Napster didn’t die in vain

Nap­ster is now gone but the impact it had on the music busi­ness and the devel­op­ment and use of p2p net­works is truly amaz­ing. The debate regard­ing copy­right how­ever hasn’t moved on. It seems you have to be either pro or con — pro mean­ing dis­re­gard­ing the copy­right of all artists. Sur­prise, sur­prise — it doesn’t have to be that way. It all comes down to the music indus­try being to slow in devel­op­ing solu­tions as requested by their cus­tomers; the tech­nol­ogy is there, and if the music indus­try doesn’t do some­thing — the users will. I still need to see hard evi­dence of p2p net­works being directly respon­si­ble for the slight drop in music sales — to me com­pet­ing media prod­ucts (often from the same com­pa­nies) are far more likely to cause this. And while I respect every artist’s right to make money off their hard work, I equally respect users world­wide who like to try before they buy, who gets a chance of lis­ten­ing to live gigs and live sets nobody makes money off any­way and at the same time gets the chance to use their p2p soft­ware for legal pur­poses. Peer-to-peer does not equal break­ing copy­right laws. It’s not all black and white, you know. Thank you Napster.