The best of Reader Comments: Bring on the legal eagles

This week it all got more than a little litigious. There were more trials and tribulations for file sharing site Napster (http://www.silicon.com/a43094 ) with orders from a federal judge that it must stop distributing copyrighted material via its service (http://www.silicon.com/a43102.

In typical fashion, the judgement handed down to Napster raised some mixed reactions:

--OK Computer...
From Mark Harold

Hey. You got a computer? Make your own music. I'm fed up with Napster now.
Myself, I go to this thing called a 'club night' where you can hear a wide selection of tunes from a particular genre, and you can ask this guy called a 'DJ' the name of anything that takes your fancy. Then I go 'record shopping' and I find what I want, which makes me run around ecstatic.

--An innocent man...
From Colin Chatwin

I am a Napster user and have been for a while now. Do I make and sell pirate cds? No. Am I causing artists to loose money? No. Am I a criminal? No. I am a person who is fortunate enough to be able to sample albums before I buy them.

-- Let it be
From Linda Forrest

With other file sharing software out there and plenty of alternative servers I can't see how this can ever be resolved. Maybe the artists would lose more money pouring it into court actions than if they kept quiet and stopped giving Napster so much publicity as it's attracting new users who would not otherwise have known about it.

--I fought the lawyer and the lawyer won...
From Dave Ferris

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that the only winners in all this is the lawyers.

Quite right, although it hasn't deterred a New York Doctor from taking on the might of heavy weight Merrill Lynch. The Doc, Debases Kanjilal, is suing analyst, Henry Blodget for the losses he suffered in the dot-com crash of last year (http://www.silicon.com/a43077 ).

--Sour grapes?
From Jonah Joseph

Oh the joys of living in a capitalistic world of opportunity and adventure. To scale the giddy heights of investment portfolios, safe in the knowledge that if I slip and fall I can always blame someone else and sue them. God bless the United States of America - land of the free, home of the brave and accomplice to the murder of common sense.

Let me see if I have this right, Blodget advises Lynch, then Lynch recommends to Kanjilal, then Kanjilal gambles, invests, loses and then blames Blodget. This is the stuff of a good Hollywood script.

Now far be it for me to start pointing the finger of blame in a situation where culpability clearly lies at the feet of the good doctor, but wouldn't your first port of call have been to blame Merrill Lynch - but no, Kanjilal's skipped straight to the third party.

Did Lynch play a 'Get Out Of Jail Free' card?

Had the good doctor made a 'thorough examination' of the market at the time, he would have realised investment in new technologies sits at the much riskier end of the market, and is therefore a bit more of a gamble.

I must confess that if this 'groundbreaking case' succeeds in imposing personal liability on analysts for issuing unfounded valuations - then I intend to sue every astrologist on the planet !!!

--Rule breaker
From Bart Jooris

Everybody lost money in the Nasdaq crash of this year. But only the few dare to admit that they have committed mistakes themselves. If the good doctor lost $10m on that stock, he failed to obey the first law of investments: diversifying! Analyst or no analyst. But it's easier and better for the ego to blame the analysts.