This Week In Techdirt History

from the memory-lane dept

For the most part, digging through Techdirt's history tends to trigger one of two feelings: "wow, that was really [x] years ago already?" or, alternatively, "oh yeah, I remember that! It was only [x] years ago?" Often enough, the deciding factor between the two is simple: is the issue in question one that has actually evolved, or even been resolved, or is it a signpost on what feels like a long road to nowhere? Of course, there's a third more simple feeling that pops up a lot too, which can be summed up as "huh... neat!" Let's take a tour and experience all three:

Five Years Ago

Five years ago wasn't all that different from today, though some issues that were blurry then have come into sharp focus, like discussions about online privacy at the Supreme Court level, or government agencies struggling to manage watch lists and surveillance. Conversely, the issue of online bullying, while hardly resolved, has lost some of the spotlight it had this week in 2009 — spurred by the ongoing prosecution of Lori Drew, with prosecutors seeking a symbolic three-year sentence and a congressional rep launching a bill to criminalize online trolling.

It was also a week where we (and most of the gaming community) made a mistake, declaring famous vaporware Duke Nukem Forever to be officially dead and buried. Two years later we would be proven wrong, with the game finally launching to reception that, in an act of staggering generosity, I will describe as "lukewarm".

Finally, five years ago this week, we got this:

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2004, the discussion about online privacy was even younger, with people just catching on to the fact that this is about redefining entire paradigms of privacy to build a new framework that works, not starting by focusing on specific individual breaches. It's also about this time that everyone began to notice America's double standard on internet censorship when a block-circumvention system offered to people in Iran and China turned out to be blocking its own list of supposedly objectionable content.

Schools were just starting (and failing) to cope with cellphone-bearing students, and the large-scale future of PayPal payments and online shopping in general was still being debated. The ringtone market was relatively new, and the world record for speed-texting was set on a phone that may or may not have had the T9 Engine but certainly did not have a touchscreen and advanced prediction algorithms.

Long before Google Glass was a thing, and before anyone would have even placed Google on a shortlist of prime candidates to build such a device, we were discussing the still-early baby steps towards wearable displays, and also wondering if the best place for wearable computing might be in your shoes. Of course, this was 2004, when people still weren't convinced that "camera phones" served any purpose.

Also, this week in Still-Hadn't-Adopted-The-Term-Patent-Troll news, we reported on "small intellectual property houses that buy up perfectly obvious patents, or those with prior art, and then go around threatening small sites".

Fifteen Years Ago

This was a fairly quiet week in 1999, but apparently a lot of people were thinking about the internet and the stock market. Victims of April Fools stock hoaxes were suing to reverse their errors, the SEC Chairman was warning casual day traders about the dangers of the market, and brand new stocks for buzzy dotcoms were still skyrocketing at their IPOs.

Nine-Hundred Years Ago

Admittedly nobody's actually sure of the exact week, but 1114 was the birth year of Bhāskara II, the greatest mathematician of medieval India, who developed many elements of differential calculus and applied them to astronomy — five centuries before Newton and Leibniz.

Filed Under: archives, look back

This Week In Techdirt History

from the looking-back dept

For this week's look back in Techdirt history, we once again find some surprises in how much the world has changed... and in how little the world has changed.

Five Years Ago:

Five years ago -- even before US Cyber Command had been created and given to the NSA -- its predecessor, Air Force Cyber Command was already active, and we were already warning that it was a mistake to put the military in charge of "cyberdefense" because they'd almost certainly turn it into a "cyberoffense." Yeah, turns out that wasn't very difficult to predict, though I don't think we thought it would go as far as it had.

We were also wondering if the Pirate Bay's legal loss in Sweden might lead to members of the Pirate Party actually getting elected to the EU Parliament -- and they did (two of 'em)! I got to give a keynote speech at an event mainly sponsored by the RIAA and I got out of there alive. Warner Music idiotically issued a copyright takedown on a presentation by Larry Lessig and Nicolas Sarkozy, in the middle of pushing for stricter copyright laws in France, had to pay up for its own infringement.

Five years ago, the Supreme Court was resisting live streaming its cases -- something that's still true today. So a more innovation-friendly, early adopter, Rep. John Culberson tried to show the Justices how easy it is. They apparently didn't get the lesson because we're no closer to live streaming.

Ten Years Ago

Comcast was trying to buy a giant company -- though that time it was Disney, which failed (though they got NBCUniversal a few years later, obviously). Speaking of Comcast, the company was claiming unlimited service, but people were discovering that (shocker!) they were lying. And speaking of broadband, President Bush was promising "universal broadband" but pushing a plan that would just make broadband more expensive (guess what happened?).

Congress was (of course) looking to ratchet up copyright law to allow the FBI to file civil suits on behalf of Hollywood and to make it illegal to bring any device that record a video into a theater. The MPAA was busy pushing a propaganda plan for elementary school kids.

Of course there was plenty of good things going on as well. Ten years ago, David Bowie was already encouraging. Meanwhile, we were finally getting past the idea that self-publishing was a bad thing.

Fifteen Years Ago:

Search engines (this was just around the time Google was about to get started...) were trying to cope with an ever expanding internet. A 13-year-old kid bid over $1 million he didn't have for products on eBay. That didn't end well. And... the hot thing in Silicon Valley was figuring out new ways to give away free PCs.

That's it for this week.

Filed Under: archives, look back

A Look Back In Techdirt History

from the learning-from-history dept

Here we go with another look back in Techdirt History.

Five Years Ago::

Once again, some things rarely change. While in the present we've been highlighting how lobbyists seem to control telco policy by playing musical chairs, five years ago, we were already warning that President Obama's supposed "ban" on lobbyists wasn't working. And speaking of broadband policy, the big broadband players were doing everything possible to shut down muni-broadband, which is partly why they have so little competition today.

Five years ago, we were already warning about how Congress was seeking to do a cybersecurity power grab to increase surveillance powers and take away your privacy. That sounds familiar. We were also mocking Mark Penn, who's now a very senior exec at Microsoft, but who was then just a "pollster" and "political strategist" using totally bogus statistics to mock bloggers. Notably, it was some bloggers who pointed out the problems with his stats. It seems worth pointing out here that Microsoft management regularly points to Penn because he has "statistical expertise", though it's been obvious for years by those who actually understand statistics that he doesn't.

On the copyright front, the EU approved yet another copyright extension while the copyright lobby flipped out that a Finnish firm wanted to rent textbooks. Because copyright.

Oh, and noting an end of an era, Yahoo shuttered GeoCities -- which was my very first home on the web.

Ten Years Ago:

The EFF launched its patent busting project. Ten years later, I think we can say that it was fairly successful, though it never really expanded beyond its initial patent targets. Meanwhile, we were still debating patent reform -- those were the early days of an attempt at patent reform, which kicked around Congress for about 7 years before the useless America Invents Act came about.

Ten years ago was also when Diebold began to abuse copyright law to try to censor leaked documents that highlighted that its voting software had serious problems -- which also revealed a lot about how Diebold was aware of the problems and still let its e-voting machines be used.

On the copyright front, the FBI was raiding schools for file sharing, the MPAA was writing open source (?!?) software it wanted universities to use to track down file sharing, and the RIAA was admitting that its silly amnesty program for file sharers was a joke.

Separately, we were imagining a day when mobile phones might replace your car stereo and you could use mobile phones on planes. Huh.

Fifteen Years Ago:

Not that much seemed to happen really. The biggest news was probably the initial announcement of Webvan, the online grocery store that became one of the most famous case studies of the original dot com bubble era. We also had stories of Netscape trying to interfere with Mozilla and Unwired Planet becoming Phone.com. That might not seem like a big deal, but the same company went through a number of business model and name changes, eventually landing back on Unwired Planet, where it has become a big and annoying patent troll.

Thirty Years Ago::

I was in elementary school, but 30 years ago this week, the Apple IIc was released!

Filed Under: archives, look back

A Look Back In Techdirt History

from the how-quickly-the-time-goes-by dept

Here we are again with another look back in Techdirt history.

Five Years Ago:

As we've noted, sometimes these look backs show that nothing ever changes. For example, one of our big stories five years ago was... the NSA abusing its surveillance powers. The NY Times revealed at the time that the NSA was collecting much more information on Americans than was allowed by law. And... basically no one paid attention. Similarly, we had a story about Swedish ISP Bahnhof deleting its log files to protect the privacy of its users. And -- just a week ago, we had nearly an identical story, as Bahnhof did it again, in response to a court ruling against the EU's data retention directive (which was put in place to stop ISPs like Bahnhof from protecting users privacy like that).

This was also the week five years ago that the Pirate Bay lost its big case in Sweden and Nicolas Sarkozy ramped up his efforts to pass a three strikes law. Of course, today the Pirate Bay is still going strong, and France's three strikes law has basically been killed off. Funny how these things work out.

We also had stories of people trying to use the DMCA for blatant censorship, including a news station trying to hide its own mistake and activist group trying to hide its fake political campaign (using actors instead of real people). Copyright as censorship is one of those issues that never changes. Also never changing: media dinosaurs acting like dinosaurs. Five years ago was when some big names in old media announced they were going to set up an "iTunes for news." That eventually turned into Journalism Online -- a paywall company that a bunch of newspapers now use (despite paywalls still failing to do much useful). Similarly, NBC was hard at work making it difficult to watch the Olympics online. Because NBC hates the internet.

Finally, we had a story of a patent troll claiming patents on basically every technology product ever and sneaky lobbyists who were hired to fight against patent reform using underhanded tricks to get "groups" that have nothing to do with patent reform (an anti-communist Hungarian group, the Minutemen (vigilante border guards), and various religious groups) to come out against patent reform. Basically, people in those groups then admitted that the lobbyists more or less tricked them into allowing their names to be used. My favorite was the 87-year old "honorary chairman" of the National Federation of American Hungarians, who had agreed to let the group's name be used but had no idea why he was against patent reform: "It was in Chicago or Detroit, I can't remember. Somebody brought this up, I don't know for what reason... So I gave them permission to use my name." And then he admitted his group was being disbanded anyway, because they were all dying, though he promised to get more information by "trying to reach the still living members of the board."

Ten Years Ago:

Back before there were copyright trolls like Prenda and Malibu Media shaking down people via legal threats, there was DirecTV's infamous program shaking down anyone who bought a smart card reader (even if for perfectly legal purposes). Ten years ago, we wrote about a former employee of their "anti-piracy" division speaking out about how it was all "an elaborate extortion scheme" and that he was suing the company because they forced him to do illegal and unethical things in shaking people down. Down in Australia, they were talking about making ISPs liable for copyright infringement. Yeah, some things never, ever change.

Also, ten years ago was the first we wrote about California state senator Leland Yee's quixotic attempt to ban violent video games. That, of course, eventually went to the Supreme Court and got completely shot down (just like about a dozen states before it). Yee wasted a ton of taxpayer money on this moralistic campaign and -- of course -- is now facing criminal charges for arms trafficking.

Then there are the more dated items that show how the world was different ten years ago. Amazon launched its A9 search engine to take down Google. We were all excited about the idea of navigation systems on phones! And they only cost $6 month! Also, people were freaking out about phones on airplanes, and a few phone makers had started testing out this ingenuous concept known as "airplane mode" to let flight attendants know the phone part wasn't on. Oh, and it was exciting to see that one-in-six Americans had used wireless internet technology.

Fifteen Years Ago:

People were trying to make a bundle of money by trademarking Y2K. The big trend in the computer world was ISPs giving away cheap free computers if you signed a long-term contract for internet service (such offerings were everywhere). In the era before smartphones, we were excited about the idea of "web phones." Also, people were writing off Mozilla for dead because Microsoft IE had won the browser wars. Okay, sometimes things do change.

One thing that never changes though, is sketchy activity online. Fifteen years ago this week, we wrote about the sex.com domain name being stolen -- a saga that went on for many years, and an entire book was eventually written about it. Also typosquatters were hitting the scene, and people were wondering if it was trademark infringement. Also, in one of the earliest "stock scams" online, an employee of the company PairGain, created a fake webpage that looked like a story from Bloomberg news about a buyout attempt, posted it on a free Angelfire account (remember those guys?) -- and watched the stock shoot up. The employee was quickly arrested.

49 Years Ago:

We weren't publishing, but that's about when Moore's Law was coined following his prediction that the number of transistors on a chip would double every 18 to 24 months. The details of the "law" have shifted somewhat over time, but the basics have held true. Of course, it was also probably 48 years ago that people started fighting over when Moore's Law was obsolete.

Filed Under: archives, look back

A Look Back In Techdirt History

from the the-more-things-change dept

Five years ago I was just a Techdirt reader. Ten years ago, I was starting journalism school and first discovering the site. Fifteen years ago, the main thing I used the internet for was playing Team Fortress Classic and a MUD called AfterShock. With that perspective in mind, let me take you on another of our weekly digs through Techdirt history:

Five Years Ago:

Today, Time Warner Cable and Comcast are working on getting their merger approved — five years ago, TWC was in the process of rolling out its metered/capped broadband services for the first time, while claiming it was what customers wanted. At the time, the response from other service providers offered a prime example of how broadband competition encourages lower prices and unlimited data. Unfortunately, when you get down to it, it's hard to say there's been much progress in improving US broadband since then, at least not from the consumer perspective — and this new merger is certainly not going to help.

Five years ago was also when a second circuit ruling opened Google up to trademark liability in AdWords — something that, we noted just this past November, may finally be coming to an end. The same can't be said for the Associated Press' aggressive interpretation of copyright law, which manifested as them targeting news aggregators for the first time in 2009. Nor can it be said for EA, which was fresh off the Spore DRM failure while Atari was following in its footsteps. Nor still can it be said about GEMA, which we were still identifying first as a "German Collections Society", for the name was in the early days of its notoriety.

These were also the days just after the ProIP bill. We noted at the time that Hollywood was already brainstorming its next round of draconian copyright legislation and, well, we all know how that ended.

Ten Years Ago:

Well this is interesting: five years ago this week Google was beginning to face trademark issues over AdWords — and ten years ago this week they had just decided to allow purchasing trademarked terms in the first place. The company was also just launching localized ads (only weeks after first testing local search). In fact, location-based services in general were only just starting to appear. Gmail was brand new and causing a stir in California with one state senator seeking to ban it, and we were also still musing about the future Google IPO.

Ten years ago this week, we also featured an innocent one-paragraph post about "the rise of patent hoarding houses" — the term "patent troll" hadn't even appeared yet. Little did we know just how bad things would get.

Back in 2004, only one in six US users had gone online via WiFi. AOL was still sending CDs and DVDs by mail. California had just made its first arrest for recording movies under its new anti-camcording law — meanwhile, the state's first anti-violent-videogame bill was shot down. Some analysts were mocking the low resolution of what we still called "camera phones" while others were smartly realizing the potential of a camera that's connected. The still-unsettled question of smartphones on airplanes was just being raised, and the finally-starting-to-settle debate about blogs and journalism was firing up as well. This week in 2004 was also the first time that salespeople started popping up in chat boxes on websites.

Fifteen Years Ago:

Things were very different this week in 1999. Microsoft had just announced that it would enter the instant messaging game. I believe I was still on ICQ at the time (uh-oh!) Some folks were trademarking Y2K. PalmPilots were still a big deal, though some were beginning to talk about the mysterious "web phones" that the future held. Network Solutions was still clinging to its monopoly on domain registration — and there were still some dictionary word dot-coms available to be registered.

Amazon.com was sued by Amazon Bookstore, and since I don't think I've ever heard of that latter one, I can guess how that ended. Folks were insisting that Mozilla was dead at the hands of IE 5.0, but even though Firefox was years away, we weren't ready to bury them yet — though we were less optimistic about web portals. Online bill payment existed in 1999, but it still usually cost money to use, and the first free services were just appearing. Linux also existed, but the first distribution with a graphical installer was still being finalized.

400 Years Ago:

In 1614, John Napier devised logarithms and shared them with the world, paving the way for countless innovations, discoveries and advances in virtually every field of science, engineering and beyond. Techdirt did not cover this — but I like to think we would have.

Filed Under: archives, look back

A Look Back In Techdirt History

from the what-happened-this-week dept

Another week, another time to reflect on what we were writing about five, ten and fifteen years ago.

Five Years Ago:

Turns out this week was the first time we wrote about two of my favorite folks in the music industry, both of whom have been at the forefront of embracing changing technologies, and both of whom I now consider friends. First up was Dave Allen (now at Beats Music) talking about helping bands try out a pay what you want scheme for their merchandise, and finding that fans actually paid more than when they set prices. We also wrote about Amanda Palmer singing a song asking that her label drop her. They eventually did (much, much later), and she's gone on to do many amazing things, including having one of the most successful Kickstarter projects ever (though, that may be one of the least interesting aspects of all she's done to build a community around her music).

That week were also surprised but hopeful to see the Appeals Court rule in the Golan Case that pulling works out of the public domain was unconstitutional. Unfortunately, a few years later, the Supreme Court overturned that ruling, in yet another awful Supreme Court ruling on copyright. Five years ago was also when France passed the law that launched its 3-strikes Hadopi regime, which has since been recognized as a complete and total failure, and basically shut down. On that front, one of the main music industry lobbying groups was found infringing on copyrights, because that always seems to happen.

Also, Time Warner Cable was in the process of expanding its capped broadband plans. Some things never ever change.

Ten Years Ago:

As you may have heard, this past week was the launch of Gmail with the immediate question raised of whether or not it was "creepy." While a California State Senator quickly sought a law to ban Gmail, claiming that was "an absolute invasion of privacy," it seems that the vast majority of folks out there were never that concerned about it. 500 million users don't seem to mind -- and as others have noted, Gmail has significantly changed how people use email.

10 years ago we also wrote about Pennsylvania officials seizing computers from an ISP, blaming the ISP for some child porn found on Usenet. That case was CDT v. Pappert, and became a very important case on establishing how Section 230 protecting internet service providers from the actions of their users. It's too bad, this week, we had to write about efforts to undermine Section 230.

Also 10 years ago, two of Hollywood's favorite Senators, Orrin Hatch and Patrick Leahy, introduced the PIRATE bill, which would have given millions of dollars to the DOJ to file civil cases against people accused of copyright infringement. While it eventually passed the Senate, it died a welcome death in the House.

Fifteen Years Ago:

It was actually a fairly quiet week... but we did have stories on the launch of Tivo (and the big funding of its one time competitor, ReplayTV) and the fact that Mark Cuban became a billionaire by selling Broadcast.com to Yahoo. Happy anniversary, Mark.

Twenty Years Ago:

Okay, we weren't publishing then, but twenty years ago Netscape was founded (originally as Mosaic Communications). I remember reading about it, and had been an NCSA Mosaic user prior to that. I also remember downloading an early copy of Netscape, which was a massive 4 megs in size. I had to set it to download overnight on my 2800 baud modem while I slept. That was about the time I really started to think about upgrading to a superfast 14.4 k modem. Exciting times. Either way, Netscape was a key part in mainstreaming the web, and my entire career has been based on the web, so a big thank you to Marc Andreessen and Jim Clark.

Filed Under: history, look back

A Look Back In Techdirt History

from the learning-from-history dept

For the most part, people seemed to like the idea of doing a weekly look back in history to take a glance at what we were writing about on Techdirt five, ten and fifteen years ago, so let's keep it up.

Five years ago:

Once again, there were some similar stories to what we see in the news today -- including China blocking YouTube (and, yes, exactly five years later, Turkey has decided to do the same). And back then, the USTR was promising to review its transparency policies after complaints about secrecy concerning ACTA. Tragically, the USTR still remains entirely secretive. We also had media giants demanding the right to edit Google's search results (something the company eventually gave in to, somewhat) and the story of the UK's PRS threatening a woman for playing music to a horse without paying a licensing fee. But my favorite may have been a post on how remixing is creative and original, using the wonderful example of Kutiman -- still one of my absolute favorite examples of the power of remixing. If you've never seen the video below, watch it now. If you have seen it, watch it again.

Ten Years Ago:

This was the week ten years ago that the MPAA's Jack Valenti announced he was retiring. We had hoped that his replacement might be more forward looking, but ten years and two MPAA bosses later, we're still waiting. Meanwhile, it was still the early days of the RIAA's disastrous attempt at suing fans for file sharing. On the broadband side, this was the week that the Supreme Court came to an unfortunate decision in Missouri Municipal League v. Nixon, which confirmed that bans on municipal broadband were legal. This is very much top of mind these days, as many people have been noting that such bans may be a key feature in the demise of net neutrality -- and getting rid of them could help drive competition. This same week, then President Bush talked up why he hoped for universal, affordable broadband access by 2007. That didn't happen. Of course, it might have been a lot closer if there weren't so many municipal broadband bans. And finally, on the absurdist tip, we had a story about a company that claimed a patent on subdomains and a spammer who insisted that anti-spam law CAN SPAM required people to accept his spam rather than filter it out. That lawsuit didn't go very far.

Fifteen Years Ago:

This was the week that the Cluetrain manifesto came out. I actually wasn't that impressed at the time. However, realizing that it's now fifteen years old just makes me feel... old. People were just starting to figure out security online, as it was realized that you could look up the social security numbers of the wealthy via the SEC's EDGAR database. In 1999 airlines just started realizing that it probably made sense to let people buy tickets off their own websites. And... we have our first sighting of the RIAA blaming MP3s for the decline and fall of the music business. Some things never change.

Filed Under: archives, look back

A Look Back In Techdirt History

from the going-back,-back,-back... dept

We're trying something new this week. I realized last week that we'd actually hit the 15th anniversary of the very first Techdirt blog post. The site had existed for nearly two years before that, but was mainly done as an email newsletter. Back in March of 1999, the word "blog" still didn't even exist until a few months later (though "weblog" had been around for a little while before that) and didn't really catch on for a couple years. Anyway, given 15 years of blog posts, I thought it might be fun to look back at what we were writing about five, ten and fifteen years ago.

Five years ago:

Really not too much different, honestly. Believe it or not, we were talking about how the NSA and Keith Alexander were trying to increase their ability to do dragnet surveillance by pretending that it was all about "cybersecurity." Some things never change. We were also talking about how corporate lobbyists from the entertainment, pharma and tech industries had too much influence over a trade agreement (in that case, it was the early days of ACTA). And, of course, we were talking about business models and copyright issues. We wrote about how musician Jill Sobule had successfully crowdfunded an album -- back in the days when crowdfunding was new (this was actually a month before Kickstarter was founded). We also wrote about the FBI getting a big chunk of money to go after copyright infringement. And, finally, we had a story about how U2's Bono said he was upset about piracy, but didn't want to speak out too much, since he was so wealthy.

Ten years ago:

Going back ten years, we see some things are still the same, while others are quite different. On the similar front, we've got stories of the MPAA ghostwriting letters for state attorneys general to send to makers of various P2P software to scare them into shutting down, as well as pushing for a bizarre law in California that would require anyone who sent "professional" audiovisual content over the internet to include their name and address with the file. Hollywood never stops playing these kinds of games. We also wrote about fears that Comcast might destroy the internet -- believe it or not, over a different proposed merger (Disney) at the time. And there were the beginnings of people recognizing just how truly awful patent trolls were.

But not everything was the same. People were just beginning to realize that streaming music might be a thing, and that it would lead some people to no longer value "owning" a music file. Camera phones were still a new thing and many stories were about how scary and awful they were -- so we were amazed to actually finally see a positive story about how a cameraphone stopped a crime.

Fifteen years ago:

These were the early days of Techdirt as a blog, and our posts were a lot shorter at the time. This was the middle of the original dotcom bubble, so there was some discussion about dot com IPOs, along with news of AOL laying off Netscape employees. We were amazed at how much companies were charging for early MP3 players. Oh, and we figured that the whole Y2K scare was likely overhyped.

There were some stories that still fit with our general coverage today, including a quick post disagreeing with Mark Cuban's view at the time that MP3s would die out to proprietary formats (and that free content would go away). We had a post about the big virtual currency of the time, called Beenz, which many people still compare Bitcoin to today. We discussed a silly trademark dispute between a software company and a beer company. We wrote about fears that CD-R's would increase piracy and... how then Senator Vice President and soon-to-be Presidential candidate Al Gore was pushing for antitrust penalties against Microsoft in a cynical attempt to drive tech companies to contribute to his campaign.

Some things just never change... Anyway, let us know what you think about these "look back in history" posts...

Filed Under: archives, look back

A Look Back At Major Label Online Strategies A Decade Ago

from the how-far-we've-come? dept

The excellent MusicAlly blog has a neat look back at a piece written in March of 2001 covering the digital strategies of the major record labels. Some of it is quite amusing in retrospect -- such as how Warner Music's plans were entirely focused on how its newly merged parent, AOL Time Warner, would offer it all sorts of digital opportunities (how'd that work out)?

The company's internet strategy begins and ends with AOL. The thinking here is that AOL, with 24 million subscribers, has a natural customer base for Time Warner's extensive music catalogue, as well as serious Internet expertise in house. Although MBI World Music Report lists Warner Music Group's global market share as equal to BMG's at 11.9 percent (tied for fourth), AOL was working to secure licensing rights from the other music titans.

Combined with Time Warner's cable-modem Road Runner service, AOL also has control of fat pipes in the US. The reason many people didn't use Napster is because it is slow and expensive. With control of broadband, subscription is that much more compelling.

Of course "compelling" in theory is different from "compelling" in execution, and AOL, Time Warner and Warner Music never bothered to come up with anything close to compelling (for years we were amused by the fact that the company even refused to let AOL work together with Road Runner, despite them being the same company!).

As you read through the rest, you just keep seeing names of long-dead sites and projects -- none of which came up with anything compelling. You see plans for "new proprietary digital formats" that rely on RealPlayer (yeah, there's a winner) and other short-sighted concepts. But what you see is really the same old story, and effectively still the same thing we're seeing today. Everyone was focused on recreating the same old retail world, pretending that the digital world is just a replica of the physical world. It's all focused on direct sales of recordings, rather than anything larger. And, of course, all of these plans ran into trouble when backwards-looking execs freaked out about being too open or too free, and so all of the plans were locked down, inconvenient, expensive and useless (if they ever came out at all).

Filed Under: decade, look back, major labels