Shift of Heart

Academic hackers rejoice! Turns out, SunnComm has decided not to file a multimillion dollar lawsuit against John Halderman, the Princeton student who posted a paper debunking the companies’ copy protection technology, MediaMax CD3. SunComm’s chief executive, Peter Jacob, changed his mind, he says, after he “learned that… The long-term nature of the lawsuit and the emotional result of the lawsuit would obscure the issue, and it would develop a life of its own.” In other words, he realized that it would be a dumb, dumb move.

For the beleaguered music industry, this is just the latest in a long string of embarrassing retaliations from the flood of so-called ‘spoof’ MP3 files the industry unleashed on peer-to-peer networks to the recent lawsuits against alleged pirates, including a 12-year-old girl in housing project. If the music industry is really going to survive the digital age, it had better get to work on coding something most important: a new business model.