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published
27 July 2000
Live fast,
die young
by Dylan Tweney
Yesterday, San Francisco district court judge Marilyn Patel ordered
Napster to stop its traffic in copyrighted material, effectively
putting an end to the the year-old company [1]. Napster has appealed
the injunction, but don't hold your breath [2].
This is probably the company's death blow, as they're unlikely
to win the suit filed against them by the Recording Industry Association
of America (RIAA). Let's face it, even in the Internet economy you
can't get away with starting a company that's built on stealing
other people's stuff. Barring an eleventh-hour intervention, Napster
will go dark at midnight tomorrow. It may be the first example of
a truly rock-star company: Napster lived fast, flouted the rules,
got tons of press, and died young.
Napster argued, unsuccessfully, that it was not responsible for
the illegal use of its service, and that the company had no way
to know when users were trading copyrighted songs through the Napster
network. Too bad, said Patel: because they designed their system
that way, that's Napster's problem. "It's sort of becoming
an orphan by your own hand and then throwing yourself on the mercy
of the court because you're an orphan," Patel wrote in her
opinion [3].
Shutting down Napster won't stop the traffic in copyrighted songs
on the Internet -- far from it. As I wrote awhile back, Napster
is already being made obsolete by technologies that, unlike Napster,
are entirely decentralized [4]. Gnutella and FreeNet also allow
people to trade music files, and in their cases, there's not even
a company to sue -- they're just technologies, unleashed on the
Internet.
In fact, the music industry will soon regret that they killed Napster.
Napster's 20 million users are nothing if not interested music fans
-- and via Napster, the record labels could at least potentially
get in touch with those fans. Preliminary studies have suggested
that people who trade MP3 files tend to buy more CDs, rather than
fewer, perhaps because they've had a chance to try out the music
first. With the right deal, record companies could have used the
Napster database as a tremendous research and direct-marketing resource
-- and I have no doubt that the Napster executives were eager to
make a deal.
Another possibility: Downloading music via Napster was and is subject
to the vagaries of the Net. It's even worse when you're trying to
download a popular song from somebody who has a poor Internet connection.
I bet many Napster users would have been willing to pay a fee in
order to download songs, via Napster, from a big server that could
guarantee quick delivery of the MP3s they wanted. The record companies
certainly could have made a tidy profit running such servers and
charging for access.
But that's all history now. With Napster dead, its 20 million users
will scatter to other services, like Gnutella and FreeNet. That's
too bad for the record industry, because with Gnutella and FreeNet
there's no easy way to tell who the users are. There's no central
database of users and what they have downloaded. In other words,
they are useless as marketing tools.
Meanwhile, copyright will continue to be eroded by the free trade
of intellectual property on the Net. It won't happen this year,
and it may not even happen this decade, but copyright will eventually
go the way of primogeniture and jus primae noctis -- barbaric medieval
laws now thankfully dead. And then, those who profit from copyright
(who have always been corporations, not artists or writers) will
be out in the cold.
History may just record Napster's demise as the record industry's
last brilliantly self-destructive act.
[1] Judge
issues injunction against Napster
[2] Napster
files injunction appeal
[3] Napster
must stop music
[4] Inevitable
technology
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