Good ol’ Cringley brings us the “Son of Napster”. Interesting concept, even if it’s flawed.
I like the idea of a publicly owned company that ‘owns’ the media that people consume, but this would effectively put musicians out of a job, and while it would hurt the record industry, it would also hurt the artists pretty badly…
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It’s disappointing that Cringely would make such an obvious error. His “Snapster” idea, which he claims is “built on the legal concept of Fair Use,” is not actually compatible with the legal concept of fair use. So the only way it could work is if the Snapster corporate entity purchased not just copies of music, but the *rights* to that music. He’s gonna need a lot more startup capital than $2 million.
But in a larger sense, I find this column to be symptomatic of a wider problem: people generally don’t understand the notion of fair use. I mean, the meaning is right there in the name: fair use, by definition, must be *fair*. Too many people think that fair use means “I can do whatever I want, cause I bought it” or, like Cringely, that fair use is a legal system in which to find loopholes.
It’s a shame, really. It’s such a simple idea.