Salon: Why the music industry has nothing to celebrate
http://www.salon.com/tech/col/rose/2000/07/27/napster_shutdown/index.html
Why the music industry has nothing to celebrate
Napster's shutdown will only cause a thousand alternatives to bloom.
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By Scott Rosenberg
July 27, 2000 | The music industry's spokespeople will no doubt crow in
triumph at their Wednesday victory over Napster in federal court, where
they persuaded a judge to issue a preliminary injunction essentially
forcing Napster to shut down. But in felling Napster, the industry is
digging an even deeper grave for itself.
The record labels' only hope was to lose this court battle. Now that
they've won, they've really lost.
To understand this paradox, you'll need to ponder with me the
implications of a front-page article in the Wall Street Journal
Wednesday. "When Its Own Artists Are Involved," the headline declared,
"Napster is No Fan of Sharing." The story tried to tar Napster as a
hypocritical company -- for on the one hand promoting the free-for-all
sharing of music files online but on the other resorting to
old-fashioned corporate bullying when it comes to protecting its own
copyrights and software code.
The big problem with the Journal piece -- and with much of the media
coverage of the Napster saga -- is that it confuses Napster the company
with Napster the phenomenon.
You already know what Napster the phenomenon is: A program that helps
Net users find and download music files from one another's computers. In
the short months since its debut last fall, Napster has become both a
revolutionary banner for anti-establishment music lovers and a lightning
rod for media-corporation paranoia over piracy and copyright
infringement.
Napster the company is something different, more prosaic: It's a venture
capital-backed Silicon Valley start-up with a lawyer at its helm. It
hopes, somehow, eventually, to make big money from Napster the
phenomenon. Those hopes look darker after today's ruling.
Here's the problem for the record labels and their trade group, the
RIAA: Napster the company is an institution they could cut a deal with
if they so desired. It's a legal entity; it runs a relatively small
group of servers that can be shut down; it has incentives to reach a
compromise with the recording industry.
Napster the phenomenon is something else entirely. It's not a
corporation -- it's an idea. Napster Inc. could disappear off the face
of the Earth tomorrow and it wouldn't matter. Think of what happened to
Netscape; the company lost its fight but the company's idea -- the Web
browser -- took over the Net. The idea of Napster -- of "peer to peer"
software that lets individual Internet users trade music files (and
other files) with one another -- lives in millions of minds. And the
Internet itself gives those minds ample opportunity to keep the idea
going.
Already, projects like Gnutella and Freenet are beginning to provide
Napster-like functions with one key difference: There's no central
server, and thus no one to sue. Napigator lets users find Napster
servers that aren't run by Napster Inc. Over at Opennap, open-source
programmers are developing free, Napster-like software for every
computing platform under the sun. On the open Net, a thousand new
Napsters are blooming.
And what will be the impact of the court-ordered shutdown of Napster?
These projects -- small, underground efforts that grew unnoticed in the
shadow of Napster the company -- will be flooded with energy. Users will
flock to them, and talented software hackers will work overtime to
perfect them.
From the recording industry's point of view, it is slaying one enemy
only to seed the field with a thousand new opponents -- opponents who
are, not incidentally, its own best customers.
Millions of people (20 million, by Napster's count) want the services
Napster provides. A new report from Jupiter/Media Metrix, which dubs
Napster "the definitive killer application for the online music
industry," finds that -- unlike so many Net-based applications that
people download once, try out but rarely use (remember Pointcast?) -- 80
percent of people who had Napster on their computers actually used it
last March (compared with 40 percent for RealPlayer and Windows Media
Player).
That's why in the long run the anti-Napster campaign is as doomed as
Prohibition. For all sorts of reasons, some good ones and some
rationalizations, people don't feel that they're doing anything wrong
when they trade music files with Napster. Maybe they're already spending
hundreds of dollars a year on overpriced CDs. Maybe they're sick of the
music industry's habit of packaging one hit with a bunch of dud tracks.
Maybe they just want to check out music before buying it in ways that
the current dismal radio-and-MTV universe simply don't allow.
Whatever the reason, 20 million users can't all be locked up and thrown
in jail. The recording industry is in for a long, fruitless siege if it
sets out to shut down each little Napster clone or slap a writ on every
individual who uses Gnutella. Ultimately, if it wants to stop people
from engaging in Napster-like behavior, the only thing that could work
would be to shut down the Internet itself. Good luck.
Instead of going to court, of course, the music industry could be
figuring out ways to use Napster to sell more music. After all, here's a
piece of software that cultivates people's taste for new music and that
appeals to the most dedicated fans. What a sales opportunity!
But by treating Napster as the copyright antichrist, the industry is
simply insuring that the vector of Internet technological development
will move rapidly toward a lawsuit-proof, free-for-all distributed
network of file-sharing -- the very outcome the owners of intellectual
property wish to avoid. How stupid can you get?
Of course, the deepest irony of all is that it is the music industry
that chose not to protect its copyrights in the first place. Where do
you think all those illegally copied music tracks on Napster come from?
From people's legally paid-for CDs, of course. But the CD audio
standards established by the music companies themselves have never
included any kind of copyright protection technology.
Why doesn't the music industry start doing so today? Because you and I
would be steaming mad about having to buy all-new stereos and Walkmen to
listen to the new-format CDs. Maybe we'd stop buying CDs altogether.
Maybe we'd turn to the Net for our music.
For music lovers, the bad news today is that if and when Napster shuts
its servers down, we will have to find our music through other channels.
The good news is that the brain-dead, colossally wasteful, artistically
homogenizing old order of the recording industry is committing
collective, time-delayed suicide in court.
Good riddance, I say. These institutions have never served artists or
listeners well. Once they're gone or rendered irrelevant, maybe there'll
be room for a new, better order.
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