CASPER PARTOVI, Wednesday September 27:

16. I agree with Reebee's first assumption regarding the manufacture and distribution of music in digital form (and to dispel any misgivings about lawyer double-speak, I'll agree 100%).
    
    
17. To stay true to the name of our group here, I'll chime in about the Napster case. The law, as always, favors established property interests—in this case the record industry's copyrights. Although it's not good practice to predict decisions from the 9th circuit court of appeals, the general consensus is that the court will rule against Napster and in favor of A&M Records and the co-plaintiffs. As Reebee rightly points out the industry will win such court decisions in the early phase. Clearly, Napster is challenging the very underpinnings of our conceptions of property, and the legal system is designed to drastically retard that rate of any change to the status quo (the balance Reebee refers to in the fourth paragraph is very slow to tilt toward public rights of access to property). However, the industry ultimately will not succeed in eliminating threats to its current distribution mechanism posed by Napster, et al. because as a practical matter, the current distribution channels for the industry are obsolete.
    
    
18. But, I would suggest that the industry doesn't need the protection of the courts for long. Already it's clear that companies traditionally in the business of music content and distribution are establishing footholds that will enable them to take advantage of the internet distribution model (witness the Time Warner AOL merger. Companies can adapt to new business models more quickly than the law can recognize new concepts of property. The brief respite granted the industry by these early court decisions will likely be sufficient for the industry to adapt to the new model. By the time the law struggles to recognize the concepts of property being proposed by Napster, I'm inclined to believe that the industry will have retooled itself to fully exploit these new possibilities. The industry players today will most likely continue to dominate distribution-though we may be hard pressed to recognize it as the same industry.

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    "By the time the law struggles to recognize the concepts of property being proposed by Napster, I'm inclined to believe that the industry will have retooled itself to fully exploit these new possibilities."

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19. The control of the industry over content, of course, is another matter. The Offspring "agreement" with Sony only highlights the extent to which content providers are dependent on the record companies. (I'm curious to hear if anyone believes that this dependence will be reduced or eliminated with the new distribution model.)
    
    
20. Finally, to follow Bob's point #1, I think the "good" v. "bad" technology (as it related to control over content) accurately describes pre-internet/napster music business. I would suggest the criteria for the new model will be control over the process of music consumption (i.e. whose hoops the consumer has to jump through in order to get the musical product).

Continue the discussion
at ECHO's Napster forum