Napster still synonymous with piracy

Lots of
Napster kerfuffle going on this week.
Powerpage contributing editor Bob Snow's
take on it is that Napster's big mistake was hiring Microsoft to handle the security element of their music service. Hence, the proliferation of ways to un-DRM downloaded tracks.

It's late on a Friday and I'm bleary-eyed at the end of a loooooong week so I'm just going to push a little farther on this and suggest that 'content providers' are going to have to come up with a new business model, and a new way of generating revenue that is not based on the selling content. Bram Cohen, the creator of BitTorrent, echoed my sentiments exactly in a recent Wired interview: "The cat's out of the bag." The advent of the digital age means content is no longer a scarce resource.
When the cost of production, distribution, acquisition, and storage are all approaching zero, the days of selling content as the primary means of revenue are numbered. DRM and
lawsuits are only going to delay what's inevitable.

On the flip side, the digital age has enabled the creation of many new and exciting ways of providing value, and many more models are still out there awaiting discovery. Wake up, sleeping giants. It's time to innovate.