More News On Napster And File Sharing

from the things-are-changing dept

Two interesting stories having to do with sharing music online. The first is about a Napster plan to wrap all the music shared on its network on the fly with a digital rights management shell. In other words, while it may be free on your hard drive, the second someone takes it off, it will be wrapped - and limited. As one analyst said, this basically means that Napster thinks that they're bigger than MP3. Talk about hubris. The other story is about how Aimster, the program that lets you share music with your "buddies" via AIM is getting around any legal issues. They've basically set it up so that any time you're sharing files you've created a virtual private network that encrypts any files that are being shared. Based on the DMCA (the very law the music companies fought for) it would be illegal for anyone else to break that encryption and find out what you're sharing. Very clever.

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