Re: Happy Anniversary Napster, and Thanks for Your Impact on Scholarly Communication

[Sandy Thatcher <sgt3@psu.edu>]

Not to be a cynic, but one possible lesson from Napster is that 
those who challenge existing copyright law by engaging in 
activities that copyright owners consider to be illegal get 
rewarded by being bought out (Napster) or leveraging their threat 
to the system by making sweet deals with copyright owners 
(Google, perhaps Scribd next). But this doesn't always work: 
witness Grokster, which went out of business. One wonders what 
will happen with Pirate Bay....

Sandy Thatcher
Penn State University Press


>A piece in today's San Francisco Chronicle assesses the legacy 
>of Napster on the occasion of the 10th anniversary of of its 
>release.  The article makes the case that Napster defined the 
>current Internet landscape by, among other things, creating the 
>expectation of an "almost infinite library of online digital 
>content" and a "frictionless, convenient way" to access that 
>content.  It also, of course, upped the ante on copyright 
>enforcement and spawned a generation that wouldn't walk down the 
>block to the record store (or the library, for that matter) to 
>search/browse/discover new materials.
>
>While I am not arguing that Napster begat the current scholarly 
>communication system, it surely has impacted it. 
>Demographically, the high school student who fell in love with 
>Napster in 1999 is now a graduate student, a postdoc, or maybe a 
>junior faculty member.  The taste of a firehose worth of free 
>content at an impressionable age surely imprinted this 
>generation, at least to some degree, with a sense that the 
>traditional mechanisms used to meter and restrict content were 
>part of a system in eclipse.
>
>I can't imagine Shawn Fanning (18 at the time - 18!) set out to 
>change the way research gets from Point A to Point B, but 
>Napster altered the consumer Internet landscape by scrambling 
>users' sense of how content could be distributed.  The impact of 
>these scrambled expectations is far-flung, reaching beyond 
>iTunes and YouTube to touch even the scholarly communication 
>space. A comment posted by a reader at the end of the article 
>states, "It took Napster to make the record companies see that 
>they weren't filling the consumer's needs."
>
>Without turning this into another "Open Access: holy grail or 
>devil's trident" debate, I wonder whether the past decade in the 
>scholarly communication space is most notable for its 
>reassessment of customer expectations.  The proliferation of 
>repositories, free archives, professional networks, data hubs, 
>and, yes, open access journals has in many ways created a 
>"frictionless, convenient way" to access content.  Many of these 
>initiatives have been grassroots (e.g., RePEc, PLoS, bepress) 
>and/or upstart in nature.  The success of at least some of these 
>ventures has pushed traditional publishing companies to take a 
>different approach to the market's needs.  By changing our sense 
>of what was possible in the sharing of information, Napster is 
>at least partly responsible for our changing scholarly 
>communication ecosystem.
>
>So happy anniversary, Napster, and thanks for making our lives 
>more interesting.
>
>The full piece is here:
>
>http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/06/01/MNI917R8PB.DTL
>
>Best, Greg
>
>Greg Tananbaum
>Consulting Services at the Intersection of Technology, Content, & Academia
>(510) 295-7504
>greg@scholarnext.com
>http://www.scholarnext.com