Feelings on Napster?

To Pghedge@aol.com: Maybe "distributing copywritten, intellectual property, in any form, is illegal" - if so how does MTV and radio fit into the picture? One could have a vcr or tape deck running all day and copy a whole bunch of "copyrighted" material. Napster is going to become the "radio" of the future if only because the radio (at least in most of the USA) really sucks. I've wanted to hear something from the recent recordings by several lesser known artists - what do I do? Sit in front of radio for weeks at time hoping to catch maybe a tune at 4 a.m.? No, I long onto Napster, do a search and within 5 minutes I've got at least one track to check out. Works great. Now if I buy the CD or not depends on quite a few other factors. And it's the fact that those "buying factors" differ from person to person that really upsets the apple cart. As an older, fairly well heeled audiophile, I like to pick up the best sounding version a recording that I can find. Napster certainly does not provide that but for a college student or teenager whose only stereo is their computer system, well the 128K Napster file probably sounds just fine and it doesn't cost them anything. Yeah, the new age is here, now the industry just has to find a way to deal with it.

Nice post, Ralph!

The big difference, Ralph, is that record companies have agreed to allow radio/television stations to us their media. They have not made similar considerations to .mp3 software sites. It's like saying that you can take all of my stereo equipment because I choose to give my little brother some extra ic's.

Robba: Here's the basic problem - there are really two parties involved in the Napster ripoff, the big bad record companies and the poor starving atrists. Most people don't seem to care if they hurt a record company but people really don't want to hurt some poor artist (unless of course they are not all that poor). I still that the record companies need to find a new way of doing things. CD's are way over priced, the radio sucks, music is pigeonholed into meaningless catagories and Napster solves a whole bunch of what's wrong. Napster is a sympton of an underlying disease and in classic American fashion we attack the sympton while the disease goes untreated. And I never said that it's okay to "steal" via an mp3 site - just that one can understand why many people feel it's okay to do so.

Ralph, if you read my posts in this thread you may see that I agree with you for the most part. I agree that record companies need to change their distribution paradigm, although not for the consumer's benefit but rather for their own. I also completely understand why people download music (although I don't for anything that is available for purchase).