The controversy surrounding MP3 music provider Napster continues to stay hot after a federal judge in New York ruled the company and similar providers were breaking copyright law by allowing their users to access and trade songs for free.
The court decided that Napster contributes to copyright infringement by providing a database to its users that allows for the free storage and access to their favorite songs. The music is compressed in the popular MP3 format and can be accessed via any computer with an Internet connection, without paying artists for their copyrighted work.
After the April 28 court ruling, Napster asked Metallica to provide the names of the Napster users who have committed copyright infringement and promised to remove those users from its service.
Metallica provided a list with more than 300,000 names of Napster users who it said infringed on the band’s copyright. Napster banned those users, 30,000 of which are now appealing the court ruling. Napster apparently advised banned users they had a right to appeal the ban if they felt they had been misidentified.
Napster has quickly gained popularity among college students at the University and nationwide for offering free music at the click of a mouse, and that has not changed throughout the controversy.
Cory Coleman, a senior double-majoring in computer science and psychology, said that many banned Napster users signed up again for the service minutes after they had been deleted, simply using a different log-in name. He also said that Napster users among his friends continue to use the MP3 provider.
“It doesn’t affect the individual user yet,” he said. “Almost everyone I know in the dorms uses Napster and continues to use Napster.”
The Recording Industry Association of America and artists such as Metallica have sued Napster for violating their copyrights. Napster’s defense has been that it is no different from such Internet service providers as America Online and thus is not responsible for any piracy its users might be committing.
Internet service providers are only responsible under the law to ban users if they use their service to break copyright law.
Rapper Dr. Dre on Wednesday also delivered a long list of users he wanted Napster to remove from its service. Dr. Dre asked that Napster either ban almost 240,000 users or delete his songs from the service. Napster agreed to review the list of users but said it would not delete the songs. Despite the legal action over the past few weeks, Keith Aoki, an associate professor at the School of Law, said that University students and other Napster users are unlikely to become a target of lawsuits.
“The liability is not so much individual students,” he said. “It would cost a lot of money to go after individual students.”
Going after 300,000 individuals could simply be too expensive and tedious, he explained.
Instead, Aoki said he expects the RIAA and Metallica to target larger entities like universities.
Last month, Metallica and other music artists filed a lawsuit against the University of Southern California, Yale University and Indiana University, which all allow their students access to the MP3 provider. The suit alleged that the universities and Napster promote piracy by allowing users to trade copyrighted songs at no cost.
The suit against Yale was dropped when that school banned its students from accessing the MP3 provider.
While the University has been monitoring developments regarding Napster, Joanne Hugi, director of the University Computing Center, said there are no plans to ban the MP3 provider. She said the court ruling in New York applies more to Napster users rather than universities.
But she also said the computing center has recently checked how much bandwidth Napster use has taken up in the University’s network. Hugi said while Napster is being used, it is not taking up an alarming amount of bandwidth.
“Napster is not eating us alive,” she said.
Senior computer science major Jake Jensen said recent Napster developments have not been a big topic among his friends, which he suspects might be because people do not know about the court ruling.
Unlike Coleman, Jensen said rumors about banned Napster users signing back on to the service under a different name shortly after being deleted might be unfounded because of the difficulty.
“A lot of the people that were banned were banned not so much by name but by IP number,” he said.
The IP number refers to the address on the Internet a given computer has. Thus, he said, just using a different name is not the solution and gaining access to Napster after being banned might not be that easy.
Coleman, however, said so far users have not been banned by their IPs but by their names, and even if that should change, there are many ways to regain access to Napster’s services quickly, especially if one uses University modems or such Internet service providers as AOL. He explained that in those cases, one uses a different modem every time he or she logs on to the Internet.
He also said litigation against Napster will not solve the problems artists and the recording industry claim are hurting them.
“Napster is going to go down sooner or later,” he said. “But MP3 trading has been going on for years — long before Napster came.”