Word: napsterized
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Ultimately, the best defense against Napster may be a good offense. If the recording industry can offer audiophiles a better product or a more satisfactory experience, either online or in music stores, its companies may be able to compete--and even prosper--in a market in which the same music is available free...
This may not be as hard as it sounds. For one thing, it's a lot easier and more convenient to walk into a music store and buy a CD than it is to go on the Internet and master the technology of MP3 file exchange. Napster may be relatively easy to use, but the process of finding music on another person's computer, figuring out what it is, downloading the compressed file and turning it into playable music takes more patience than many think it's worth...
...peer to peer, there are all sorts of hidden pitfalls. Files can take forever to download. Servers can crash or go offline before you finish. Files advertised as containing one song may hold another. Or they may contain a so-called cuckoo egg--a gotcha message posted by anti-Napster activists. Last week Napster users downloading the new Barenaked Ladies single, Pinch Me, and got a version implanted with a "Trojan horse": a spoken message from the band telling fans to buy the song instead. Worse still, P2P files may harbor a file-eating computer virus. The advantage...
What will that new, post-Napster music industry look like? In some ways, it will be comfortingly familiar. There will still be CDs and music stores for some time; not all consumers are going to leap onto the Internet to meet their musical needs. As BMG Entertainment CEO Strauss Zelnick puts it, "People like packaged goods...
...chief scientist at Sun Microsystems, I have long appreciated the power of networking and of peer-to-peer file-sharing systems such as Napster. And I understand both the Internet ethos that whatever technology makes possible is inevitable and the vague precept that content should be (or will inexorably be) free...