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#1 - Failure to license Napster, Scour & Madster from the very beginning of P2P - this would have embraced the new music revolution instead of make criminals out of the people that did embrace it, plus give the artists a chance to be compensated for it. Also, suing Napster and Scour made P2P harder to control as later P2P protocols like Gnutella, FastTrack, MP2P, Freenet, and BitTorrent all used decentralization and some of them even open sourced the code to their sharing protocols.

#2 - DRM and SDMI - Assuming that DRM would solve the piracy problems. This failed because for one, DRM can be cracked and often gets cracked with time (the music industry should have learned from software Keygens, Copy II+, and bootleg versions of coin op arcade boards). The fact that Professor Felten cracked SDMI in a couple of weeks and that Jon Johansen, a 16 year old created DeCSS so quickly should have been wake up calls that DRM was DOA. Additionally, DRM was disliked by consumers as it made backing up files, transfering files when you upgrade to you new computer, added timeouts, and limited portable device and CD burning capibility. In fact, I think that DRM is what P2P services more popular than licensed major label backed DRM music services.

#3- Setting unreasonable rates for streaming and internet radio that many smaller web broadcasters could not afford to pay the rates for streaming.

#4 - Rootkits and CD Copy Protection. Installing these programs secretly caused security holes on peoples PCs in which a casual user could not uninstall. More inportantly, I did not stop a person from ripping the discs (particularly if they were using an older version of Mac OS, Linux, or BSD). A virus exploited the rootkit to spread and a game cheat program also exploited it. Older versions of CD copy protection such as MediaMax, MediaCloq, Suncomm, Cactus Data Shield, etc also had problems, particularly when the device playing it was not a low to mid end consumer CD player. Often high end CD players, DVD players, Game Consoles, some car stereos, and computers could not play the disc very well. Some copy protection schemes even damaged the CD drives of some macintosh computers.

#5 - Suing P2P users. I think that this consumer lawsuit campaign is nothing more than a scare tactic. After all, 19,000 or so lawsuits against over 30,000 or so thousand users does not even come close to the amount of users using popular P2P programs out there. More importantly, innocent users have been targeted. This is because the bots they uses to gather evidence to sue aren't 100% accurate at identifying people. Something as simple as a shared use computer, a computer brought to another location, a NAT router, a proxy server, or a VPN tunnel will cause these bots to identify the wrong person.

#6 - creating inferior label backed services. Early on, services like MusicNet, Pressplay, FullAudio, MusicRebellion, etc offered catalogs that were smaller and used DRM. Early versions of Musicnet, for example offered tracks that only played for 30 days and were not burnable or usable on portable devices. Some services only offered tracks from a few labels. This alone made them inferior to P2P back in the day.

#7 - Lobbying for more DRM mandates. For example, the CDBTPA is one example of such a mandate. Trusted computing was another way to sow the seeds for DRM mandates. I think that some of these proposals went far too far, and the tech community rejected some of them. Excluding small scale developers, such as what some companies are doing from developing applications for devices like phones or video game systems I think is wrong also.

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