In Memoriam: 10 Cool Sites We Miss

In honor of the Microsoft's lawsuit against Linux and the whole world's lawsuits against YouTube, mashable.com published a list of "10 Cool Sites We Miss." Some of the sites that perished in "Death by Lawyer," in addition to the obvious Napster, mp3.com, et. al.:

OLGA, or OnLine Guitar Archive, was one of those cool places on the Internet where you could find anything on a particular subject; in this case, guitar tablatures. But, I guess the sales from guitar tablatures were so big that copyright owners had to shut them down, too. Most of the guitar tablatures on the site were done by the users; but that obviously doesn't matter much….

If the US were the only country in the world, p2p would probably be only a theoretical concept. Grokster, i2hub, WinMX, and everyone else within the grasp of US laws and regulations, went down, never to come back. Grokster's current page gives you a nice overview with the current state of affairs on the Internet with this sentence:"YOUR IP ADDRESS IS xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx AND HAS BEEN LOGGED. Don't think you can't get caught. You are not anonymous."…

Fonpods was a service that offered free podcast listening over the phone. For some reason, this allegedly cost the telecommunications industry "millions" (back then they didn't yet invent billions and trillions, hence the modest numbers), so the service was shut down. Ok, we can understand why they went after Allfreecalls.net (which is, btw, online again) and FreeConferenceCall.com, but podcasts? Millions, they say.

This sad list of losses adds some heft the argument that Digital Millennium Copyright Act is primarily an anti-competitive "attempt by the entertainment industry to outsource the costs of their business model to the legal system."

Via Fark