Record Companies Backed Off From Napster Out Of Fear
from the fear-this dept
It seems that there's a bit more to why the recording industry backed off their Napster lawsuit recently. They claimed it was because they were close to a settlement, and they didn't want to interfere with that. However, the NY Times is reporting that they really got spooked by Napster's requests to explore how the record companies had acted. The judge in the case was ready to let Napster look into whether or not the record companies had colluded to prevent it from licensing music and (perhaps more importantly) whether the record companies actually controlled the copyrights they claimed they were protecting. Basically, Napster called the record labels' bluff and it worked (for now).
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