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reborn practically the next day under a new name. 
 
It\'s been eight years since Sean Fanning created Napster in his college dorm-room. Eight years later, there isn\'t a single authorized music service that can compete with the original Napster. Record sales are down every year, and digital music sales aren\'t filling in the crater. The record industry has contracted to four companies, and it may soon be three if EMI can get regulatory permission to put itself on the block. 
 
The sue-em-all-and-let-God-sort-em-out plan was a flop in the box office, a flop in home video, and a flop overseas. So why is Hollywood shooting a remake? 
 
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YouTube, 2007, bears some passing similarity to Napster, 2001. Founded by a couple guys in a garage, rocketed to popular success, heavily capitalized by a deep-pocketed giant. Its business model? Turn popularity into dollars and offer a share to the rightsholders whose works they\'re using. This is an historically sound plan: cable operators got rich by retransmitting broadcasts without permission, and once they were commercial successes, they sat down to negotiate to pay for those copyrights (just as the record companies negotiated with composers *after* they\'d gotten rich selling records bearing those compositions). 
 
YouTube 07 has another similarity to Napster 01: it is being sued by entertainment companies. 
 
Only this time, it\'s not (just) the record industry. Broadcasters, movie studios, anyone who makes video or audio is getting in on the act. I recently met an NBC employee who told me that he thought that a severe, punishing legal judgment would send a message to the tech industry not to field this kind of service anymore. 
 
Let\'s hope he\'s wrong. Google -- YouTube\'s owners -- is a grown-up of a company, unusual in a tech industry populated by corporate adolescents. They have lots of money and a sober interest in keeping it. They want to sit down with A/V rightsholders and do a deal. Six years after the Napster verdict, that kind of willingness is in short supply. 
 
Most of the tech \"companies\" with an interest in commercializing Internet AV have no interest in sitting down with the studios. They\'re either nebulous open source projects (like mythtv, a free hyper-TiVo that skips commercials, downloads and shares videos and is wide open to anyone who wants to modify and improve it), politically motivated anarchists (like ThePirateBay, a Swedish BitTorrent tracker site that has mirrors in three countries with non-interoperable legal systems, where they respond to legal notices by writing sarcastic and profane letters and putting them online), or out-and-out crooks like the bootleggers who use P2P to seed their DVD counterfeiting operations. 
 
It\'s not just YouTube. TiVo, who pioneered the personal video recorder, is feeling the squeeze, being systematically locked out of the digital cable and satellite market. Their efforts to add a managed TiVoToGo service were attacked by the rightsholders who fought at the FCC to block them. Cable/satellite operators and the studios would much prefer the public to transition to \"bundled\" PVRs that come with your TV service. 
 
These boxes are owned by the cable/satellite companies, who have absolute control over them. Time-Warner has been known to remotely delete stored episodes of shows just before the DVD ships, and many operators have started using \"flags\" that tell recorders not to allow fast-forwarding, or to prevent recording altogether. 
 
The reason that YouTube and TiVo are more popular than ThePirateBay and mythtv is that they\'re the easiest way for the public to get what it wants -- the video we want, the way we want it. We use these services because they\'re like the original Napster: easy, well-designed, functional. 
 
But if the entertainment industry squeezes these players out, ThePirateBay and mythtv are right there, waiting to welcome us in with open arms. ThePirateBay has 
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