Monday, August 13, 2007

Hollywood to make Napster Wars: Part Deux

Looks like Hollywood is set to re-create the Napster Wars of the early 21st century. Cory Doctorow's article in Information Week, "Why Is Hollywood Making A Sequel To The Napster Wars?", examines the industry-initiated downfall of Napster, one of the fasted adopted technologies ever -- 52 million users signed up to download the software over a period of only 18 months. Record companies bought out Napster and its ilk, and eventually tried to bring back services like mp3.com under their own banner of corporate ownership.

Doctorow takes a look at Sony, and asks why "today's Walkman is the iPod" when Sony owns or part-owns some of the largest record companies worldwide -- shouldn't it have been a shoe-in for a corporation like that to dominate a market so clearly wide open to them? He then goes on to look at how the Napster battles of 2001 compare to the YouTube battles of 2006 and 2007; record companies are here replaced by Cable TV networks and film distribution companies all vying for a piece of YouTube's oh-so-valuable revenue.

The main difference in the contemporary version of these legal battles is that YouTube is already making money -- a *lot* of money. Another massive difference is that YouTube -- owned by Google -- actually wants to sit down as a company with all of the copyright and IP owners and work out some sort of financial deal.

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