Bad Napster Analogies for Rock Stars
by Dan Kennedy
"What they're doing is essentially hooking up a tube to everybody's kitchen and asking the guy that lives there to make a sandwich for everybody and then put it in the tube so everyone can have at it. But it's literally, like, millions of sandwiches. Who can make that many sandwiches? Nobody. I don't even make my own lunch. I Haven't for years."
"It's like me saying that it's okay for me to take your teeth away from you if you're a dentist and then every time I see you I get mad that you won't smile and say hello. It's the same thing, except I'm a musician and nobody is taking my teeth. And there isn't a dentist involved in Napster."
"If I have two dollars in this hand, and four dollars in the other, and I ask you to take one of the dollars out of the hand that has two in it…I'm left with one less dollar, aren't I? So, how is that considered sharing files? See, I never said I had a file in either hand, did I? No. I was holding six dollars in singles. I think I had, what did I say, four dollars in one hand and two in the other one? See? Napster is basically illegal."
"Where do we draw the line? What if these people want to enter into my brain when I'm using it and become three-dimensional characters in dreams I'm having? You know, sometimes I have dreams about private stuff, or stuff that I don't have any control over, and no suddenly everybody's in there going, "Oh, I wonder why he's dreaming of a snake." And some other guy is like, "Oh, that's a penis. Everybody knows that one."
"Napster is turning the record business into a multimillion dollar industry that sells music. And this "Music" will be listened to while people type away on their computers, and that's exactly the part I don't like about this. All of the typing."
About the author:
Dan Kennedy believes that file sharing can only lead to much, much worse.