Napster

Some in the used-book industry are questioning whether Amazon.com is becoming the Napster of the book business.

It would be easy to call the venture-backed, San Mateo-based YouTube the Napster of video, an outlaw startup rocketing onto dotcom radar screens on the backs of rights-holders. But that's a designation that the year-old company desperately wants to avoid.

In many fields, we now have the equivalent of Spotify for research: vast databases that help scholars search millions of articles and connect them—often through highly restrictive and increasingly unsustainable subscriptions, but that is another story—instantly to digital copies. (There is also a Napster for research articles, of which we shall not speak.)

I have done my part this year by buying fewer albums than in any year since, um, 1982 I think it was. No, I haven't been Napstering them, either. I'm catching up to my backlog of listening, listening to the radio, and most-of-all spending a lot of time with demos of friends' bands, and with the tapes I make of my live show every week.

I've got the first four albums on vinyl. Nothing on CD, other than a few "napstered" songs.

Anyway, I noticed recently that somebody had Napstered the song, and I presume that tapes of the single were floating around long before the internet.

Google does the "Napstering"-sharing of public and copyrighted materials they take possession of, online. They are pigs, fascists, as that's what fascists do: take all books in the world, for free, and add sponsor links to the public materials.

Don't get me wrong. I am not interested in making that case myself with regard to Debian. On the contrary; I don't want to see Debian get Napstered. Putting obviously infringing stuff onto the mirror network is just begging for trouble. It's not like it's that hard for people to set up their own repositories; let them gamble with their own assets.

If you find Youtube as fascinating as I do you may want to step up the searches & viewing since it seems they may be "napstered" in the future.