Skinhead and Nazi music under fire by German security agency
"Providers of such online services have a responsibility to prevent their services being abused in this way due to the difficulty of tracing the origins of these exchanges", said Ruediger Hesse. The agency spokesman also said "Napster is a particular challenge because with it, everyone has access to skinhead and Nazi music with its incitement to hatred and its appalling anti-Semitic content... I can only appeal to Bertelsmann's sense of responsibility. They will have to look at content". Andreas Schmidt, the head of the Bertelsmann eCommerce Group (the Napster 'annexe' of BMG) agreed that the exchange of Nazi music through the file swapping software is wrong, but says there is nothing they can do. He was quoted as saying "Music on the Napster network is not stored on a central computer but on the computers of more than 40 million users... Napster is, like any Internet provider or the post office, merely the transport platform". BMG have announced future plans to change there current free service to a subscription service, where members fees will be used to pay copyright holders. They hope to offer digitized versions of their own catalog as well any other record companies who may join them. |
