December 20, 2004
Deja Vu?
I’ve been thinking about this over the last few days and noticed Zeropaid’s Chris Hedgecock make the same point in this News.com article: Suprnova et al shutting down seems like such a clear parallel with Napster shutting down. It’ll be important for the movie industry for about five minutes. eDonkey has a similar system for swarm downloading. The decentralized Exeem is already in development. These suits are an interesting and important development, but they’re hardly more than a temporary stopgap.
Filed by Derek Slater at 7:54 pm under General news
4 Comments
I think the industry strategy here is simply to blow up the big ones until people lose interest. It’s kind of worked with music… I don’t think any of the subsequent whack-a-mole p2p tools put together (with the brief exception of kaazzzaazazzzaazazza or however the hell it’s spelled) have had anything even approaching the following Napster did. They’re taking it out of the mainstream.
Huh? Since when has music file-sharing disappeared? Since when is it not mainstream? Have you seen the figures from Big Champagne? Maybe the users are not as concentrated in one system a la Napster, but it’s a slight difference.
I think one would need a sense of the real numbers. There’ll always be an underground. There could be a huge absolute file-sharing number, but as long as it stays comparatively small relative to the total market, the music industry will be profitable and can call it a “win”.
Certainly, Seth. If these suits actually reduced file-sharing or kept it at reasonable levels, we could say they were contributing to the “win.” But that doesn’t seems to be the case in the least. Going back to Paul’s point, the suit against Napster could hardly be said to have taken file-sharing out of the mainstream. Similarly, I don’t see shutting down Suprnova changing much.