Courtney Love on Napster

[John Kawakami]

>[from Sam Smith's Progressive Review]
>
>COURTNEY LOVE, DIGITAL HOLLYWOOD CONFERENCE: It's become quite fashionable
>lately for artists to express outrage at music piracy, and I'm a fashionable
>gal. Stealing artists' music without paying for it fairly is absolutely
>piracy, and I'm talking about major-label recording contracts, not Napster.
>Stealing our copyright provisions in the dead of night when no one is
>looking is piracy. It's not piracy when kids swap music over the Internet
>using Napster. There were one billion music downloads last year but music
>sales are way up, so how is Napster hurting the music industry? It's not.
>The only people scared of Napster are people who have filler on their albums
>and are scared that if people hear more than one single, they're not going
>to buy the record.

Yeah!

I heard Lars of Metallica on KROQ in LA.  He sucks.  He's either a 
fool or a liar.  He claimed first that controlling digital copies was 
the "right" of the creator, and MetallicaCorp has the right to demand 
that Napster establish contracts with each artist before featuring 
them on the service.  Then, as talk turned to finances, he did a 
weird turn and claimed that MetallicaCorp is not doing it for the 
money, but as artistic expression, and listeners were free to accept 
or reject the art.  I came to the conclusion that the commercial and 
copyright aspects of their music defined their art.

Weird.

Maybe Negativeland has something to say about this.