Kazaa Settles with the RIAA/MPAA; A New Opportunity for MySpace?
Among many others, Ars Technica is reporting on Kazaa’s $115 M settlement. (Or read the short and sweet summary at Boing Boing.)
They make the good point, questioning how Sharman Networks (who owns Kazaa) can survive on a “legitimate” business model–selling themselves as a licensed content server. Consumers who want to buy licensed content will move to iTunes, et. al.; those who still want free music and movies will move to BitTorrent, et. al. What market does that leave for Kazaa?
Perhaps now that Kazaa has been stuffed into the change pocket of the music/film industry, they’ll pump money into Kazaa and continue throwing away their profits in their megalomaniacal need to control everything.
I’d like to see MySpace set up a file-sharing service for kids to share freely-offered MP3s from the independent and semi-independent bands that can thrive in that space. What if they educated the kids on BitTorrent–and then the kids found they can get even more from other BitTorrent trackers?
That could be a double-whammy to the Man. Keep the kids from the industries’s content services as well as take over promotion and distribution of the industries’s talent.
Furthermore, this is actually exciting to me–at least in an academic sense. Now that all the “easy” copyright-infringement targets are gone, what *is* the industry going to do to fight small, “dark” file-sharing communities or BitTorrent/Tor-based networks? Are they just going to shut down the trackers? How does the Grokster case apply to trackers?
July 29th, 2006 at 1:27 am
[…] See also my other post on how the Industry’s shutting down of Kazaa is only going to hurt them. […]