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Napster

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For Napster, LLC (formerly Roxio), and the paid Napster music service see Napster (pay service).

Napster was a file sharing service that paved the way for decentralized P2P file-sharing programs such as Kazaa, Limewire, iMesh, Morpheus, and BearShare, which are now used for many of the same reasons and can download music, pictures, and other files. The popularity and repercussions of the first Napster have made it a legendary icon in the computer and entertainment fields.

Napster's brand and logo continue to be used by a pay service, having been acquired by Roxio.

Origins

File:Napster 2.0 Beta 7 screenshot.png
Napster 2.0 Beta 7's file transfer screen during Napster's heyday. Note the Search, Library and Transfer buttons, prototypical of the many peer-to-peer systems to follow.

While Napster founder Shawn Fanning was attending Northeastern University in Boston, he wanted an easier method of finding digital music than by searching IRC or Lycos. Using his knowledge of programming, he created the initial version of Napster: A decentralized, easily-distributed program that would allow users to share music and other files directly from peer-to-peer over the internet.

With the files obtained through Napster, people frequently made their own compilation albums on recordable CDs, without paying any royalties to the copyright holder. As a partial solution to this issue, Napster was used as a test case for the Abilene Network, the educational Internet backbone.

The service and software program were initially Windows-only, but in 2000 Black Hole Media wrote a Macintosh client called Macster. Macster was later bought and designated the official Mac Napster client, at which point the Macster name was discontinued.[1]

Legal challenges

Napster peaked in February 2001

Heavy metal band Metallica discovered that a demo of their song ‘I Disappear’ had been circulating across the Napster network, even before it was released. This eventually led to the song being played on several radio stations across America and brought to Metallica’s attention that their entire back catalogue of studio material was also available. The band responded in 2000 by filing a lawsuit against the service offered by Napster. A month later, rapper Dr. Dre shared a litigator and legal firm with Metallica, and filed a similar lawsuit after Napster wouldn't remove his works from their service, even after he issued a written request. Separately, both Metallica and Dr. Dre later delivered thousands of usernames to Napster who they believed were pirating their songs. One year later, Napster settled both suits, but this came after being shut down by the Ninth Circuit Court in a separate lawsuit from several major record labels (see below). Also in 2000, Madonna, who had previously met with Napster executives to discuss a possible partnership, became irate when her single "Music" leaked out on to the web and Napster prior to its commercial release, causing widespread media coverage.[2] Verified Napster use peaked with 26.4 million users worldwide in February 2001.[3]

In 2000, A&M records and several other recording companies sued Napster for contributory and vicarious copyright infringement under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMC Act).[4] The music industry made the following claims against Napster:

(1) That its users were directly infringing the plaintiff's copyright; (2) That Napster was liable for contributory infringement of the plaintiff's copyright; and (3) That Napster was liable for vicarious infringement of the plaintiff's copyright.

The court found Napster guilty on all three claims. [5]

Napster lost the case in the District Court and appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Although the Ninth Circuit found that Napster was capable of commercially significant non-infringing uses, it affirmed the District Court's decision. On remand, the District Court ordered Napster to monitor the activities of its network and to block access to infringing material when notified of that material's location. Napster was unable to do this, and so shut down its service in July 2001. Napster finally declared itself bankrupt in 2002 and sold its assets. It had already been offline since the previous year owing to the effect of the court rulings. [6]

Promotional power

Along with the accusations that Napster was hurting the sales of the record industry, there were those who felt just the opposite, that file trading on Napster actually stimulated, rather than hurt, sales. Proof may have come in July 2000 when tracks from English rock band Radiohead's album Kid A found their way to Napster three months before the CD's release. Unlike Madonna, Dr. Dre or Metallica, Radiohead had never hit the top 20 in the US. Furthermore, Kid A was an experimental album without any singles, and received relatively little radio airplay. By the time of the record's release, the album was estimated to have been downloaded for free by millions of people worldwide, and in October 2000 Kid A captured the number one spot on the Billboard 200 sales chart in its debut week. According to Richard Menta of MP3 Newswire,[7] the effect of Napster in this instance was isolated from other elements that could be credited for driving sales, and the album's unexpected success was proof that Napster was a good promotional tool for music.

One of the most successful bands to owe its success to Napster was Dispatch. Being an independent band, they had no formal promotion or radio play, yet they were able to tour to cities they had never played and sell out concerts, thanks to the spread of their music on Napster. In July 2007, the band became the first independent band to ever headline New York City's Madison Square Garden, selling it out for three consecutive nights. The band members were avid supporters of Napster, promoting it at their shows, playing a Napster show around the time of the Congressional hearings, and attending the hearings themselves. Shawn Fanning, the founder of Napster, is a known Dispatch fan.

Since 2000, many musical artists, particularly those not signed to major labels and without access to traditional mass media outlets such as radio and television, have said that Napster and successive Internet file-sharing networks have helped get their music heard, spread word of mouth, and may have improved their sales in the long term[citation needed]. Although some underground musicians and independent labels have expressed support for Napster and the p2p model it popularized, others have criticized the unregulated and extra-legal nature of these networks, and some seek to implement models of Internet promotion in which they can control the distribution of their own music, such as providing free tracks for download or streaming from their official websites, or co-operating with pay services such as Insound, Rhapsody and Apple's iTunes Store.

Shutdown

Napster's facilitation of transfer of copyrighted material raised the ire of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), which almost immediately — on December 7, 1999 — filed a lawsuit against the popular service.[8][9] The service would only get bigger as the trial, meant to shut down Napster, also gave it a great deal of publicity. Soon millions of users, many of them college students, flocked to it.

After a failed appeal to the Ninth Circuit Court, an injunction was issued on March 5, 2001 ordering Napster to prevent the trading of copyrighted music on its network.[10] In July 2001, Napster shut down its entire network in order to comply with the injunction. On September 24, 2001, the case was partially settled. Napster agreed to pay music creators and copyright owners a $26 million settlement for past, unauthorized uses of music, as well as an advance against future licensing royalties of $10 million. In order to pay those fees, Napster attempted to convert their free service to a subscription system. A prototype solution was tested in the spring of 2002: the Napster 3.0 Alpha, using audio fingerprinting technology licensed from Relatable. Napster 3.0 was, according to many former Napster employees, ready to deploy, but it had significant trouble obtaining licenses to distribute major-label music.

On May 17,2002, Napster announced that its assets would be acquired by German media firm Bertelsmann for $85 million. Pursuant to terms of that agreement, on June 3 Napster filed for Chapter 11 protection under United States bankruptcy laws. On September 3, 2002, an American bankruptcy judge blocked the sale to Bertelsmann and forced Napster to liquidate its assets according to Chapter 7 of the U.S. bankruptcy laws.[11]

Current status

Main article: Napster (pay service)

After a $2.43 million takeover offer by the Private Media Group, an adult entertainment company,[12] Napster's brand and logos were acquired at bankruptcy auction by the company Roxio, Inc. which used them to rebrand the pressplay music service as Napster 2.0.

Napster in popular culture

In the 2003 remake of The Italian Job, a flashback depicts Shawn Fanning (playing himself) stealing the program from a computer expert played by Seth Green while the latter is napping, providing a humorous folk etymology for the name.

The suffix "-ster" has become a popular component of the brand names of many Internet products, suggesting a peer-to-peer model, such as Grokster, Aimster (later Madster), and Blubster. This has also been extended to Friendster, a site which vaguely recalls Napster's community-building features.[13],[14]

An episode of animated television series Futurama, I Dated a Robot, centres on the illegal distribution of robotic celebrity clones over the Internet. The organization responsible for this was thought to be named "Nappster," a reference to Napster. It was later revealed, however, that the full name was "Kidnappster" with a piece of tapestry covering "Kid" from the logo.

In the South Park episode Christian Rock Hard, Stan, Kyle, and Kenny illegally download music from Napster for inspiration for their band 'Moop.' They are then caught by police and shown the horrors music pirating does to musicians. After seeing this, they start a strike and famous musicians/bands join them, among them are Rancid, Master P, Ozzy Osbourne, Meat Loaf (all four also playing in Chef Aid), Blink-182, Horny Toad, Metallica, Britney Spears, Missy Elliott, Alanis Morissette and The Lords of the Underworld (minus Timmy).

In a 2001 episode of the animated Disney series, The Proud Family, Penny becomes addicted to a site named EZ Jackster, a parody of Napster that allows music to be downloaded illegally.

A tribute song to file sharing "Napster and Gnutella" was written to the tune of "Puff, the Magic Dragon" and distributed via OpenNap servers during the lawsuit.

See also

References

  • Carlsson, Bengt and Gustavsson, Rune. 2001. "The Rise and Fall of Napster - An Evolutionary Approach." Proceedings of the 6th International Computer Science Conference on Active Media Technology.
  • Geisler, Markus and Pohlmann, Mali. 2003. "The Social Form of Napster: Cultivating the Paradox of Consumer Emancipation." Advances in Consumer Research.
  • Geisler, Markus and Pohlmann, Mali. 2003. "The Anthropology of File Sharing: Consuming Napster as a Gift." Advances in Consumer Research.
  • Green, Matthew. 2002. "Napster Opens Pandora’s Box: Examining How File-Sharing Services Threaten the Enforcement of Copyright on the Internet." Ohio State Law Journal. 63: 799.
  • InsightExpress. 2000. Napster and its Users Not violating Copyright Infringement Laws, According to a Survey of the Online Community.
  • Ku, Raymond Shih Ray, "The Creative Destruction of Copyright: Napster and the New Economics of Digital Technology" . University of Chicago Law Review, Forthcoming Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=266964. or DOI: 10.2139/ssrn.266964
  • McCourt, Tom and Burkart, Patrick. 2003. "When Creators, Corporations and Consumers Collide: Napster and the Development of On-line Music Distribution." Media, Culture, & Society. 25 (3): 333-350.

Notes

  1. ^ http://www.macobserver.com/article/2000/10/25.2.shtml
  2. ^ Borland, John (June 1, 2000). "Unreleased Madonna Single Slips On To Net". CNET News.com. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  3. ^ Jupiter Media Metrix (July 20, 2001). Global Napster Usage Plummets, But New File-Sharing Alternatives Gaining Ground. Press Release.
  4. ^ 17 U.S.C. A&M Records. Inc. v. Napster. Inc. 114 F. Supp. 2d 896 (N. D. Cal. 2000).
  5. ^ .A&M Records, Inc. v. Napster, Inc., 239 F.3d 1004, 1013, 1020 (9th Cir. 2001).
  6. ^ .A&M Records, Inc. v. Napster, Inc., 239 F.3d 1004 (9th Cir. 2001). For a summary and analysis, see Guy Douglas, Copyright and Peer-To-Peer Music File Sharing: The Napster Case and the Argument Against Legislative Reform http://www.murdoch.edu.au/elaw/issues/v11n1/douglas111.html
  7. ^ Menta, Richard (October 28, 2000). "Did Napster Take Radiohead's New Album to Number 1?". MP3 Newswire. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  8. ^ A & M Records, Inc. v. Napster, Inc., 114 F. Supp. 2d 896 (N.D. Cal. 2000), aff'd in part, rev'd in part, 239 F.3d 1004 (9th Cir. 2001)
  9. ^ Menta, Richard (December 9, 1999). "RIAA Sues Music Startup Napster for $20 Billion". MP3 Newswire. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  10. ^ 2001 US Dist. LEXIS 2186 (N.D. Cal. Mar. 5, 2001), aff’d, 284 F. 3d 1091 (9th Cir. 2002).
  11. ^ Evangelista, Benny (September 4, 2002). "Napster runs out of lives – judge rules against sale". San Francisco Chronicle. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  12. ^ "Porn company offers to buy Napster". CNET News.com. September 12, 2002. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  13. ^ Grimmelmann, James (July 18, 2003). "Blogster". The Laboratorium. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  14. ^ Abrams, Jonathan. SXSW Interactive Keynote Speech. South by Southwest festival. Austin, TX. March 16, 2004.

External links

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