Napster Being Shut Down 213
helix2301 writes "Napster was one of the earliest and most popular P2P music-sharing services. After a long legal battle that saw Napster slowly gutted in the face of infringement lawsuits, it was reinvented as a legitimate music download service. The resurrected Napster is now being shut down. Rhapsody has completed its purchase of Napster and will be absorbing its subscribers and assets."
Re:Without Napster we'd still be buying all CD's (Score:3, Informative)
Re:morality (Score:5, Informative)
We are talking about a business here that has regularly ripped off its own artists. I keep up to date on Robert Fripp's struggles with UMG/Universal. They just do whatever they want, and when he demands accounting information and information on how songs that he never gave permission to be placed on download services ended up there, he basically enters that evil realm of lawyer/accountant double-talk.
However bad music piracy may be, the biggest pirates of them all have always been the record companies. They'll even try to steal of big name acts. Both Pink Floyd and the Beatles have had to go to court to retrieve royalties or to enforce contractual requirements.
Re:Without Napster we'd still be buying all CD's (Score:4, Informative)
If it weren't for Napster and iTunes we'd all still be driving down to the record store to buy $15 CD's, just to get the one or two songs you actually want and the 10 other songs that are complete filler..
They really shot themselves in the foot with the whole CD single thing, that was gouging pure and simple. I still have an old '45 from 1980 with the original price tag still on it: CAN$1.49. That was when LPs were 40 minutes or less with 8 songs, going for around CAN$9.99.