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why is hollywood maKiNG a sequel to the NaPster wars?
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Why Is Hollywood Making a Sequel
to the Napster Wars?
(Originally published in
InformationWeek,
August 14, 2007.)
Hollywood loves sequels — they’re generally a safe bet, provided
that you’re continuing an already successful franchise. But you’d
have to be nuts to shoot a sequel to a disastrous flop — say,
The
Adventures of Pluto Nash
or
Town and Country
.
As disastrous as
Pluto Nash
was, it was practically painless
when compared to the Napster debacle. That shipwreck took
place six years ago, when the record industry succeeded in shut-
ting down the pioneering file-sharing service, and they show no
signs of recovery.
The disastrous thing about Napster wasn’t that it existed, but
rather that the record industry managed to kill it.
Napster had an industry-friendly business model: raise ven-
ture capital, start charging for access to the service, and then pay
billions of dollars to the record companies in exchange for licenses
to their works. Yes, they kicked this plan off without getting per-
mission from the record companies, but that’s not so unusual.
The record companies followed the same business plan a hundred
years ago, when they started recording sheet music without per-
mission, raising capital and garnering profits, and
then
working
out a deal to pay the composers for the works they’d built their
fortunes on.
Napster’s plan was plausible. They had the fastest-adopted
technology in the history of the world, garnering 52,000,000
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