I just read this interesting article by Rob Walker at MSN.COM news...
Napster R.I.P.?
By Rob Walker
Posted Thursday, July 27, 2000, at 12:05 p.m. PT
Wednesday's ruling by a California judge that Napster must shut down its
popular music-file-swapping feature has caused a lot of teeth-gnashing.
Could this be the end, so soon, of the so-called "peer-to-peer" craze?
As a person who buys a fair number of CDs, I'm as attracted as anyone to the
idea of technology like Napster's. It's an incredibly clever and impressive
creation. I completely understand, and even empathize with, people who are
sick of bloated CD prices. And I even get the attraction to the
revolutionary, cut-out-the-useless-middleman rhetoric that surrounds the
peer-to-peer notion: Even if Napster goes down, the tech revolutionaries
promise, successor companies such as Gnutella will ensure that
file-swapping, without the annoying "friction" created by the current
recording industry apparatus, will continue unabated. Two points are
supposed to follow from this. One, repeated almost constantly by an army of
self-styled contrarians from the very second that Napster first appeared, is
that the recording industry is toast. And two is that there is nothing it
can do via the courts to stop a Gnutella-like foe, whose technology works in
such a way that there is nothing to shut down.
But is either of those points really true? If file-swapping continues, does
it follow that the recording industry collapses? I still don't think so.
There have been conflicting reports as to whether Napster's popularity
caused people to buy more or fewer CDs, but even if it's the latter, the
negative effect has been pretty small. And it's worth remembering that
videocassettes didn't wipe out the movie business--nor did they cause the
price of movie tickets to fall.
I'm also not so sure that the record industry wouldn't be able to do
anything about Gnutella-type technology. I don't know what the Gnutella
creators' plans are, but anyone trying to make money using a Gnutella
variation would have to create some of that "friction" that the peer-to-peer
revolutionaries complain about. After all, Napster's ultimate goal isn't
really to eliminate the middleman, Napster's goal is to be the middleman,
and to make a lot of money as a result. (It's never been clear to me how
they would do this, and to date Napster has not earned a penny.)
If Gnutella or any similar outfit intends to make money, it will have to
introduce some friction to the process; and if any firm ends up earning
profits by making it easy for other people to circumvent copyright law, it
doesn't seem that it would be all hard to go after that firm in the courts.
So, it may be right that it is impossible to stop technology that allows
people to swap digital files. But what if it also turns out to be
prohibitively difficult to profit from that technology, at least without
getting the copyright owners on board? In other words, what if the
technology lived on, but no one ever made any money off it? That would
certainly be revolutionary. And it might even be fine with some of the
revolutionaries writing the impressive programs that make it all possible.
But I'm not sure how investors betting on peer-to-peer as a business trend
would feel about it.
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Pierre Forest- Kheops Minidisc Owner
Kheops Minidisc - Your one stop shop for all your minidisc needs !
http://www.kheopsminidisc.com
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