So he made a deal with Germany's media giant Bertelsmann, which invested in Napster and dropped it's copyright suit against the company. The idea is to turn Napster's 32 million user community into paying customers, so it can in turn pay royalties to artists and publishers. Universal Music, one of the plaintiffs in the case, declined to be a party to the agreement and continues to ask for millions of dollars in damages. This isn't good news for people who like to get things for free, but it's essential if the planet expects to have art a part of life. It's a money economy and artists want to be paid.
Music is the current battle, but cinema is next, and on to everything that can be digitized.
Something has to be done to protect people generating music, film and other art forms. There will be changes in the way they share revenue, but they have to receive their fair share. The problem is not isolated to the imaginations of greedy producers, publishers and distributors. I've downloaded music and created CDs, and copied CDs just to see how easy it is. It's easy, and there's an entire industry that caters to this trade with cheap blank CDs and labels specifically designed to fit both the CDs and their plastic cases.