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Cringely Tries Snapster 2.0
Fungii writes "Following up from this story last week, here is an update on Cringely's site about the snapster idea. He writes about some of the more interesting reader responses to the idea. Raises some interesting questions."
I thought his first plan was just dumb, this new one is mind-blowing idiotic!
Let's assume, for the sake of arguement, that what he proposes is legal. That is, a company can exist that owns 1 of each CD, and as a shareholder in this company you are given access to download an "archive" of a song or CD in such a way as to guarentee that you are the only person who is listening to a given song or CD at that time.
What would this accomplish? So say Metallica realeases a new song and 100,000 people want to listen to it. Get in line. Assuming a 5 minute song, that last person in line has to wait 500,000 mintues (347 days!) just to hear it. In the mean time, everyone else has only heard that song once!
Who, in their right mind, would sign up for that?
"The market alone cannot provide sufficient constraints on corporation's penchant to cause harm." -- Joel Bakan