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| Author |
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| 22 new of 183 responses total. |
mcnally
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response 162 of 183:
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Aug 7 07:33 UTC 2000 |
I finally had time to go back and read Courtney Love's music-industry
diatribe (mentioned in #99, 100, 132..) and I actually found it pretty
lucid and thought-provoking. Sure, she's a bit full of herself, but
I think this is several times in a row now that I've enjoyed reading her
opinions on music-industry issues, even if I haven't necessarily agreed
with all of them -- if nothing else, she's not afraid to be blunt..
The speech in question can be found at:
http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2000/06/14/love/index.html
Could anyone with greater insight into music industry finances comment
on the numbers she spins for her financial hypothetical?
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krj
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response 163 of 183:
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Aug 8 20:46 UTC 2000 |
Napster is the cover story on the August 14 Business Week magazine.
The material is on the web at http://www.businessweek.com
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krj
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response 164 of 183:
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Aug 15 20:24 UTC 2000 |
More articles, pointed to by the news section of mp3.com:
Motley Fool has an essay on why the copyright system is doomed:
http://biz.yahoo.com/mf/000814/hill_000814.html
Quote:
"More restrictive laws ((on copying)) can't substitute for the
consent of the governed. King George tried that when the American
colonies started grumbling. In the 1920s our own government tried
it with prohibition..."
-----
Another story reports on Hewlett Packard releasing a new line of
CD-RW drives, bundled with software for creating audio CDs and
professional-looking printed graphics for the box. HP acknowledges
that Napster users are driving the CD-RW sales.
"Market analysts figure that consumer demand could be as high
as 30 to 35 million for CD-RW drives this year." HP reckons that
70-80% of the users are making audio CDs.
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krj
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response 165 of 183:
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Aug 21 23:22 UTC 2000 |
Many net news sources cover the brief Napster filed on Friday
with the appeals court. This is where the RIAA seeks to reinstate
the injunction shutting down Napster, while the company seeks a
permanent stay. It's not clear to me that Napster is going to make any
headway with calling the judge "naive." It's also not clear to me
that they will many any headway with their argument that since it is
impossible for them to distinguish between legal and illegal file
trading, therefore they must be allowed to operate.
----------
http://www.upside.com/News/39a1a15c0.html
mp3board.com is being sued for linking to illicit MP3 sites.
mp3board has now sued AOL and Time Warner; mp3board argues that AOL,
and Time Warner if the marriage comes off, should indemnify mp3board
if any of mp3board's activities with Gnutella are found to be
infringing copyrights. They argue that since Gnutella was developed
by the staff of an AOL division, that the prospective company AOL-Time-
Warner should not be able to collect damages for the use of a
product they developed.
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mcnally
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response 166 of 183:
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Aug 22 04:08 UTC 2000 |
Heh..
It's been astonishing to see the about-face AOL has done on MP3 issues
since their prospective merger with Time Warner was announced.
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krj
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response 167 of 183:
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Aug 28 23:42 UTC 2000 |
Speaking of AOL's about-face: http://www.inside.com has a piece today
on how the author of Gnutella has disappeared and seems not too happy
to have sold Winamp to AOL.
-----
News item:
http://www.inside.com/story/Story_Cached/0,2770,8823_9_12_1,00.html
MP3.com, in the copyright case over My.MP3.Com, was able to reach
settlements with all but one of the major labels. Universal held out
and so the trial now moves into a stage to determine damages.
Universal does not budge: they want billions. They want MP3.com
destroyed (KRJ interpretation) From the inside.com story:
"According to its filings, Universal is not only trying to get
even with MP3.com, but it is also seeking 'deterrence' --
that is, to send a shrill message to Napster, Scour and the like.
In one brief, Universal asks Judge Jed Rakoff to 'give notice
to other prospective Internet billionaires that violation of the
law is not an acceptable business strategy.'"
The article goes on to outline possible MP3.com legal defense
strategies.
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krj
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response 168 of 183:
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Aug 31 15:12 UTC 2000 |
News item:
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,38525,00.html
"17 out of 50 US colleges and universities polled have banned
students from using Napster's song-swap service on their
campuses, said a report released on Wednesday by research firm
Gartner Group Inc.
...
"'I would not want to be the university president who neglected
to update the school policy regarding music downloads this year,'
said Robert Labatt, principal analyst for Gartner's e-Business
Services group. 'Long legal battles can be costly, and one
school could easily be singled out to set legal precedent
this year.'"
Napster's next court date in the Court of Appeals is
the week of October 2.
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krj
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response 169 of 183:
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Sep 7 04:26 UTC 2000 |
Continuing from resp:167 :: Wired, and most other media, report that the
court has found that mp3.com's infringements of the Universal
Music copyrights was "willful," and it set damages at $25,000
per CD copied into the MyMp3.Com service. Wired guesstimates
the total bill at around $118 million, which is not enough to
put mp3.com out of business.
mp3.com plans to continue challenges to some of the Universal
copyrights.
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krj
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response 170 of 183:
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Sep 7 04:53 UTC 2000 |
www.inside.com says that the number of CDs which were infringed
is not determined. mp3.com says 4700 which yields the $118 million
figure; Universal claims 10,000 which puts the damages closer to
$250,000,000.
In general the www.inside.com piece is much more pessimistic about
mp3.com's survival.
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richard
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response 171 of 183:
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Sep 7 04:58 UTC 2000 |
mp3.com's stock will tank bigtime tomorrow
they wont survive on their own, will need to get bought out
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krj
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response 172 of 183:
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Sep 15 03:28 UTC 2000 |
(( FW note: I've linked in the two lengthy Napster items from
the Agora conference, now that Summer's Agora is winding down.
I intend to keep most of the news updates on the legal war
in this item. ))
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krj
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response 173 of 183:
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Oct 9 20:54 UTC 2000 |
Lengthy interview with Napster's lead attorney David Boies, in which
he lays out Napster's four main legal arguments:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.10/boies.html
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krj
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response 174 of 183:
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Oct 11 02:28 UTC 2000 |
http://www.upside.com runs an interesting rumor that two unnamed
ISPs are interested in buying Napster. The idea is that the Napster
server would only be available to customers of the purchasing ISP.
With Napster incorporated as "bait" into a profitable company,
there would be some money to try to cut a deal with the record
industry.
No such sale can happen unless a deal can be cut with the record industry,
and the RIAA seems awfully determined not to make any deals.
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orinoco
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response 175 of 183:
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Oct 11 21:36 UTC 2000 |
Interesting. And it would be doubly interesting to see how much damage a
"cover charge" like that would do to the size of Napster's user base.
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raven
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response 176 of 183:
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Oct 14 22:54 UTC 2000 |
Also in the same Wired mentioned in #173 a pretty good article by John
Perry Barlow on I.P. and Napster. It makes the same points basicaly he
made in a ground breaking article on IP in Wired in 1994 that have been
addressed here, but still makes for a good read. The URL of the earlier
article is http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.03/economy.ideas.html
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mcnally
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response 177 of 183:
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Oct 15 23:54 UTC 2000 |
Interesting "is not / is too" accusations are flying between Salon
Magazine (www.salon.com) and Leonardo Chiariglione, head of the
industry-sponsored Secure Digital Music Initiative (SDMI)
Salon, citing anonymous SDMI insiders, claims that *all* of the
watermarking, encryption, and other security technologies proposed
as possible standards by the SDMI have already been cracked in record
time since the SDMI began their "Hack SDMI" challenge (which invites
would-be hackers to try for $10,000 by breaking SDMI's security schemes.)
Chiariglione, quoted in [Inside] magazine (www.inside.com) claims that
nobody knows the results of the contest yet and that none of the 450
submissions have been properly examined to see whether they're successful
cracks or not.
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krj
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response 178 of 183:
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Dec 8 00:07 UTC 2000 |
We haven't opened this can of worms for a while. I don't know what to
think about the deal between BMG and Napster, but one element of it,
which proposes that Napster charge its users $5 a month, seems like
it would badly damage Napster by driving away lots of its users,
and thus thinning the available song selection.
mp3.com's streaming service "my.mp3.com" may be in even worse shape.
mp3.com got reamed in the courts for thinking they could save users
the trouble of uploading their mp3 files to the "storage locker"
service. The revamped service will only allow free access to
25 CDs; if you want to "store" more than that, it'll be $50 per year,
thank you. Oh, and major-label products only, please, because those
are the only companies mp3.com has hundreds of millions of dollars
in licensing deals with.
I dunno, I think paying $50 per year to stream CDs that you are supposed
to already own is a non-starter, but then I'm used to dragging a
box of CDs and a portable player around with me.
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mcnally
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response 179 of 183:
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Dec 8 00:26 UTC 2000 |
It gets worse than that.. I order to prevent people from borrowing
a copy of a CD to prove that they own it, the my.mp3.com service will
apparently now require listeners to insert the CDs at random intervals
to prove they still have them. If you have to keep the CD media handy
so you can prove you're not a thief whenever you want to listen to
something, what exactly is the benefit of the storage locker concept?
Lower fidelity? High bandwidth usage? Limited selection?
I probably never would have gone for the original service in a big way
but I think MP3.com got reamed while trying to do the right thing --
all they were trying to do was provide a digital repository for content
to which people already had access, even making good-faith efforts to
ensure they weren't delivering music to people who didn't already have
a copy..
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krj
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response 180 of 183:
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Dec 27 05:50 UTC 2000 |
Not purely an mp3 item, but an mp3.com news pointer leads to it.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/2/15620.html
discusses a "stealth plan" to put a copyright protection system
into all new hard disks starting summer 2001. Yes, this makes
backups and large disk farms difficult to impossible to operate.
"But for home users, the party's over. CRPM paves the way for
CPRM-compliant audio CDs, and the free exchange of digital
recordings will be limited to non-CPRM media...."
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mcnally
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response 181 of 183:
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Dec 27 06:00 UTC 2000 |
I'm extremely skeptical about the overblown claims being made in the CPRM
stories (CPRM = Copy Protection for Removable Media..)
It seems unlikely to me that the system can do all that its critics claim
it will do and if indeed it does those things it seems pretty unlikely
that it will be a widely adopted and successful technological format.
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krj
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response 182 of 183:
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Jan 16 07:33 UTC 2001 |
Pete Townshend on Napster:
http://www.petetownshend.com/press_release_diary_display.cfm?id=3961
and if I typoed that, see www.mp3.com/news and dig down.
He seems tired of the old business model -- note his carping about BMI --
and willing to see what's coming.
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micklpkl
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response 183 of 183:
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Jan 16 16:04 UTC 2001 |
I'm not sure if I like this proposal, but there is an interesting article on
a way to make free distribution of content profitable here:
http://interocity.com/jukebox/jukebox2.html
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