opensoul

The disastrous thing about Napster wasn’t that it it existed, but rather that the record industry managed to kill it.

Napster had an industry-friendly business-model: raise venture capital, start charging for access to the service, and then pay billions of dollars to the record companies in exchange for licenses to their works. Yes, Napster kicked this plan off without getting permission from the record companies, but that’s not so unusual. The record companies followed the same business plan a hundred years ago, when they started recording sheet music without permission, raising capital and garnering profits, and then working out a deal to pay the composers for the works they’d built their fortunes on.

…This is a historically sound plan: cable operators got rich by retransmitting broadcasts without permission, and once they were commercial successes, they sat down to negotiate to pay for those copyrights.

…The thing is, the public doesn’t want managed services with limited rights. We don’t want to be stuck using approved devices in approved ways. We never have — we are the spiritual descendants of the customers for “illegal” record albums and “illegal” cable TV. The demand signal won’t go away.