I have followed, with some amusement, the misadventures of the American legal system over the insidious, corrupting, devilish program Napster.
Napster allows users to “kidnapster” music files from other users on the Internet running the same application. You log on and type in a search string and the Napster finds MP3 files on other users’ computers and allows you to download them onto your computer and listen to them.
Well, right is right and wrong is wrong. Is it wrong to “steal” music over the internet? Yes. Is it wrong to rip off young artists? Yes– but that’s what the music industry does better than a million internet users. Is the current system of distribution of music unjust, unfair, and grossly inefficient? Yes. It will die of it’s own contradictions.
I watched the debate and the court proceedings with amusement because the judge that tried to shut down Napster made a ruling that is ridiculous and will only bring scorn and ridicule to the legal process.
Here’s why:
1. Though shutting down the Napster site will temporarily stop people from using Napster to download MP3 files, there are dozens of other programs that do the same thing. When the Napster site was temporarily shut down last month, the Gnutella site had so many hits that it too went down. Shutting down Napster will have almost no effect on the distribution of music over the internet.
2. Sony has announced that it will sell music over the internet for $2.98 per cut. This is a bad joke. This is obscene. It is more obscene than millions of users sharing their music over the internet without paying the artist. This amount is so ridiculously high that it will only serve to increase the scorn and hatred of the music industry out there among computer hackers. If the music industry is going to sell music over the internet, the price is going to have to be about ten cents a cut. At this price, the music industry will– believe me– still make piles of money, because they will sell 100 times as much music as they currently sell.
3. The other programs that do the same thing as Napster don’t do it in the same way. Napster still requires a “server” which a judge could order shut down. Other programs, however, function in a more decentralized way. It may be impossible to shut down these systems by shutting down a small number of servers. A zealous judge would have to shut down everybody– which means it won’t happen.
4. Even if Napster, and Gnutella, and all the other programs succeed and prevail, the music industry will survive, and it will continue to sell music through music stores. In the first place, MP3 is not really a very good music format. The new generation of DVD’s will provide better quality sound and there will always be a market for disks. In the second place, even though it has long been possible to record music off the radio and television programs off the TV, the markets for CD’s and video tapes continues to grow. A lot of people just want to get the disk or tape in their hands.
5. The music industry will cease to have a cooperative monopoly (something the banks and oil companies already have) over the sales and distribution of music. Anyone can get on the internet and distribute and promote his or her own work.
6. Video is next. The fact that we cannot, at the present time, watch television programs when we want to, rather than when they are scheduled is, when you think about it, absurd. If Monty Python is on at 2:00 a.m. and I want to watch it, and the television station showing it wants me to watch it, why shouldn’t I be able to move that program to a day and time when it would be convenient for me to watch it? Furthermore, why can’t I watch programs that aren’t scheduled whenever I want to? Want that Dick Van Dyke episode from 1964? The news footage of the Munich Olympics hostage crisis? The Beatles appearance on Ed Sullivan? Someone should have it on file somewhere. If the television industry was smart– and I don’t think they are– they would put up web sites right now and announce plans to make the entire back-catalog of television programs available as soon as it is practically possible to make them downloadable. They would publish the specs for creating the compression algorithms necessary, and make it freely available to all.
Yes, I know, we already have the means with which to “time shift” television programs: the VCR. However, even after twenty-five years of development, most people still don’t use it regularly to tape programs they would otherwise miss. What do they use it for? To watch pre-recorded tapes rented, at outlandish prices, from a video store.
That should teach us something. For one thing, it indicates that there will continue to be a market for CD’s and video tapes in spite of new medias. For another, it indicates that a large number of people will never learn to master some new technologies.