Amoeba Music’s Vinyl Vaults is no Napster despite what musicians say
Remember Napster? Not the paid streaming music service sold last year to Rhapsody, but the original peer-to-peer music sharing service that was hugely popular from 1999-2001 when it went down in a legal ball of flames over copyright infringement. Well something Napster-like is emerging from Amoeba Music, the huge pre-owned music and video stores in Berkeley, San Francisco and Los Angeles and some musicians and vinyl junkies are up in arms about it, though I can’t understand why.
Napster was a peer-to-peer service that allowed people to share their music collections online. What Amoeba is doing with its new Vinyl Vaults service is similar in that the company is ripping tracks from […]

My son Fallon, who is six and still hasn’t lost any teeth, has a beef with Apple, iTunes, and the iOS App Store. “Apple is greedy,” Fallon says. But he has come up with a way for Cupertino to improve its manners through a revised business model.
Paul Otellini this week resigned his position as CEO of Intel as I’m sure you’ve already heard or read. Analysts and pundits are weighing-in on the matter, generally attributing Otellini’s failure to Intel’s late and flawed effort to gain traction in the mobile processor space. While I tend to agree with this assessment, it doesn’t go far enough to explain Otellini’s fall, which is not only his fault but also the fault of Intel’s board of directors. Yes, Otellini was forced out by the board, but the better action would have been for the board to have fired itself, too.
Earlier this year I wrote a