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*                                                            * 
*                         CYBERSPACE                         * 
*         A biweekly column on net culture appearing         * 
*                in the Toronto Sunday Sun                   * 
*                                                            * 
* Copyright 2000 Karl Mamer                                  * 
* Free for online distribution                               * 
* All Rights Reserved                                        * 
* Direct comments and questions to:                          * 
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Napster and the law of diminishing returns

So you download Napster. Your work is wired with about 90 T3 
lines and you've downloaded every song you desire. 

Hey, there it is Time Zone's "World Destruction"! Thank you 
Napster! Wow M.A.R.R.S.' "Pump Up the Volume". Thank you 
Napster! Oh my god finally Tom Tom Club's "Genius of Love"! 
Napster rulezzzz! And by the way, where do I send my cheque for 
the Napster defense fund?

Then it happens. You can't think of any more songs to download. 
You think pretty hard. What was that song they used to play on 
AM radio back in the '70s? You know the one your dad loved so 
much he got it on 8-track tape and he played it over and over 
again all the way to Florida. You begin downloading Juice 
Newton MP3s, Dueling Banjo covers, the Hockey Night in Canada 
theme, and even KLF's "Justified and Ancient". 

Soon it happens again. You can't think of any more songs to 
download. You start term surfing, entering things like "moon", 
"spoon", or "kirpan", just to see what comes up. 

Eventually you have to admit, there exist only about 349 songs 
in the world that you really care to listen to. You've 
discovered an answer to a question you've never asked yourself: 
"If you had only 3 gigabytes of storage what songs would you 
bring to a desert island?"

If you've not yet discovered the answer to this question, 
you've got only a matter of weeks before Napster could, yet 
again, be forced to shut down operation.

Napster is, of course, being sued by the Recording Industry 
Association of America (RIAA) for all kinds of copyright 
infringements. In July the RIAA got a judge to issue an 
injunction against Napster, forcing a shut down of the service 
until a full trial. Napster immediately appealed and a higher 
court over turned the judge's injunction temporarily.

Last Monday Napster and the RIAA were back in court to present 
short arguments before a panel of three judges regarding the 
injunction. It looked like the end for Napster but again the 
court reserved judgment for another few weeks.

Whew.

Napster has long argued that it provides nothing more than a 
simple technology known as peer-to-peer software. When users 
are swapping MP3 files, whether they're legal or illegal, it's 
a transaction between two computers: the dude with the files on 
his hard drive and the dude sucking them down to his hard 
drive. Napster's only role is letting users know what's on 
everyone's hard drives and where they can find each other.

The RIAA counters Napster's technology aides copyright 
violators by providing them with lists of obviously illegally 
copied songs and the technology to hook them up. That's a 
violation of copyright law no matter how you slice it. The 
judge that issued the original injunction agreed, noting 
Napster had to devise a technology to distinguish between 
copyrighted material and non-copyrighted material if the 
company wanted to stay in business.

If a court ultimately decides the Napster model of a 
centralized music list is in violation of existing laws, 
there's technology on the horizon that eliminates the sue-able 
middle man. A program called Freenet (freenet.sourceforge.net) 
basically makes each computer running the program a node. When 
you search for a song, the Freenet program contacts another 
node and asks "hey do you know where to find this song?" If 
that node has no idea where to find the song, it contacts 
another node and asks it. Each node builds a growing list of 
song titles and locations.

Its obvious downloadable music is here to stay, whether done by 
legal or illegal means. Napster made a counter offer to the 
RIAA. It would charge users five bucks a month and split the 
profits. With some thirty million users, that's a revenue 
stream of nearly two billion dollars a year. The music industry 
had gross sales of about 12 billion dollars in 1999. While the 
music industry has sales six times larger than what it would 
realize from a Napster subscription service, when you  take 
into account production costs, shipping, and a brick-and-mortar 
store's cut, $2 billion for the simple shuffling around of 
electrons seems like a pretty good deal.

    Source: geocities.com/lapetitelesson/cs/text

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