Google, are you watching this? You should

be.

Six years and several billion shared songs later, the original Napster fiasco is finally about come to an end. EMI and Bertelsmann have reached a settlement that will close the book on the original Napster's biggest legal woes—legal woes so old and so confounding that it's amazing that these guys don't have better things to do.

Bertelsmann angered its colleagues in the music business when it started financing Napster in 2000, back at a time when Napster was still a P2P music service very much blamed for all of the industry's ills. Napster was shuttered in 2001 and was later reborn as a legal commercial service. Napster's demise did nothing to stop file sharing online, however, and recent estimates from Big Champagne say that more than 1 billion songs are shared each month via P2P.

Despite the early demise of the first iteration of Napster, EMI and Universal joined with a number of smaller music publishers in 2003 to sue Bertelsmann in US district court. Napster had received nearly $100 million in support from Bertelsmann starting in 2000, which both EMI and also Universal music argued amounted to copyright infringement. This argument was taken to the courts despite the fact that Bertelsmann was also a lead company in the lawsuit that eventually killed Napster the Elder.

As part of the settlement with EMI, Bertelsmann admits no wrongdoing, but they've had to pay EMI an undisclosed sum to steer clear of the tarnish of Napster. Universal stepped out of its suit after Bertelsmann paid them $60 million for a similar clean slate deal, so we suspect that the settlement with EMI is a stone's throw from that amount. Bertelsmann may yet again have to open its pockets in the future, however, as a number of smaller suits are still out there.

EMI's CEO Eric Nicoli seemed happy with the end results, saying in a statement that EMI looks forward to putting this matter behind them so that they can "continue to pursue the development of new legitimate digital music business models."

We wish them luck, because the industry has plenty of challenges in front of it, and the bogeyman of piracy is already a questionable target for their efforts. Here's hoping that EMI might change its mind about DRM and really commit to the development of new business models which aren't about selling your rights back to you.