Word: napstering
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...burners were widely used (and widely accepted) as do-it-yourself piracy kits, bringing much joy to the lives of nearly every computer-literate student and much distress to the careers of Tower Records executives who, coincidentally, declared a no-return policy on all compact discs. Thanks to Napster, people didn't need to leave home for a five-fingered discount on music. The recording industry's nightmare was the morally flexible college student's dream...
...Libraries of Congress around the world at whim. Amazingly, the sellers of this dream overlooked the fact that many homes and offices connect to the 21st century fiber network with twisted-pair copper wires--late 19th century tech. These could hardly keep up with the bandwidth demands of the Napster...
...Napster prevailed, we could have avoided this wretched mess. With the illicit but compelling market power of its 50 million users, Napster might have muscled agreements with the other record labels similar to its Bertelsmann pact. Still tiny relative to the rest of the recording industry, Napster would slowly but surely have been transformed into a profitable way to distribute music while benefiting artists, labels, consumers and Napster itself. All this would have been possible, if only the law had worked just a little bit slower. Yet thanks to our speedy and efficient legal system, it's now highly doubtful...
There's no real solution to this problem, either. Napster was founded on a legal loophole, the premise being that the company would avoid culpability by not hosing music files on its own servers. Its legal argument was based on the 1984 Betamax case, in which movie studios sued Sony because they feared VCR's would lead to piracy. The judge in that case, evincing an understanding of technology more sophisticated than Judge Patel's, ruled in favor of Sony because Sony's customers, not the company itself, were the ones violating copyright. Judge Patel, in contrast, feels that Napster...
APSTERNAY The bad news: last week a U.S. district court judge told the file-swapping service Napster that it has to stop users from trading copyrighted music. The good news: Napster isn't trying all that hard. Software filters are supposed to keep users from posting songs that the record labels have asked Napster to block, but the filters are ridiculously easy to fool. Disguise a song title with an obvious misspelling--say, replacing the word to with the number 2--and the filters won't pick it up. One popular strategy is to post a song with its title...