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NAPSTERISM August 10 2000 (Written for Internet Freedom - www.netfreedom.org) The attraction of Napster over competing services has always been its strong brand, with millions more users than its nearest rival. If, as the RIAA hopes, Napster gets shut down, its 22 million fans will scatter and disperse- a huge potential market destroyed. This is, in my opinion, a counter-productive move on the industry's part: many average home users will be driven to the more sinister likes of Gnutella and Freenet, designed from the ground up to enable unstoppable copyright infringement. As Bill Bales of the copyright-friendly media sharing network AppleSoup says, Napster is the "most benign" of peer-to-peer systems- at least from the record labels' point of view - as it boasts a team of lawyers, ex-musos, shareholders and so on. The music business should have capitalised upon the uptake of Napster by supporting the technology, thus removing the incentive for the majority of users to go underground. Groups such as the Performing Rights Society in the UK and ASCAP in the US would in my opinion be perfectly suited to collecting revenues from services such as Napster on behalf of artists and composers. The most obvious method of doing so would be to divide subscription or advertising fees between musicians in proportion to the number of times their material had been served in a given month. But it's not all about tomorrow. New technologies such as those offered by Trymedia and Digital Payloads already enable musicians to be compensated for their work should they so wish. In the case of Trymedia, tracks downloaded from Napster or similar can be played only after the listener's e-mail address or credit card details have been entered; Digital Payloads append advertising to MP3s and share profits with artists. And there are plenty of legitimate industry-endorsed viral-distribution technologies such as InterTrust and Magex's DigiBox, opportunities for which will be damaged as more file-sharing networks are closed down. The artists of the future need a choice of open distribution channels such as Napster to promote their music, for free if they so wish, without traditional record company backing. The Internet allows us to bypass the usual monopolies of distributors, record shops and so on, getting directly to the ear of fans. That the control of Napster and other Internet technologies could potentially be handed over to the RIAA rather than individual music lovers and makers is a great source of disappointment for me. It will undoubtedly reduce my freedom as an artist. Opening briefs in the case are now due on August 18. comment on this article e-mail this to a friend start a discussion 
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