Napster movement goes underground, people responsible

2000-07-31

In the oft-downloaded words of the Carpenters, “It’s only just begun…” Napster may have until Friday to shut down its operations, but it doesn’t take much to realise that the injunction will not spell the end of online piracy of copyrighted materials. The judgement was against Napster alone, and not the individuals using it – according to \link{http://www.news.com,News.com}, this would require lawsuits to be filed against individuals. Similarly, peer-to-peer duplication products such as Gnutella, Centrata and Akamai (covered \link{http://www.it-analysis.com,here} are not affected as this would also require individuals to be pursued. It looks like, whatever happens in the future, individuals hold the key.

Let’s get one thing straight. Piracy of any creative work is a bad thing, as it is stealing from the livelihood of its creator not to mention the agencies that work on his or her behalf. These may be perceived as “the enemy,” capitalist men in suits who like nothing more than to make a fast buck off the backs of the innocent public. The major record labels and publishers do provide a necessary service – without them, for example, Harry Potter might still have been a manuscript languishing in the bottom of the drawer. All the same, recordings are priced high and the temptation to make copies of them has been too great for any of us. If there is anybody out there that has not, at some time, taped an album or a song off the radio, speak out! We want to hear from you.

Together, digital quality recordings and the Internet changed a problem that was seen as a necessary evil by the publishing industry, to one which could have catastrophic consequences. This is probably a reasonably accurate analysis, if the duplication and distribution of MP3’s were not stopped. The question is, can it really be stopped? One company – Napster – has gone down, but others (such as AppleSoup) exist. Is the RIAA going to sue every bunch of students that put together a few lines of code to permit peer-to-peer file sharing? Let’s face it, even an Instant Messaging facility and an email service is sufficient to allow an exchange of information on pirated files, not to mention the files themselves, which could be exchanged automatically using facilities such as ftpmail.

Sooner or later, attention has to turn from the pirating software to the pirates. In the UK in the eighties, a levy was put on blank cassettes to recompense recording companies for lost sales, however it is difficult to see what similar mechanism could be put in place for the Web.

Given the vagaries of human nature, it is possible that an honour system is the only one that will possibly work. Stephen King may have had only limited success on the first day of his online publishing venture but the idea is sound: download a chapter of my book, if you pay I’ll publish the next one. The only difficulty is that it is a one-shot operation – once the entire book is published, being on the Net it will be subject to the same issues as any other online work. The concept of a “second edition” goes out of the window.

As more and more people get online, and as connection speeds improve, the problem of piracy can only increase. This is inevitable, whatever lawsuits may take place – savvy students and others the world over are unlikely to take too much note of the results. If the recording industry wants results, it must appeal to the individuals responsible for both its existence and its possible demise. It may get results, but it will not get everything its own way.

(First published 31 July 2000)