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recording sheet music without permission, raising capital and garnering profits, and *then* working out a deal to pay the composers for the works they\'d built their fortunes on. 
 
Napster\'s plan was plausible. They had the fastest-adopted technology in the history of the world, garnering 52,000,000 users in 18 months -- more than had voted for either candidate in the preceding US election! -- and discovering, via surveys, that a sizable portion would happily pay between $10 and $15 a month for the service. What\'s more, Napster\'s architecture included a gatekeeper that could be used to lock-out non-paying users. 
 
The record industry refused to deal. Instead, they sued, bringing Napster to its knees. Bertelsmann bought Napster out of the ensuing bankruptcy, a pattern that was followed by other music giants, like Universal, who slayed MP3.com in the courts, then brought home the corpse on the cheap, running it as an internal project. 
 
After that, the record companies had a field day: practically every venture-funded P2P company went down, and millions of dollars were funneled from the tech venture capital firms to Sand Hill Road to the RIAA\'s members, using P2P companies and the courts as conduits. 
 
But the record companies weren\'t ready to replace these services with equally compelling alternatives. Instead, they fielded inferior replacements like PressPlay, with limited catalog, high prices, and anti-copying technology (digital rights management, or DRM) that alienated users by the millions by treating them like crooks instead of customers. These half-baked ventures did untold damage to the record companies and their parent firms. 
 
Just look at Sony: they should have been at the top of the heap. They produce some of the world\'s finest, best-designed electronics. They own one of the largest record labels in the world. The synergy should have been incredible. Electronics would design the walkmen, music would take care of catalog, and marketing would sell it all. 
 
You know the joke about European hell? The English do the cooking, the Germans are the lovers, the Italians are the police and the French run the government. With Sony, it seemed like music was designing the walkmen, marketing was doing the catalog, and electronic was in charge of selling. Sony\'s portable players -- the MusicClip and others -- were so crippled by anti-copying technology that they couldn\'t even play MP3s, and the music selection at Sony services like PressPlay was anemic, expensive, and equally hobbled. Sony isn\'t even a name in the portable audio market anymore -- today\'s walkman is an iPod. 
 
Of course, Sony still has a record-label -- for now. But sales are falling, and the company is reeling from the 2005 \"rootkit\" debacle, where in deliberately infected eight million music CDs with a hacker tool called a rootkit, compromising over 500,000 US computer networks, including military and government networks, all in a (failed) bid to stop copying of its CDs. 
 
The public wasn\'t willing to wait for Sony and the rest to wake up and offer a service that was as compelling, exciting and versatile as Napster. Instead, they flocked to a new generation of services like Kazaa and the various Gnutella networks. Kazaa\'s business model was to set up offshore, on the tiny Polynesian island of Vanuatu, and bundle spyware with its software, making its profits off of fees from spyware crooks. Kazaa didn\'t want to pay billions for record industry licenses -- they used the international legal and finance system to hopelessly snarl the RIAA\'s members through half a decade of wild profitability. The company was eventually brought to ground, but the founders walked away and started Skype and then Joost. 
 
Meantime, dozens of other services had sprung up to fill Kazaa\'s niche -- AllofMP3, the notorious Russian site, was eventually killed through intervention of the US Trade Representative and the WTO, and was
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