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Jewish World Review Feb. 14, 2001 / 21 Shevat, 5761

Paul Campos

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The Napster thrill

http://www.jewishworldreview.com -- A FRIEND of mine I'll call "Christine" is a Washington D.C. lawyer. Last week she introduced me to the wonders of Napster, the file-sharing Internet music site that has just been told by a federal appeals court to shut down during its legal battle with the world's largest record labels.

Napster runs a network of interactive servers that allows its more than 50 million members to trade copies of music online. A Napster user in, say, Denver, can download a digital copy of a song stored in the hard-drive of another Napster member's computer in Chicago or Tampa or London or Tokyo - and vice versa.

On Sunday afternoon, just one of Napster's dozens of servers was making the music libraries stored in the computers of 12,000 members available to each other simultaneously: A body of downloadable data that included upwards of 2 million individual music files. Multiply those figures by the more than 100 servers Napster employs, and you begin to get an idea of a massive international phenomenon the site has become.

"Aren't all these people violating copyright laws?" I asked Christine. "Technically, yes," she said. "But is it really so different than making a compilation tape of songs from your own recordings and giving them to a friend?" Naturally, the big record labels don't see it that way. They envision a nightmare scenario in which pirated copies of CDs cut drastically into their sales.

So far there is little evidence this is happening. Sales of CDs have remained steady in the face of Napster's exponential growth, even among the computer-savvy teens and college students who are both the heaviest purchasers of music and the most enthusiastic users of the site.

It's worth noting that for much of the last few months the world's best-selling CD has been a collection of the Beatles' chart-topping singles: 35-year-old songs that no doubt have all been illegally taped and downloaded tens if not hundreds of millions of times.

Still, the music industry has reason to be concerned. My brother John runs a recording studio. "A whole generation of kids is growing up right now with the idea that they don't have to pay anything for music," he says. "At some point, this is going to become a problem."

After logging onto Napster this past weekend, I have some idea of what he means. Leaving aside the legal technicalities of this particular suit, there can be little question that the site facilitates copyright violations on a mind-boggling scale.

From a rule of law perspective this should outrage me, and indeed I am outraged - very much so - except . . . look at all this cool stuff! After a couple of hours of searching I do not fail to find a single item from my personal mental jukebox, no matter how obscure.

Simply put, the site appears to have everything. That Graham Parker B-Side that has been out of print for 20 years? Check. That Neil Young song performed once in concert and never officially released? Check. Several thousand versions of "The Wichita Lineman?" Check.

Napster is like a used record store the size of New Hampshire, where obsessive characters out of a Nick Hornby novel prowl around looking for the Japanese import versions of deleted Frank Zappa albums - all without having to get out of their chairs or spend any money.

This is a situation that cries out for compromise. A small user's fee would allow Napster's millions of patrons to funnel well-deserved royalties to the artists who have made the site a utopia for music fans. The insatiable media conglomerates could take their cut, and everyone would come out ahead.

Paul Campos is a professor of law at the University of Colorado. Comment by clicking here.

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01/31/01: Racial imbalance not always racist

© 2001, Paul Campos