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why is hollywood maKiNG a sequel to the NaPster wars?
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and the French run the government. With Sony, it seemed like
music was designing the Walkmen, marketing was doing the cata-
log, and electronics was in charge of selling. Sony’s portable play-
ers — the MusicClip and others — were so crippled by anti-copy-
ing technology that they couldn’t even play MP3s, and the music
selection at Sony services like PressPlay was anemic, expensive,
and equally hobbled. Sony isn’t even a name in the portable audio
market anymore — today’s Walkman is an iPod.
Of course, Sony still has a record label — for now. But sales
are falling, and the company is reeling from the 2005 “rootkit”
debacle, where it deliberately infected eight million music CDs
with a hacker tool called a rootkit, compromising over 500,000
U.S. computer networks, including military and government net-
works, all in a (failed) bid to stop copying of its CDs.
The public wasn’t willing to wait for Sony and the rest to wake
up and offer a service that was as compelling, exciting, and ver-
satile as Napster. Instead, they flocked to a new generation of
services like Kazaa and the various Gnutella networks. Kazaa’s
business-model was to set up offshore, on the tiny Polynesian
island of Vanuatu, and bundle spyware with its software, making
its profits off of fees from spyware crooks. Kazaa didn’t want to
pay billions for record industry licenses — they used the inter-
national legal and finance system to hopelessly snarl the RIAA’s
members through half a decade of wild profitability. The company
was eventually brought to ground, but the founders walked away
and started Skype and then Joost.
Meantime, dozens of other services had sprung up to fill Ka-
zaa’s niche — AllofMP3, the notorious Russian site, was eventu-
ally killed through intervention of the U.S. Trade Representative
and the WTO, and was reborn practically the next day under a
new name.
It’s been eight years since Sean Fanning created Napster in his
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