So Napster appears to be about to move from Chapter 11 to Chapter 7 liquidation.

During the ealry days of our news group, Napster was a pretty hot topic as people debated their business model, business ethics, and the record industry ethics.

I'm on fan of the record industry but I think many of us who are in the business of CREATING intellectual property can breath a sigh of relief to see that Napster died. Part of the reason for that (a big reason) was the very idea that people could get rich by allowing others to pilfer the work of others.

Early Object Desktop users may recall the discussion of Object Recommendation, which preceded Napster by a year. This component allowed users to select folders on their hard drive as well as links on the net" to "recommend" to others. These files were then available as part of a global file database. Why did we kill it? Because we couldn't figure out how to prevent people from using it to pirate software and music. An ethical dilema that Shawn Fanning apparently did not worry about when he whipped up Napster in MFC a year later and went on to win various "technology of the year awards" to the dismay of software develoeprs everywhere who had been discussing peer file networks for years but were prevented from creating open ones due to moral/ethics issues involved.

So while there is definitely a bit of a sour grapes feeling among some of us that someone could gain international fame as a "brilliant" software developer simply by having no moral qualms over IP theft, at least in the end there seems to be justice - that you can't necessarily make a long term business out of creating things designed mainly so that others to steal the work of others easily.

(flame away)