Napster: Illegal, but Where Do We Draw the Line?
Feb 28 '01
The Bottom Line It's gonna be shut down, but opennap servers and gnutella-style clients will make shutdowns of filetrading damn near impossible. mp3s are here to stay, for better or for worse.
It's an easy method of music pirating. It's very hard to separate the facts from the fiction about napster and filesharing in general, but here is my attempt to clear it up.
Myth: Using napster to download copyrighted songs is legal/moral.
False. Just because everyone else makes copies of movies or cheats on their taxes doesn't make it legal for you. Even though napster is still running, it doesn't mean that using it to do illegal things is technically legal. This area gets fuzzy at times, and it's easier to think of it as a photocopying machine of sorts: How responsible does the manufacturer of these machines have to be for use of their products to do illegal things?
Think, for example, of a weapon. Although, like napster's distribution system, it has practical uses (think kitchen knife), even if it is used illegally occasionaly (think silence of the lambs), sometimes it can get extreme with it only being used illegally and its use must be controlled (think, for example of an M16 assault rifle with built-in grenade launcher and laser scope).
That's the fundamental issue at the heart of the legal battle over napster. It has lost (it's an assault rifle in the file-trading world, not a kitchen knife or even a handgun). It's definitely known that virtually all of its users use it to obtain illegal copies of songs they don't own, but it's clearer still that even if napster dies, things like gnutella will carry the torch of free information access, forcing this battle further still
Do record companies abuse artist's rights, treat them like garbage, and not pay them much? Yes. But still, they get paid per album, and stealing songs, though it may steal mostly from the record labels, steals from the artist. The system definitely needs to change, though, and the record companies won't change from their economically comfortable position unless they need to respond to a threat. That threat is napster, and it's bringing the labels online. Perhaps Napster, although bad for them in the short term, may help the record companies to move to a new digital form of distribution. That's where the new battle lies: control of digital information, and your rights as a user to reproduce/use that media in any way you choose for personal use.
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