Napster switches sides

From the moment it first popped up on the Web more than a year ago, Napster swore it was utterly and steadfastly devoted to the ethos of free music. The Internet music-swapping service said it would never give up its battle against greedy recording companies and antiquated copyright laws.

Last week, the rebel cut a very lucrative deal with the music conglomerate Bertelsmann A.G. and announced it was cutting similar deals with other industry giants. Amazing the effect huge infusions of corporate cash can have upon principle.

Actually, not at all amazing. Napster’s worldwide flouting of copyright laws and the concept that intellectual property is actual property with actual owners never was based upon principle, but upon the very forces of evil it swore it was fighting. Napster’s 38 million users did not pay anything to download music files, but that many hits certainly generated a lot of advertising revenue, a roundabout form of greed. As for antiquated, stealing anything not nailed down is a concept as old as dirt.

Napster’s announcement that the Bertelsmann catalogue, and soon the catalogues of other industry giants, will be available only to users who pay a subscription fee – from which royalties will be passed along to artists – was greeted with outrage in the no-rules world of the Internet-obsessed. The call went out for boycotts of everything related to any form of musical moneymaking, from record stores to concerts to MTV to T-shirt vendors.

In the real world, news of the Napster/Bertelsmann partnership was met with a sense of both inevitably and relief. A growing body of court decisions regarding copyright infringement on the Internet made it clear the judicial tide was running in favor of the creators and owners of intellectual property. The suit brought by the Recording Industry of America against Napster was proceeding, with tens, perhaps, hundreds of millions in damages at stake. A federal appeals court is expected to rule any day on the stay of an injunction against Napster and a ruling against the company would have pulled the plug and left it with nothing of interest for Bertelsmann or anyone else. Further, recent developments in encryption, the successful trials of an encoded “watermark” that would make unauthorized transfer of copyrighted material difficult and the quality substandard, promise to turn this particular brand of thievery into something only for the most experienced programmers.

The relief is from the increasing worry that the Internet actually could fail, or at least be set back years, if the culture of piracy were allowed to persist. Several recent downturns in the technology-oriented Nasdaq were traced in part to investor concerns that the wunderkind running the show are just too immature to be handling their money. If copyright law and the underlying principle that ownership matters can be so easily dismissed, what, investors rightly wondered, would become of contractual obligations?

Numerous surveys on the subject suggest that a large majority of Napster users primarily are interested in the convenience of being able to use their home computer to sample unfamiliar music and to download music they enjoyed – they do not object to paying a reasonable fee for that convenience. There may be enormous hypocrisy in Napster’s sudden conversion-for-cash, but it does mean there’s one less pirate on the loose.