If you read the news about Napster offering non-DRM mp3 files and felt a kind of psychological whiplash from all the ironies inherent in that brief item, don’t feel bad. I share your pain. Imagine: the idea of an online music provider named Napster offering actual mp3 files for people to download. I would have liked to have been in the meeting when someone suggested a strategy that could easily have been implemented (at least technically) almost a decade ago, when the original Napster was just getting off the ground. Instead, we’ve had years of expensive lawsuits and watched the music industry stumble from disaster to disaster.
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