Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Re: Control of distribution

Author:isaac
Posted:9/11/2000; 6:33:52 AM
Topic:Discuss by email?
Msg #:21167 (In response to 21166)
Prev/Next:21166 / 21168

(I'm not sure that I understand. Who do you mean by "these people are bothering me"? Aaron and Ken? Or someone else whose responses I cannot see?)

Back to the topic: I thought that Napster usage was about challenging "authority figures" in a way. Do you not see any parallels with this Aaron/DG email issue, and that of Napster (and its clones)?

Off topic: the RIAA are in a bitch of a situation. (Correct me if I'm wrong here - I'm neither an American, nor a musician.)

They're made up of, primarily, the big music labels, right? So, if the labels predominantly say "sue", RIAA sues.

Are the labels owned by shareholders who want the largest returns on their investment? How do they make the most money - keeping the regular system going, or shifting to a lower-profit Internet distribution system that strives to remove the labels from their middleman position?

Now, (this is the unfortunate bit), can't shareholders sue a company if the board makes a decision which does not favour the company financially? (I remember reading that somewhere.)

So really, the shareholders and the board of the labels really gotta keep pushing for cash. And that forces the RIAA's decision. Whether Internet distribution of every track imaginable would be a great thing for the users or not, the RIAA and the labels have to fight against it at all costs.

I'm guessing...

I see similarities with Microsoft's almost-standards-compliance WRT IE 5.5/Win NT/9x/etc. My guess is that Microsoft would love to make the Windows version as compliant as IE5/Mac, but they have to serve their big-paying customers first. These big-paying customers are the companies with corporate intranets standardised on Microsoft products which depend on the older, non-standard code.

If they tweak IE to make it compliant and shut the Web Standards Project up, they risk losing the companies that buy all those copies of Office and build intranets with Frontpage, and employ all of those MSCEs...

Anyone with any thoughts/corrections on this thread?

i

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