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Napster
Kayoed?
The
US Appeals Court ruling
[Wired] Feb. 12 against Napster
turned out to be as ambiguous as the dispute itself has become.
Yes, the file-trading service faces a shutdown
[Salon] but it wasn't an immediately
lethal sword to the gut.
Sure
the recording industry seems to have proved its case that
file-traders are breaking copyright laws. And musicians need
to be paid for their work. But the recording companies have
a difficult
time [NYTimes] proving that
they have been damaged out on the digital free range. Indeed,
there is mounting evidence that digital music downloading
may be in part responsible for a strong
increase [The Age] in recording
sales.
The
recording industry itself has not
exactly been on the cutting edge [ZDNet]
of finding ways to sell music legally online. Currently it's
much more difficult to download music legally - paying for
it - than do it with any of the "illegal" services.
And young people are now hooked on downloading, with one-in-three
teens ages 12-17 [Washington Post]
copying away. And who trusts the recording companies anyway?
They were hit with a
price-fixing suit [Variety] last
year for colluding to keep CD prices high. In any case, it
may be time
to stop romanticizing [The Telegraph]
the "revolution" represented by Napster - after
all, it's about the content, right?
Complete
Digital/Napster stories archive.
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