Word: bertelsmann
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...least, good riddance to the 60-year-old recording industry that built its fortune printing CD's full of songs like "American Pie" by Don McLean. That, it seems, is the implication of the huge agreement announced on Halloween by Napster and the German giant of the media world, Bertelsmann Music Group. In a nutshell, Napster has agreed to clean up its act and charge users a subscription to download songs by Bertelsmann artists, in return for sharing profits with the German label and its artists. Forget the presidential election, forget the sequencing of the human genome, forget that space...
...Napster with the mother of all lawsuits. Because Napster doesn't host song files, it merely facilitates their transmission, Napster had a pretty strong case. But an unsympathetic judge and the prospect of being tied up in court until the Class of '04 graduates made them want to deal. Bertelsmann, recognizing that in the future, music will be downloaded whether they want it to be or not and, knowing that a recording industry not known for its technological savvy wasn't going to get them the digital promised land, decided it had better do a deal too. Not since Nixon...
...Bertelsmann officials also said they would try to convince the other litigants to cooperate with Napster...
King could not be reached for comment about the Bertelsmann deal yesterday...
However, other major players in the battle against Napster began to soften their rhetoric, hoping the Bertelsmann deal would lead to an industry-wide settlement...