Amazon recently announced a service that would have been cutting edge in 1999. AutoRip lets you buy a physical CD and automatically get sent the MP3 files to go with it. Why didn’t someone think of this in the last century? Someone did. Michael Robertson started companies to offer this service in 1999, 2005, and 2007. Each and every one was torpedoed by the industry (with the occasional help of incompetent courts). Turns out some kind of stupid are just beyond helping.
Read the ArsTechnica article for more of the sad story, and some excellent quotes from Robertson.
Reading about this the other day, I wondered: “What if I buy a disc as a gift for someone else? Do I keep rights to the MP3s while they get the disc?”