The Ethics of Napster

The internet, in the minds of its earliest champions, was supposed to be a wonderfully anarchic, egalitarian revolution. All the world's peoples would unite to tear down the barriers of class and geography; information would be free to the masses. To them the internet was supposed to be a commune, Berkeley II. In many ways, Napster was the epitome of that golden, communitarian internet. A free service that allowed people from across the globe to share their music.

On Monday, a hearing in federal court in San Francisco will begin to decide whether to shut Napster down, upholding an earlier decision in favor of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). RIAA is seeking to stop Napster, then collect many millions of dollars in damages. And while RIAA's fight with the web-music phenomenon is the most important legal challenge to online music sharing, the morality and ethics of Napster are under attack in a second case--last April the band Metallica also sued Napster. The crux of Metallica's case (which is still pending) is that Napster is simple theft, or in their words, Napster users are "common looters loading up shopping carts because 'everybody else is doing it.'"

Their contention is worth examining.

Napster is a piece of simple yet elegant software, developed by 19-year-old Shawn Fanning, that allows people to copy music from one another over the internet in the form of files known as MP3's. The company that owns the software, also called Napster, runs a website that distributes the eponymous program for free. Napster has no--which is to say, absolutely zero--income from any sources. No one pays to swap songs. No one pays for the software. There isn't even any advertising on the company website.

Napster is, essentially, a high-tech way of trading tapes. Back in the Stone Age of the 1980s, anyone who cared about music put in time making cassette tapes. People would make romantic mixes for their girlfriends or make party tapes or copy an album so they could play it in their car or on their boom box. People would also make copies of albums they especially liked and trade them with their friends. Napster is an extension of that behavior.

Of course, there is a difference. Tape trading was allowed by the law. Upon the advent of cassette decks, Congress passed the Audio Home Recording Act, providing that people could copy and trade music so long as it was for "private," "personal," and "noncommercial" use. In other words, so long as you gave tapes to people you knew and didn't make any money from it, tape trading was fine. There isn't much that is "private" or "personal" about Napster: When people trade songs, they don't know each other. But the key to the Audio Home Recording Act was always the "noncommercial" part anyway. When it comes down to it, however, the government and the record labels never attempted to stop you from sharing tapes because there was no way to control tape trading, other than to stop the highly profitable sale of magnetic tape. By setting up as a clearinghouse for sharing free music, Napster has given the authorities a clear target.

Metallica, it should be noted, used to endorse widespread tape trading. In 1982, Metallica was an unknown upstart band in California. With little available capital, they cobbled together a crude seven-song demo tape called "No Life 'Til Leather." The boys in the band gave the tape out to anyone who would take it, encouraging them to copy it and pass it along. "No Life 'Til Leather" became an international sensation through this sort of swapping and launched Metallica into a career that has been beset with stardom and riches. Now no longer a hungry young band, Metallica is bent on destroying a system of sharing whose ancestor was once so helpful to them.

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