“The New Napsters”: Fortune’s perspective
“There’s more free downloading of music than ever. The big labels hate it–but shutting down the outlaw networks won’t be so easy this time.” - Headline on article by Melanie Warner in Fortune, August 12.
The TeleRead take: The magazine goes on to say: “Napster operated with central servers that tracked and controlled the transfer of files between users, but Kazaa, Grokster, and Morpheus are completely decentralized” and thus will be harder to shut down. It notes that the industry has bungled “on perhaps the most important front: creating Internet services that people actually like for legitimately licensed music.” Exactly! Just when are the big music companies going to wake up? They continue to offer a terrific negative examples for major book-publishers, which, just like the record labels, don’t offer the most reasonable prices on online products.
An aside: Maybe it’s because the old Time Warner people hate the guts of the AOL upstarts, but some of the most informative reporting on AOL Time Warner continues to come from none other than Fortune. Presumably, by the way, Melanie Warner’s last name is merely a coincidence (and besides, hey, that was a merger or so ago). Any readers know? Meanwhile see our followup on Howard Berman’s dangerous bill to allow the big boys to hack file-sharing sites.
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