The Wild Days of MP3's are over

May 25, 2001

When the RIAA went after Napster and won most of the system's users went underground or turned to alternative services such as Aimster. Fast forward two months and withness the purchase of MP3.com by Vivendi Universal and the fresh lawsuit against Aimster and the industry's strategy becomes very clear.

Lacking a cohesive online strategy, the music industry has used legal action under the guise of copyright infringement to drive the market valuation of new upstarts like MP3.com down so the record labels can buy them, thus buying an online strategy on the cheap.

As I have said many times, this battle is not about artist's rights, but control. The recording industry is attempting to control what you listen to, how much you pay, and by what means. If they had their way it would have been illegal for you, as a paying customer, to make copies of your LPs to audio cassette. I'm not kidding about this, there was a lawsuit over this very issue in the 1970's.