Pay-per-view press.

• Author: Simonds, Wes
• Position: Letters

Nicholas Thompson's summary of the Napster controversy ("Gofer Broke" November 2001) is ludicrous. The Napster controversy and court cases were not about 19-year-olds or their abstract intellectual process of writing code at all. The trials concerned the degree to which Napster the company leveraged Napster the application to raise venture capital and generate revenue by way of the massive copyright violation of creative original content.

If Thompson seriously feels that all forms of digital content should be available without charge on the Internet, regardless of the time, energy, and money involved in its production and the explicit...