Record Industry Going After Music City, Kazaa
from the well,-that-took-long-enough dept
To be honest, I've been surprised that it's taken the music industry this long to finally get around to suing Music City and Kazaa. Both of the services have finally become just as useful as the old Napster (in plenty of cases, more so), and so the music industry wants to repeat history and shut them down. The game of "whack-a-mole" continues. In this case, though, shutting down the company might do very little to kill the music trading. They're all based on the same technology, which should keep working even if the company is shut down. In the meantime, Music City seems to be working on a strategy that shows legitimate uses of their Morpheus software - to show why it should be deemed legal. Should be another fun one. I get the feeling that it's going to be a very long time before the music industry realizes just how moronic they've been. Instead of the greatest distribution system they could ever find, with the best way to directly communicate with their customers, they're building crappy expensive useless systems that piss off their users. Update: Dotcomscoop got their hands on an internal memo from the RIAA about all of this. They seem to admit their case isn't as strong as it was against Napster, but if they can get one of the companies to join the dark side, they can find out all sorts of info. They're apparently trying to work out a deal with FastTrack.
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Money Better Spent
"We cannot sit idly by while these services continue to operate illegally, especially at a time when new legitimate services are being launched," RIAA Chief Executive Hilary Rosen said in a statement.
Maybe the RIAA and MPAA should invest the money they spend on lawsuits in making the legitimate services solid alternatives to the free services. I believe there is a market for legal subscription services that provide a good user experience at a reasonable price. Granted some people will always go with something that is free. But the mass market wants something that is easy to use, has good content and is reliable.
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