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Comment by pretoriusB | Hacker News Reader

>It's crazy to think of all the energy that went into building great services like Napster, Audiogalaxy, and Soulseek, only to see them shut down by lawsuits.

Sure, though the same can be said for drug cartels too.

If record companies had put their efforts into turning just one of these services into a legal alternative (without completely ruining it), they'd be in the position Apple is in today with iTunes.

Actually they tried, and they didn't go anywhere. Napster was turned into a legal service, as was mp3.com.

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They didn't go anywhere because their version of trying was making you pay the ownership price, but rent it to you.

"Napster was turned into a legal service, as was mp3.com"

The legal Napster was created years after the original had died, was completely different and not very compelling. It felt like it was designed to fail.

mp3.com was an honest attempt but they didn't have label support. That's what killed them.

> Sure, though the same can be said for drug cartels too.

Perhaps. Nils Gilman argues that increasing the risk of a transaction increases the reward, and backs it up with drug-war data.

http://longnow.org/seminars/02010/may/03/deviant-globalizati...

The difference is that drugs are physical goods that require nontrivial infrastructure to produce. Digital media is essentially free to reproduce, and very cheap to distribute. Instituting the death penalty for trading Metallica's songs is unlikely to drive the price of a bootleg copy of the black album into the tens of thousands of dollars.

> Sure, though the same can be said for drug cartels too.

This strikes me as an apt comparison, although maybe not for the reasons you intended. In both cases, the illegal services came about only because people wanted things that weren't or couldn't be provided legally. In both cases the laws are purportedly made for the public good, and in both cases it's not clear that they achieve the desired effect, and there are some decent reasons to think that we'd be better off if these things were legal. In both cases, there's behavior we wish wouldn't happen, but criminalizing it isn't really reducing it.

And who says that (all) drugs should be illegal? Marijuana is legal in a couple of places and so are coca leaves.

He isn't commenting on the legality of drugs. He is comparing drug cartels to the above mentioned websites.

How is he comparing them? From what I understand he's saying that both of them are illegal therefore should be shut down.

>How is he comparing them? From what I understand he's saying that both of them are illegal therefore should be shut down.

No, I'm saying that both of them are illegal, thus both of them ARE shut down in a similar manner.

When you assume...

Good Comment!

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