Napster/P2P: who’s right? What works?

[Scronx]

Am tempted by the idea of getting sojething for nothing -- esp. recorded music I've long wished to own. Napster comes along and offers this; I successfully resist; it's destroyed, the record companies totally bungle the aftermath, others handily replace the original program. If I ever use them, it will nly be to buy selections that I will either never buy or buy only in thrift shops (a great source of sound recordings BTW), Let me have your thoughts on these offerings, please, and on which of them work best and are known to be free of viruses, admware and all that rot.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napster


Although the central servers used by Napster made it a convenient legal target, the record industry failed to capitalize on the power vacuum left in its wake. The years between Napster's demise and the emergence of the iTunes Music Store (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITunes_Music_Store) as the first popular pay-service were squandered as the five major labels bickered amongst themselves, launching the user-unfriendly, restrictive, and mutually incompatible subscription services Pressplay (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pressplay) and MusicNet (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=MusicNet&amp;acti&#111;n=edit).<SUP =plainlinksneverexpand id=ref_musicnetpressplay>[9] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napster#endnote_musicnetpressplay)</SUP>


In the meantime, the peer-to-peer (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peer-to-peer) filesharing (or P2P (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P2P)) trend Napster started soon resumed, with new programs and networks picking up the torch. Unofficial Napster servers proliferated, aided by a program known as "Napigator (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napigator)", and a second generation of P2P protocols (including FastTrack and Gnutella) were quickly developed. Designed as decentralized networks, these have been much more challenging for copyright owners to pursue in the courts (see MGM vs. Grokster (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MGM_vs._Grokster)).

[Michael]

The world is changing. The old order is dying.
The record industry profits have been falling for years even before
Napster. Napster became an excuse for the record industry executives’
failings. They do not want to blame the “music” that they are
putting out. So they blame the new technology and the changing world.




P2P is just part of a changing world and the old
order is trying to control and profit from that change.
Intellectual property--companies today are even claiming to be able to
patent natural itself. But they fail to use the new
technology correctly so they want to stop other people from using
it. It all about control.



In the end, the old order will fail and the
next order will ask what is best for the nation not the rich.

[Scronx]

Interesting, Michael! Have thought similarly on occasion. Not to mention the fact that popular music has for 40 years done everything it could to destroy the "old morality" ..... ah, a rich spectacle indeed, watching these "artists" (degenerate rock, pop, rap, hip hop, gangsta, etc. performers) and their swinish middle men (record companies, promoters) reduce youth to a rootless, clueless mass of protoplasm, and then complain that people just take things. Popular music has been almost 100% hedonistic for -- how long? The Beatles were culture killers. So was Elvis. How about the Big Bands orTin Pan Alley -- how high did they ever lift the human soul? (How low did they drag it into a gutter of vulgarity?) Notwithstanding the fact that many of these acts' music is highly listenable (for what it is), their effect overall has -- in my HUMBLE opinion -- been [QUALIFIER CENSORED].