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What's in a name?

I was talking to an aspiring musician the other night about Napster. She mentioned that one of the reasons it seemed intuitive to believe that Napster involved "stealing music" was because of the name, the "nap," part. In fact she believed that the name indicated that it was designed to steal music, and hence so labelled.

I corrected her, telling her it was rather based on developer Shawn Fanning's nickname for having nappy hair.

The conversation makes me wonder how much the filesharing debate might be different if the original name hadn't had such connotations.

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This page contains a single entry from the blog posted on January 5, 2005 4:45 PM.

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