Napster and Intellectual Property

The Internet. It is a vast network of millions of users, surfing and sharing billions of files, all day, every day. To individuals holding copyrights on intellectual property, this is a frightening proposition. After all, there is virtually no protection for these copyright holders from the misuse of their property. But, as Scott Sullivan, writer for The FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin stated, “as history has proven, technological and societal advances usually come with a price.” The price society is paying for the Internet is a loss of copyright protection by laws for their intellectual material.

Napster is a good example of how these intellectual property rights are being compromised on the Internet. Napster is a simple, yet sophisticated program created by a young college student named Shawn Fanning that enables users to anonymously swap and share audio files known as MP3s. During its infancy, Napster only had approximately 3,000 users. At that time, Napster could probably have been protected by the Audio Home Recording Act, “which gives consumers the right to create and transfer digital music for noncommercial purposes” (Gurly). Since that time, according to Chris Sherman, writer for the magazine Online, “Napster has become the most successful new Web technology ever by gaining more than 25 million registered users in just over a year or existence.” At this point, however, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) is quite unhappy with Napster’s existence and its service. They believe “the fact that millions of users can share songs with one another is a violation of copyright and constitutes outright ‘theft’ of intellectual property” (Sherman). The RIAA won a lawsuit under this argument against Napster in early 2001, so the program may go offline unless a compromise is reached.

If the final ruling is made to stop Napster’s service, doing so will not be difficult because it is a centralized service. However, “file sharing, a mainstay of Web activity that’s considered almost a ‘right’ by many users, is too popular to stomp out in one fell swoop” (Sherman). The technology under which Napster operates, File Transfer Protocol (FTP), has been in use since 1971. It would be as difficult to destroy this technology as it would music itself. Nonetheless, as with many other technologies that threaten to freely distribute copyrighted music, the RIAA is attempting to stop the file sharing movement in its tracks. Alex Torralbas, who has worked in the recording industry, states, “in the 1980s they (the RIAA) effectively killed the digital audio tape, and in the ‘70s, albums and tapes bore skull-and-crossbones stickers warning buyers against taping the music on cassettes.” The MP3 and services such as Napster are no different from these technologies as they provide consumers with a way to abuse copyrighted material. “The record industry’s business model is pure Industrial Age; manufacturing and shipping pieces of plastic. MP3 and other forms of digital music threaten this model” (Torralbas). The RIAA doesn’t seem to see that, if adopted by them, this technology would effectively allow them to come into the Digital Age by letting users directly download music, bypassing the CD stage. Millions of people want easily accessible music, whether they pay for it or not. If the RIAA