I have a love/hate thing with download libraries that trade in MP3's.
That's what Napster and MP3.com really do, after all the techno-babble
dust has settled.

Napster, if you believe the original author, was originally created so
that the author wouldn't be bothered by his dormitory buddies looking
for either the latest cool sites containing MP3's, or copies of his
MP3's.  So he wrote a user friendly networked file sharing utility.

It boomed into this courtroom mess very quickly (less than two years,
at least) not because it suddenly made pirate music available, but
because it made the already available pirate music easier to find.
It's very nature and essence is to centralize and make it easy to swap
any and all audio files unencumbered by any concern other than download
speed.  That, and MP3.com's silly "my MP3" attempt just brought the
whole pirate thing (that had been going on for years) into the
spotlight, allowing the nightly TV news teams at NBC and CBS to make
it the latest shocking bugaboo.  Before, when it was all underground
sites, record companies whined and muttered and just hoped the whole
thing would go away.  Now they had to face reality and were caught
with their pants down (again).

(Aside: Note that it was David "dimpled chads" Boies who was making the
laughable argument that Napster was simply allowing licensed owners to
make "fair use" copies.  I can see that ass trying to foist the same
argument while defending street corner video merchants.)

I always thought the people who made Napster (and MP3.com) a business
could have avoided all this mess by introducing advertising (for
income), striking a deal with BMI, ASCAP and all the other licensing
groups, and declaring themselves to be a form of demand-driven radio,
thus piggybacking on that precedence and gaining an aura of
legitimacy.

There could have been Napster "Top Ten" and "Top 100" personality
pages, and so on and so forth.  They'd have made a fortune with the
blessings of society.  Instead, we have juris obfuscators jockeying
for a share of the loot, and the bovine RIAA making the ridiculous
assertion that this is hurting "all artists."   I'm trying to picture
Puffy Combs or Madonna clutching their last pitiful rags of clothes,
shaking their fist at Napster for bringing about their ruin.

George Bogatko
http://www.inluxeditions.com/