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cory doctorow
college dorm-room. Eight years later, there isn’t a single autho-
rized music service that can compete with the original Napster.
Record sales are down every year, and digital music sales aren’t
filling in the crater. The record industry has contracted to four
companies, and it may soon be three if EMI can get regulatory
permission to put itself on the block.
The sue-’em-all-and-let-God-sort-’em-out plan was a flop in
the box office, a flop in home video, and a flop overseas. So why is
Hollywood shooting a remake?
YouTube, 2007, bears some passing similarity to Napster, 2001.
Founded by a couple guys in a garage, rocketed to popular success,
heavily capitalized by a deep-pocketed giant. Its business model?
Turn popularity into dollars and offer a share to the rightsholders
whose works they’re using. This is a historically sound plan:
cable operators got rich by retransmitting broadcasts without
permission, and once they were commercial successes, they sat
down to negotiate to pay for those copyrights (just as the record
companies negotiated with composers after they’d gotten rich
selling records bearing those compositions).
YouTube ’07 has another similarity to Napster ’01: it is being
sued by entertainment companies.
Only this time, it’s not (just) the record industry. Broadcast-
ers, movie studios, people who make video or audio are getting
in on the act. I recently met an NBC employee who told me that
he thought that a severe, punishing legal judgment would send
a message to the tech industry not to field this kind of service
anymore.
Let’s hope he’s wrong. Google — YouTube’s owners — is a
grown-up of a company, unusual in a tech industry populated by
corporate adolescents. They have lots of money and a sober inter-
est in keeping it. They want to sit down with A/V rightsholders
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