Word: napstering
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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...
...even now that the recording companies have muzzled Napster, their real solution is nowhere in sight. Computer nerds, bless their souls, seem to have an unyielding desire to boast their virtual manhood. Encryption codes will be broken; system will be beaten. Gnutella, for example, is a small, mysterious little file sharing program that has no central servers to blame and will probably allow piracy to thrive as long as the Internet exists. No one can stop the wave...
...goldrush thrill of hearing a no-name album and discovering that it is really, really good. Word of mouth is the advertising market of music that stands on its own, that refuses to be ignored. Simply put, if an album is worth owning, people will hear about it. Napster, for all its blatant disregard for the law, provided the most organized and extensive word of mouth forum on the planet, and has swayed the purchasing power of at least one consumer, me, toward support of relatively unknown bands...
...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...
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...