[isthisnickcool]

RIP Napster.

[ecurbh]

I guess the RIAA can rest easy now that file-sharing is dead. </sarcasm>

[FormerLurker]

And I see a accompaning fall of the music industry, as Napster provided a means to sample what many would otherwise have never heard and would have totally ignored.

With MTV, and radio, there really isn't a big desire these days to actually BUY music. Napster could have been modified to allow a certain sampling off of a CD, and then allowed an interested person to "burn" a CD if they liked what they heard.

As always, short sighted greed overcomes long range common sense...

[AAABEST]

Yep, the buggy whip makers killed Napster only to find 50 more heads of the hydra popping up.

Now they want to go after all of your computers and electronics so they can continue their empire. I hope they go bankrupt.

[cynwoody]

Napigator lives!

[Caipirabob]

The consumer will still continue to drive the market. Those companies/entities which fail to adapt will die on the alter of obsolescence. The market says that file sharing is how the future model will work. I'm just stating the facts. I really doubt that any single non-government entity has the ability to control the trends of millions upon millions of web users. It's a losing battle and the RIAA are living in a dream if they believe they can compete with an army of 12 year old hackers.

[KneelBeforeZod]

[Jim Noble]

Napster still has (had) the best P2P interface for music.

They should have gone to Fiji as soon as the lawsuit was filed, but they were greedy-wanted to be a big cheese onshore-too bad.

RIP, ded kitty.

[Musket]

I said it when Napster was born and I'll say it now--you CAN'T make a business out of stealing other peoples work. DUH!

[LS]

Napster was clearly theft. However, technology in free markets routinely runs ahead of the law, and in this case the genie is out of the bottle. The law must in some way adjust, just as the VCR companies worked out an arrangement to tape television movies.

I am of the opinion that this is PART of the current malaise in tech stocks, and that the industry is in part waiting until this issue is solved to move ahead, because we were on the verge of Internet movies and instantly downloaded music. No more.

[elfman2]

This reminds me of when I would copy cassette tapes from friends and make them for them. I knew that it was technically illegal, but get real - it was just small time sharing between friends. But I was never juvenile enough to believe that because I could get away with that, I should have the "right" to start up a billion dollar business doing the same publicly. ROTF!

Of course we can't "stop" file swapping, but we can make it inconvenient and somewhat underground, just like cassette duplication 20 years ago.

[beckett]

KaZaA rolls on, swapping files unencumbered. No US court, no court anywhere in the world, can stem the tide.

Napster was just unlucky enough to be the first to get noticed by the big money special interests whose business plans require a cessation of the advance of technology. It is a fool's project.

Copyright law in its present form does not reflect reality. The Internet permanently devalues almost all copyrightable material because distribution is nearly cost-free. The RIAA and huge portions of the big entertainment companies have become unnecessary.

[mhking]

The only thing on Napster's site today is this graphic:

[Huck]

I used Napster. Now I use Grokster. I like Grokster. It works pretty well and has enough users to provide a wide enough variety of tunes. I am a pub musician, and I am able to download all the songs, all the lyrics, and all the sheet music I need. It's really incredible. In the old days, you had to tape stuff from friends or off the radio, copy lyrics from books, etc. Bottom line for me is that I simply can't buy CDs when I can get them for free. I still buy concert tix, but not CDs. I am strung out on MP3s. I get all my music that way. I tape DVDs from the video store too. I have low ethical standards.

[A CA Guy]

85 million loss. Typical for those not in at the start of the pyramid scheme known as internet companies.