Antallet af piratsider eksploderer

Martin Kofoed skrev:
Gad vide, hvordan verden ville have set ud, hvis indholds-branchen var indgået i et reelt samarbejde med Napster dengang, i stedet for at slukke bålet ved på kikset facon at sparke gløderne rundt i det tørre græs?

Napster executives on Tuesday offered record companies US$1 billion over five years for the right to allow copyrighted music to be traded on the popular file-swapping network.
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Specifically, Napster is offering US$150 million per year to the five major record companies and US$50 million annually to independent labels.
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The annual payment of US$200 million would come out of projected subscription fees and other potential sources of revenue. The company gave a few new details on just what those fees would look like. A service allowing limited numbers of downloads per month would likely cost between US$2.95 and US$4.95 per month, while an unlimited download service would likely cost US$5.95 to US$9.95, Barry said.

It all could have been different: Seven years ago, the music industry's top executives gathered for secret talks with Napster CEO Hank Barry. At a July 15th, 2000, meeting, the execs -- including the CEO of Universal's parent company, Edgar Bronfman Jr.; Sony Corp. head Nobuyuki Idei; and Bertelsmann chief Thomas Middelhof -- sat in a hotel in Sun Valley, Idaho, with Barry and told him that they wanted to strike licensing deals with Napster. "Mr. Idei started the meeting," recalls Barry, now a director in the law firm Howard Rice. "He was talking about how Napster was something the customers wanted."

The idea was to let Napster's 38 million users keep downloading for a monthly subscription fee -- roughly $10 -- with revenues split between the service and the labels. But ultimately, despite a public offer of $1 billion from Napster, the companies never reached a settlement. "The record companies needed to jump off a cliff, and they couldn't bring themselves to jump," says Hilary Rosen, who was then CEO of the Recording Industry Association of America. "

The goal at Napster was to be the online distribution channel for the record labels, much like iTunes and the *new* Napster is today. There were several offers made to the labels that would have given them the vast majority of all of the revenue. The numbers were staggering. We had over 50 million users, many of whom were willing to pay $5 per month or $1 per download for digital music. That translates to about $250M a month or $3B per year. Even if Napster kept just 10% of the revenue that would be $300M per year against expenses of less than $10M. At the stock market multiples of the day that would have been a $15B IPO.

Lawyers (save those from Chicago) are not typically trained to think about the business consequence of their legal advice. To many, business is beneath the law.

When a Sony lawyer threatened a fan of the company's Aibo robotic dog, who had posted a hack online to teach the dog to dance to jazz, he or she no doubt never thought to ask exactly how making the Aibo dog more valuable to customers could possibly harm Sony. Harm was not the issue, a violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act was: consumers should be banned from hacking Sony dogs, whether or not it was to Sony's benefit.

...it is more likely a blinkered-lawyers
syndrome: businesses that have forgotten their business, and have instead been taken over by their lawyers.