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The news has been announced. The Ninth Court of Appeals has
essentially given Napster the thumbs down to continue.
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| Art
by Ben Strawn |
The
court stated that Napster, the Redwood City, Calif.-based
music swapping service, must eliminate it's 53 million users
ability to download copyrighted music files. Though the company
remains online due to some technical court loopholes, the
service could be shut down within two weeks.
Napster
works by using clusters of servers to store the user names
of registered members and compiling a list of all the MP3
files. Using the Napster client enables people to search lists
of files until users find what they are looking for.
Napster
provides the IP (unique Internet location) address of the
computer where the file is located. Then the user can download
the file.
The
Recording Industry Association of America began a lawsuit
against Napster in 1999 and has finally received their desired
"cease and desist" order against Napster. The RIAA argues
that Napster is knowingly providing a way for people to find
and transfer copyrighted material.
Although
most mainstream media have focused on the legal implications
of the court order, few have focused on why it is legal for
people to transmit music to each other. To begin to understand
this, one must first understand copyright.
By
copyrighting something in America, a person is claiming ownership
of an idea, and basically legally declaring a monopoly on
that idea. In the case of Napster, "idea" is music.
Music
is an idea in that it can be thought of as intangible patterns
of sound that represent an idea or provoke an emotion. By
copyrighting a song you are declaring the idea of that song
as an owned "property". This is called Intellectual Property
(IP).
When
a piece of IP, i.e.: a song, is created, the copyright exists
automatically. It doesn’t have to be registered anywhere.
The
1988 Copyright Act says owners have the following exclusive
rights of the copyright: works can be copied, issued to the
public, rented or lent, performed in public, broadcast or
adapted.
The
problem with IP is that the IP laws of America, and other
countries, is based on physical property. These laws come
from the fact that a physical object can't be in two places
at once. This keeps people from fighting over the one object.
IP
differentiates itself in that ideas can exist in more than
one place.
The
basic reasoning behind IP is that people will not make more
IP unless they have a reason to make more money. Songs are
allowed to be copyrighted so artists can make money off them,
and because of this money they will be encouraged to make
more music.
So everyone is copyrighting music, right? There has been a
very small movement back lashing against copyrighting music.
This
has mostly come from independent punk and folk artists who
encourage the free distribution, reproduction, and modification
of their art. It can be argued that these are the true artists.
But, the American laws are the American laws, and copyrights
and lawsuits over copyrighted material related to Internet
music transfers, will persist.
This
is where British computer developer Ian Clarke comes in. Clarke
has boldly come out and said, "Copyrights pretend that information
is property and copyrights are a form censorship."
As
Clarke’s senior project in his artificial intelligence and
computer science degree, Clarke created the Freenet concept
and protocols. His system was developed as an answer to the
flaws of Napster.
Unlike
Napster, Freenet is completely decentralized; meaning it has
no fixed servers. In addition, it offers complete anonymity
as well as high-level data encryption algorithms, meaning
that the RIAA and other groups can't know who is trading what.
Another advantage is that once information is published onto
the Freenet system, the information can't be taken off. So,
in essence, the Freenet project, which is being developed
in the open-source model by Clarke and a team of volunteers,
is attempting to subjugate the whole Intellectual Property
issue, the RIAA and governmental control of what people can
do with ideas.
The
team already has the major protocols and algorithms worked
out, but are still in the process of refining the clients
and software for mass-release. The software is being written
in Java and the source code as well as clients can be downloaded
from their Web site.
The
concept of Freenet is definitely complex, so complex that
it can’t be explained entirely in this article. But check
out Freenet’s website at http://freenet.net/.
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