Judge Issues Injunction In Napster Case
from the watch-the-RIAA-gloat dept
So, as everyone expected the judge in the Napster case has finally handed down the injunction. This doesn’t really change anything since Napster already started blocking songs over the weekend. The question, however, is how the RIAA will respond. Already in the article you can see Hilary Rosen gloating over the victory. Now, how are they going to respond when songs slip through the Napster filters? Are they going to be understanding or are they going to keep going for the total kill?
Comments on “Judge Issues Injunction In Napster Case”
Go for the kill
Various posters on message boards are already talking about ways of getting around the filters, such as mispelling names or using Pig Latin. All this effort shows that people don’t want to get music, they want free music. Napster should be shutdown and the music companies come out with a reasonable priced pay alternative as soon as possible.
Future of Napster
Aside from the technical differences of P2P vs. typical client-server communication, Napster was essentially just a bunch of warez sites with the important difference that there was nobody the copyright holder could go to get anything shut down: find your companies’ software at a warez site and you can get their ISP to shut it down very quickly and possibly go after the individual trading the warez too. Napster shielded the individual behind essentially anonymous ids, and claimed they couldn’t and didn’t need to shut anybody down.
Now the court has ruled that they do need to behave like an ISP at least in the sense that they must shut down any obvious copyright infringement. What that means is that it’s no longer a place to avoid the scrutiny of copyright holders. In the long run I’d expect it to be as hard to find a copyrighted song on Napster as it is to find it on a warez ftp site. (That’s not to say the files won’t be there; the swapping will just have to go underground behind obfuscated names, secret passwords, etc. All the RIAA has to do is just to push the swapping scene far enough into a niche that mainstream users can’t figure it out any more.)
Whether Napster survives depends on whether there’s any legitimate traffic left, and whether the advantages of their P2P model, if any, are enough to justify its continued use for legal reasons.