Cheese Bikini makes some very interesting observations about Shawn “Napster” Fanning’s new initiative SNOCAP. SNOCAP is a new and legal file sharing network.

Berkeley lecturer Larry Downes’ theory is that businesses going through times of huge change and upheaval will go though very similar experiences to that of terminally ill patients and their families.

In her 1969 book On Death and Dying, psychiatrist Elizabeth Kubler-Ross introduced the “five stages of grief” model to explain the emotions that dying people and their families often experience: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Patients diagnosed with terminal diseases often find transition between these stages quite painful, and many never reach the acceptance stage.

The parallel with the record industry is obvious. First we had denial that the web was going to change things. Then the anger represented by the law suits and rants.

Now we have bargaining as the record industry tries to make its peace with P2P by siding with the “legal” paid sites.

It’s only a matter of time before depression (the realization that free file sharing is not going away) and acceptance as they all apply for vocational jobs in the Church or something.

SNOCAP itself is actually only the corporate equivalent of morphine, designed to ease the pain of the record execs - “its name even sounds like a drug”:

# Start with a networked music-sharing service, similar to the original Napster.
# Remove most of the music.
# Make the following tasks extremely difficult: downloading songs, listening to songs, transferring songs between devices.
# Pretend that music fans will abandon the free file sharing networks and will pay good money to endure these hassles.

It sounds more like a placebo to me