So, mp3.com has 250,000 Artists and over 750,000 songs. These are mainly independent artists, not on a label, and often times with no other channel for distribution of their art besides mp3.com. Vivendi Universal bought mp3.com back in 2001 for $372 million cash-and-stock. They've just sold the domain name to Cnet but have retained ownership of all of the music on the site. On December 3rd this archive of staggering proportions describing what I feel is an important and significant part of our modern culture will be destroyed.
I'm not sure this is on par with past destructions of this type however it is another instance, illustrating the basic problem with the corporate owned world we live in being that corporations cannot make decisions based on human ethics because they exist in an entirely discreet evolutionary world with completely different rules (shareholder returns are kind) than the rules in our organic evolutionary world which shapes our ethics. This is true, even though this corporation (like all corporations) are run by humans (theoretically) with ethics driving decisions in their own lives.
The old CEO of mp3.com is pleading with vivendi not to destroy the archive but to no avail.
So if you've ever found anything that you liked on mp3.com, you better download it before December 3rd or it's gone for good.
UPDATE : Here is Michael Robertson's plea to Vivendi