************************************************************** * * * 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: * * * * * ************************************************************** 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.