

[Halloween Jack]

"Self-respecting culture mavens" can't be bothered with petty things like understanding the twenty-dollar words that they throw into reviews. See, "livegoat"'s email points back to gamegal.com, which is, like, this game review site, OK, but, see, it's, like, for gals! Or written by a gal. Or something. Let's look at their profiles page, shall we?

Atchly, looks like "Libe Goad" is a real person, according to their site, and helped make kozmo.com the success that it is today. And she has degrees in Journalism and English Literature, so she must be qualified to be an editor. So there.

Illegal versus unethical

[s20451]

I used Napster a handful of times too, but only when I was looking for a specific song off a hard-to-find album.

Although the law does not technically distinguish between the two cases, I would argue that my use of Napster was not unethical, because if everyone did it, it would not have a significantly negative impact on the production of music, and because the music industry has provided no legitimate alternative. Meanwhile, downloading thousands of songs to avoid paying for music at all is unethical, because the downloader benefits from musicians' work without giving them any possibility of compensation. If everyone did that, the availability of music would likely decrease as fewer people could afford to produce it, and everyone would suffer.

Your argument, that breaking a law is black-and-white regardless of intention or magnitude, is the sort of logic that puts petty thieves away for life under three-strikes laws. It also implies that legality is the same as morality, and sets up the government as the ultimate judge of correct social behaviour.

And I think those who download music should consider that because they can do something, it doesn't necessarily mean that they should.

Napster--Quintessentially Dot-bomb?

[istartedi]

Pitchman: I have a 19-year old programmer who wants to promote a system that distributes other people's copyrighted works and will probably give rise to all kinds of troublesome legal issues, but he does it on the Internet so it's really cutting edge.

VC: Here's a truckload of money.