Word: napstering
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...ever wrong. Back in November, I wrote an op-ed in this newspaper celebrating the beginning of a new era in the distribution of music. Napster had just signed a pact with the record label Bertelsmann, and it looked as if the rest of the Big Five labels would follow suit shortly. Napster would set up a subscription service, I predicted, and you and I would never buy another CD at Tower Records again...
Well, the brave new world has arrived, and it looks decidedly like the past. Judge Marilyn Hall Patel has ruled that Napster must prevent its users from trading in copyrighted material. Last week, the record labels delivered to Napster a list of hundreds of thousands of copyrighted songs, files which Napster now filters to prevent users from trading. Intrepid users are now resorting to misspellings and Pig Latin to avoid the filters, but it's doubtful that the majority of users will ever find Napster as convenient as it once...
...Napster's predicament is a case of the law working too well. Usually, technology and business race ahead to new frontiers, while the rules necessary to constrain behavior in these areas struggle to catch up. In the 19th century, vagabonds and fools flocked west seeking their fortune, and in some places, like mining towns, they built a virtually lawless society. Only later, when sheriffs and judges arrived, did these areas begin to achieve a degree of civilization. In the 1980s, Wall Street invented new financial instruments like junk bonds and mortgage-backed bonds, only to abuse these Byzantine new securities...
Turning to Napster, 50 million registered users proved that online music distribution was a feasible opportunity. Still, the chaotic interim period simply did not last long enough. The recording industry sued Napster within a year of its founding, and with the Patel ruling now on the books, the door has officially been closed on the lawless period of Internet music distribution. No one knows if Napster's model could even produce a viable business, as Napster has been a free service since Day 1, and now with the law firmly against Napster, we may never know...
Going forward, we can now reasonably expect the worst-case scenario for digital music. As I suggested in November while entertaining the possibility of Napster's defeat, the record labels, able to work together only to squash a common enemy, will now fracture and pursue Internet music distribution separately. To download their favorite tracks, consumers will now have to register and pay at more than one music site, to say nothing of figuring out which site hosts the music they're after...