Page 1 of Napster

Let me first say, this isn`t personally directed at Mark Jewiss! I pretty much agree with his recent column update.

First, I think it would be stupid for a movie studio to ask a site like Reviewer to remove the screenshots and cover images on the site since both are just to give people an idea of the product and I doubt could be used for printing pirate covers (too lores to look at all decent) or whatever. That said, people like movie studios often do what appear to me to be stupid things. :-) As for fan sites, they seem to have damaged and hurt fans by removing them, while doing little to protect their products from any serious harm. I could understand them asking a fan site which projected a terrible image of one of their products, intentionally or not, but people like Fox seem to be all-out to destroy everything, even sites which were basically free adversiting for them. Go figure.

Napster, though, is a very different issue, in my opinion.

I`m going to break Internet tradition and say something shocking.

I think Napster are bad people. I think Metallica are morally right to sue them, although I`m not sure they`ll legally win the case.

I think some people may have stopped reading already. :-)

A lot of minds have been made up on this before really examining the facts, if you ask me. My initial reaction was that Metallica were beating on people trading the odd song and they just wanted to be even more rich and didn`t understand mp3 and the Internet. But then I investigated it more and thought about it more.

One key point, as mentioned in Metallica`s Yahoo chat. Napster is a company. They do what they do to make money. They are not a bunch of people in a basement trying to make the world a better place in their spare time. They have the money to sponsor Limp Bizkit to tour. They will float on the stock market and all become filthy rich. But somehow they`ve managed to pain themselves as Robbin Hood.

Another key point, Napster BLATANTLY exists to help people pirate music. Blatantly. Read the help file. I don`t have it here to quote it, but it says something along the lines of that Napster is designed to let you search for and find songs made by your favourate artists. If the mp3 revolution had really happened the way people keep saying it may one day happen (maybe it will), this might be pretty innocent, but as it is I think Napster`s purpose is quite clear. How many of your favourate artists regularly release freely distributable songs?

So, basically, Napster are a company who set out to make money through piracy. Casual piracy has never bothered me, but I`ve always thought that making money from piracy is disgusting. I`m not saying what they`re doing is illegal, but it is certainly immoral in my opinion.

Napster have done other things, like say that they cannot remove specific songs from their databases. They`ve said they can only completely withdraw the access from those who are trading them. First, I don`t believe for a minute that Napster is so badly designed that they cannot block given artist names or song titles. Total bull. In my opinion, they`ve said this to make Metallica look bad that they`re stopping "their poor fans" from using a service, from using all of the service, not just from doing the illegal stuff they were doing. (And anyway, so what? If you make abusive or illegal calls on your telephone, you get cut off and can`t use it to order pizza, either. It`s not like they`re taking away their Internet access or cutting off their hands, it`s just Napster.)

Also, Metallica have said they don`t mind people trading bootlegs and live recordings. They just want to retain control of the propper studio works. (I imagine they included the professionally recorded and commercially released live recordings in that statement!) Fair enough, this is what they spend their lives creating. What right has anyone to take control of that? Metallica have said they have no problem with mp3 itself, mp3 is just a format. Their problem is that Napster provides an organised way for people to take control of the distribution of their music. (It`s not like some Geocities site which stays up for two days before being removed by Geocities when they notice it. (And there`s an example of Geocities doing what they should do and what Napster have so far refused to do.))

Metallica and the others suing them have got a lot of stick from the net community for apparently not understanding how Napster works. I don`t know the details of the suit and I don`t much care. I think it`s one thing to critize their understanding of something technical and another thing to say they`re being immoral assholes -- I don`t think they are anymore. (It may be perfectly legal, anyway. They have provided Napster with information on criminal activity and they probably have to, by law, do what`s in their power to stop it.)

You can argue that artists are stupid to close down Napster because it provides a good way for people to preview music they`re unsure about. In some ways I agree with this and I admit, I myself use Napster from time to time to check out music I`ve heard of but am not sure if I`ll like.

I`ll say that again, I`ve used Napster and I don`t view myself as an evil person. But I still think Metallica are right to try to shut them down. Call me a pragmatist if you will, but I`ll use whatever`s available and apply my own morals to exactly how I use it.

The important thing is, it`s not my right to be able to check this music out. If the musicians themselves or their record companies are too stupid to provide some decent quality preview material on the internet, that`s their fault and they`ll probably sell less records as a result. But, IF SOMEBODY CREATES SOMETHING BEAUTIFUL YOU DON`T AUTOMATICALLY GET A PIECE OF IT. It still belongs to them, and if they won`t show it to you or sell it to you at all, or if they want a million pounds for even a glimpse of it, it`s up to them. Okay, sure, if someone asked a million pounds for something I could easily copy and I wanted, I would copy it and I wouldn`t have a problem with myself doing that. But I also wouldn`t have a problem or act surprised about them getting p***ed off that people are making it really easy for it to happen. And CDs don`t generally cost a million pounds. :-) (In fact, I`m really shocked that people do find it really surprising that artists are trying to defend themselves from piracy. Wow, who would`ve thought?)


I`ll end with a couple of quotes from people (who are not from Metallica):


Matt Johnson of The The:

"Many artists have spent their lives honing their craft and now some anonymous person in a little dark room with a computer somewhere is able to collate that lifetime`s work and pass it around the world for free. It`s just not on. Stealing is stealing regardless of what name you choose to call it. You get people saying `I`ve been a fan of yours for twenty years, I`m entitled to have it for free.` Well I`m afraid you`re not. That`s no different to me than going down to the local greengrocers and saying `well, I`ve been coming here for twenty years and so I`m going to help myself to all your fruit and vegetables from now on thanks very much.`"


Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails, in a recent interview with the Boston Globe:

"I create my music; it`s mine," said Reznor of Nine Inch Nails in a recent telephone interview. "It`s not your right to give it away or exchange it with your friends, just as it`s not right to copy software or photocopy books to give away. It represents the artist`s work. Just because a technology exists where you can duplicate something, that doesn`t give you the right to steal.

"There`s nothing wrong with giving some tracks away, or bits of stuff, that`s fine. But it`s not everybody`s right," Reznor said. "Once I record something, it`s not public domain to give it away freely. So I stand behind Dr. Dre and Metallica and support them. And that`s not trying to be the outdated musician who is trying to stop technology. I love technology. Technology is here to stay and I`m the first one downloading the newest update to software that I don`t need and that makes my machine not work."

As for [Limp] Bizkit`s [Fred] Durst, Reznor blasted him by saying, "Durst is the brain trust of all that is wrong with music. He supports [Napster] because they gave him $2 million to tour. He forgot to mention that in his press release."

Napster shouldn`t be punished at all in my opinion. They are merely providing a service for the public.

And MP3s were being traded *a lot* even before napster appeared. Obviously no one knows of ICQ Activelists and FTP. In fact, FTPs is where most songs from Napster orginate from I think, so maybe they should be trying to find out these big distro FTPs and shut them down. Napster isn`t the problem, the supply is.

If people want to bootleg music, let them, who are we to cast judgement. If someone was to rip off a copy of my music, let them, it means more people would listen to my music / play my company`s game etc. You are still in the knowledge that some people will buy it. It builds a bigger fan base and offers you more chance in the future of bigger sales.

In the case of Metallica, they are obviously self centered, money grabbing brats. They already have multi million pound fortunes yet are not content with the money they have.

I suppose Metallica are in the unfortunate situation that their music is in a minority genre as opposed to pop bought by 8 year olds.

But at the end of the day, they are just money grabbing c***s.

Btw, please don`t argue with me, I probably have lots of holes in this argument, but you won`t change my opinion.

Btw don`t listen to Leo, he is associated with a site that posts pictures of dicks on toast with onions.

I kid you not!

Leo said:

"Let me first say, this isn`t personally directed at Mark Jewiss! I pretty much agree with his recent column update"

Firstly let me say that I didn`t see anything in your post that could be taken as being against me, so don`t apologise for any offence as there wasn`t any (thanks for being nice though!)

Secondly, don`t apologise for stating your opinion. It`s yours and you should be proud of it. Shout it from the rooftops. If people don`t agree they will either ignore you, ridicule you or debate with you.

As to your argument, sorry but you haven`t convinced me. I think it`s wrong for people to go around bootlegging stuff, as I`ve said many a time, but I also think it`s wrong for people to single out a company like Napster to take action against. Napster are providing a service. In my opinion this case is like suing the Royal Mail because someone bottlegged a CD and mailed it to you. It`s purely a delivery mechanism for a greater evil.

Mark J.

"Btw, please don`t argue with me, I probably have lots of holes in this argument, but you won`t change my opinion."

heh, then what can I say? :-)

Don`t bother reading this if you don`t want to, but I want to say some stuff for anyone else who for some reason cares what I say or just wants an opinion to consider against their own, and you`re welcome to reply because I do listen to what other people say and I can change my mind. I`m not writing this to try to change the world or win an argument, I`m writing it because I find the issues interesting to discuss. (As I said, my initial reaction was that Metallica were being money grabbing bastards, but my opinions changed a lot as I investigated more.)

Napster isn`t the only way to trade mp3s, but it is the only one I know of which is run by a company to make money and it is also the most organised and easy to use method of trading mp3s I know of. People don`t generally have access to big FTP sites and any which people do are probably run from countries where not much can be done (else something would`ve been done). ICQ is nowhere near as good for mp3 trading as Napster.

(Yeah, you can often find mp3s from recent albums with a quick net search, but Napster makes it even easier a lot of the time. You can`t just ban Altavista, though, can you... Not unless they are purposely making it easier for masses of people to break the law and could easily do something to stop it.)

At the end of the day, in my opinion, Napster exists to make money from pirated music, as I said. I think that`s immoral and I don`t see a problem with musicians wanting to shut them down.

"If people want to bootleg music, let them, who are we to cast judgement."

While some poeple are, I myself am not casting judgement on the individuals who pirate music. Personally, I`m only judging Napster, the origisation, the company full of people who are working on making themselves filthy rich on the backs of other people.

"someone was to rip off a copy of my music, let them, it means more people would listen to my music"

I might be wrong, and forgive me if I am, but I doubt you spend your entire life making music and base your livelihood on it. Unless you do, saying this is like me saying I`d give all my money away to charity if I was as rich as Bill Gates.

Metallica have said it`s not about the money. I expect most people laugh. I don`t even know if I believe them or not. Hell, Metallica have so much money I could believe they no longer care about the money as much as I could believe they`re money grabbing bastards. (Either way, I`d say they deserve to be rich a lot more than many of the richer people.) I do believe that it is more about the control of what they create than about the money, though. It just plain sucks to have your work raped by other people, whether they are your uncaring, profit driven record company (see NIN and TheThe and the lack of support they are getting from parents Interscope) or from an unaffiliated organisation of bloodsuckers like Napster.

I prefer to leave Metallica out of the issue of whether Napster is bad or not, but yeah, the fact is they started the suit. The fact that a big band is the first to fight back is another thing I don`t understand people`s surprise about. Smaller bands cannot afford to sue a company like Napster. Pretty obvious if you ask me.

If Metallica win their case or force Napster to do something about people trading their music without permission they will set a prescedent allowing any band, not matter how big or small, to say to Napster, no, I do not wish these songs of mine to be copied without my permission. Whether bands opt to say this will be their choice. Whether they allow some but not all of their material to be copied is their choice. Now they have no choice.

BTW, I was thinking on the way home that maybe it`s hypocritical of me to say that regional encoding sucks and then a couple of days later defend the rights of artists to control their works... I started a message trying to explain myself (mostly to myself!) but then the pieces fell in to place and every point I was making seemed so obvious. Thought they were not before I`d written the message, afterwards it just seemed a pointless thing to post, an apology for something I didn`t do. However! I`d be happy to explain myself to anyone who thinks it is a double standard and cares enough, and is bored enough... heh :-)

"Btw don`t listen to Leo, he is associated with a site that posts pictures of dicks on toast with onions.

I kid you not!"


Ahahahah :-)

I think Napster are providing a service with a direct intent to do wrong, though. They`re also not doing anything about people using their service for wrong when it is explicitly reported to them. That`s quite different to the Royal Mail.

I think Napster are being singled out because no other *organised, suable company* has done what they are doing before.

I also think Napster`s PR machine is trying to make them look like basement Robin Hoods when they are corporate leeches. They claim to be amoungst the mp3 revolution, trying to break down the evil record companies and bring musicians closer to their fans, but, really, I think they`re in some ways worse than the record companies because they`re making money from people`s creations and not even asking or paying them for it, and not stopping when artists request they stop.

You can`t sue a bunch of anonymous FTP sites. You *can* sue Geocities if you tell them they have copyright material online and don`t remove it in a reasonable amount of time. (Which is similar to what`s happening with Napster, so in that respect maybe they`re not really being singled out, they`re just reacting so damn slowly that legal action was required.)

As a former editor of a fan site ( I got fed up of it), I feel the more worrying issue in this argument is not so much to do with Napster, but that of people needing to assert their intellectual property copyright.

I have no experience of Napster personally, so I`m assuming that their site is full of pirated tracks from other publishers which you pay to download. If this is so, then this is a no-no. It`s just the same as the market traders flogging bootleg copies of "Chicken Run" or whatever. However you might feel about piracy or circumventing the putting-money-into-rich-executives-pockets paradigm, the thing is that it makes the producers more paranoid. They insist on software encryption and legislation like the proposed ban on digital home recording to prevent piracy, and it spoils everything for the rest of us.

If Napster only supply the software, or provide the tracks freely, this is a muddier area. Technically it is still a breach of copyright (read the edge of any CD for confirmation), but as there is no "piece of the action" for the producers to miss out on. It can only be a moral high ground victory.

I`m more worried that the studios and record producers will embrace a system like mp3 in the future. Technophiles will adore the idea of downloading movies and albums for a small fee in a relatively short time, so the system will flourish. There will be wired-up movie players and hi-fi systems that will have hard disks (or solid state memory) in them, but there will be no way of making a permanent copy, and like DIVX there will be a lifespan for every recording. I hate the idea of PPV, PPListen and all the other ideas the pundits offer. I like having a DVD/CD/Video on the shelf I can play when I want to. I don`t want to pay £3.99 a pop every time I want to listen to my favourite album.

Finally (don`t breath a sigh of relief, you at the back), with regards sites such as DVD Reviewer having to drop copyrighted material:

As long as a site is providing its service completely free and with no strings attached (like most of the fan sites do), then I think Fox and the other studios are being really stupid clobbering what is after all free advertising. If copyrighted materials are being provided for a charge (i.e. behind AVS or by subscription), then I think the copyright owners are completely within their rights to ask for the materials to be removed.

On 13 May, most of the fan-based sites are going offline in support of the sites closed down by Fox in their Buffy The Vampire Slayer purge. These sites pose a special problem with copyright because of a little habit they have called "fanfic". Just to clarify - fans write fiction based on the series they like. Who owns the copyright in the fanfic? The producers? The fan who wrote the fanfic? Fox have decided that the simple solution is to ban the sites lest their copyright be diluted. Personally I feel if you write fanfic it automatically becomes the property of the studio. If you want to write fiction, you should invent your own characters.

On a legal point, a disclaimer in small type recognising all copyrights, logos and insignia as belonging to the original copyright holder and stating that their inclusion is purely for the purposes of review should get round the Berne Convention etc.

I just had a look at Napster, and I reckon if you`re going to hit them with a lawsuit, you`ll have to hit RealPlayer, Vivo and Microsoft (for their Media Player) `cos they`re all the same types of software.

This is fast turning into protectionism and I think the producers, studios and artists supporting this hard-nosed attitude will soon regret it.

Leo said:

"You can`t sue a bunch of anonymous FTP sites"

Ahh, but that`s the thing, you can.

The thing is, there`s no such thing as an anonymous ftp site. Despite what some people will tell you, if you really want to do it, and you know how, you can use publicly available tools to find out who is running virtually any site out there. The only time you will run into problems is when a site is hidden behind a corporate network - by that I mean that an employee of a company with a big fat `net connection (say an ISP, for example) shoves a box on the local network and tells everyone it`s his desktop machine.

Even these can be traced and found with the assistance of employers - the biggest trouble is sites moving around a lot.

Yes it would be a lot of hassle, and yes it would take loads of time, and yes it would probably cost loads of money. But it is do-able.

Mark J.