BURN, BABY, BURN
I have a confession to make.
I’ve used Napster.
No, that’s too mild. I LOVE Napster. I have a collection of music files downloaded onto my computer’s hard drive that ranges from the sublime (Bruce Springsteen and Melissa Etheridge doing a live acoustic duet on "Thunder Road") to the ridiculous (William Shatner doing a version of "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds" that is so mind-bogglingly bad that it makes the dog howl whenever he hears the opening chords). In the eyes of the big record companies, however, I am apparently endangering the livelihoods of Christina Aguilera and N’Sync, who if the record industry is to be believed, are headed for the bread line and the soup kitchen because of Napster.
Not sure what I’m talking about? Here’s a short primer. A few years ago, someone figured out how to record music into a computer file. You can copy a song off a CD onto what’s called an "MP3 file." Since the file is digital, it’s possible to make perfect copies of those files and send them over the Internet, just like you send a word-processing document or the baby pictures you send by e-mail to Aunt Minnie in Paducah. So this dude named Shawn Fanning got the bright idea, "hey, wouldn’t it be cool if everybody knew what music files everybody else had, so they could swap their favorite songs over the ‘Net?" He developed this nifty little program called Napster, which people could download for free. Using Napster, you can, if you’re signed on to the service, search for a song by typing the name of the song or the artist into the program’s search engine. If you find another user who has a copy, you hit a button and download the song into your own computer. You can then play the song on your computer’s sound system, since a lot of PC’s these days have speaker systems that are better than the stereo I had in college. You can transfer the tunes to a cigarette-pack sized MP3 player. Or, if you prefer, you can use a CD writer to "burn" a selection of your favorites onto a CD that you can play on your living room stereo or in your car.
Since it’s darn near impossible to find a new CD for less than 15 bucks (and you can’t get a refund if it turns out to be a dog), the idea of free music caught on. Depending on who you ask, Napster had 50 million to 64 million subscribers at its peak.
On the heels of Napster’s success came a storm of controversy, with people who insist that Internet copying of recorded music is record piracy pitted against cyberhippies who insist that "data wants to be free, man" and who rail against the greed of the record companies. The record companies filed suit against Napster , claiming that the service "facilitated copyright infringement." Napster basically responded with what legal scholars refer to as the "who, me?" defense. Last Tuesday, US District Court Judge Marilyn Hall Patel
ordered Napster to block copyrighted songs from its service, but only if the record companies notified them of specifically which songs they wanted blocked.The decision sounded like Napster’s death knell. But Napster is apparently like the Hydra: cut off one head and two more grow back. Other music swapping services are springing up with weird names like Gnutella, Aimster, and Bearshare. One entrepreneur has even proposed setting up a Napster-like service on "Sealand", an old anti-aircraft fortress located on a platform off the coast of Britain. Some guy who calls himself "Prince Roy" took over the platform in 1966 and established it as his own country. (I’m not kidding. The place even has its own postage stamps. But you can reach it via the Internet and it isn’t subject to American copyright law.)
The proliferation of copycat services points out one glaring fact: we can spend our time arguing about the moral and legal rights of artists to their royalties, the greed of record companies, and freedom of information until we’re blue in the face. But the Internet doesn’t just cross international borders; it blithely refuses to recognize their existence. If something on the ‘Net violates the laws of one country, all an entrepreneur has to do is pack up his servers and move offshore. In addition, the increasingly non-centralized nature of many ‘Net functions means that finding someone to prosecute gets harder and harder with every innovation.
There is only one law that cuts across all borders and reaches all corners of the Internet and that law is: adapt or die. Napster and its ilk are beginning to look like the big comet that killed off the dinosaurs. While the comet got smashed, the changes it wrought in the environment spelled the end for the big lizards. It’s going to take these lizards-- the record companies-- awhile to die, and they’re going to fight it every step of the way, but doomed they are, unless they figure a way to survive in a world where information is instantly shareable for free.
Stay tuned. It’ll be interesting to see what comes next.
Dusty Rhoades lives in Carthage, practices law in Aberdeen, and enjoys watching evolution in action.
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COPYRIGHT 2001 BY JERRY D. RHOADES, JR.