Bill Ready is right. The Napster phase of AI needs to end. I should know. I run Napster.
In his Fortune op-ed, Ready used our name as shorthand for an era when technology outpaced ethics—when access was prioritized over compensation, and creators got left behind. He’s not wrong about the parallel. Generative AI companies have been scraping the internet’s creative output to train models without much thought about who made that content or whether they’d like to be paid for it. That’s a familiar story to us.
But here’s what Ready doesn’t seem to know: Napster isn’t a cautionary tale anymore. We’re an AI company. And we’ve spent a quarter-century learning exactly the lesson he’s describing.
What the Original Napster Actually Revealed
In 1999, Napster didn’t fail because the idea was wrong. It failed because the business model didn’t exist yet.
