Monday, November 1, 2010

"The war on piracy is a failure." - Sean Parker

In a recent appeared on a panel at the Daily Beast's Innovators Summit recently, at which he proclaimed "you have to accept that the war on piracy is a failure." Just in case you don't know, Sean Parker is the founder of Napster, a website which "allowed people to easily share their mp3 files with other participants, bypassing the established market for such songs and thus leading to massive copyright violations of music and film media as well as other intellectual property." He knows a bit about piracy in the music industry.

Parker claimed that among all internet music downloads, 4 billion have been done legally, as opposed to 4 to 10 trillion illegally. Even Steve Jobs was quoted saying that "today’s most popular iPod holds 1000 songs, and research tells us that the average iPod is nearly full. This means that only 22 out of 1000 songs, or under 3% of the music on the average iPod, is purchased from the iTunes store." It's an established fact that almost all music downloading is done so illegally and that it will be extremely difficult to stop, or even slow down for that matter.

Parker has come up with a new way of downloading mp3s legally as he has launched Spotify. Its approach is to "allow unlimited streaming of music to a desktop, and to confine that music to the desktop device." Parker talks about this new system in this video:


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