Eric Scheirer Quotations

(With this deal) the major labels have stopped whining about absolute control and embraced a new business model. Secure delivery, the majors' magic bullet, is overrated; legitimately making music available is the strongest weapon in the fight against music theft.

What we'll find is that next week some of the music is gone. The week after that, even more is gone. And over the coming weeks and months, the music is gradually less and less appealing to music lovers.

No, not right now. The service consumers want is not what the record labels are currently able to provide. Anybody who is satisfying consumer demand will have to be doing it outside of the sphere of the record labels.

Now that the labels are indicating that they are willing to give licenses out for at least some kinds of music service ventures, the floodgates are opening and anyone who wants to be a big player in this space in 2001-2002 had better get moving now.

Neither digital security nor lawsuits will stop Internet theft of content.

Napster has always been a questionable business. They've never been a business making money. So what this really puts doubt on is whether they're ever going to be a service that makes any money or at some point they're just going to quietly fade away into Internet oblivion.

When the record industry is identifying particular pieces of music on Napster, they're pointing to specific files and where they see a file name. But clever users of Napster are doing things like writing the name backwards or putting it in code.

Consumers will use sites like Napster to get content for free.

Also, musicians and authors will go outside of the major industries to speak directly to consumers. That's starting to be a small trend now, but we see that becoming a very major trend within about two years.

This kind of technology is such a fundamental part of the Internet that to try to have a blanket ban against all technology like this is essentially saying people on the Internet can't exchange files with each other. You just can't do that.

They're already third-party Napster servers, that I can just point my Napster client (software) to some other server and I don't have to use a server that's run by Napster. You just download a different (small software program) and go to a different site an you can essentially use the same Napster service you were using before.

The basic problem is that DRM is trying to keep honest people honest. With Napster out there, that's not good enough. It only takes one person to break the encryption, and then the encumbered version is competing with the unencumbered version on Napster.