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OPEN LETTER TO THE PRS October 20 2000 pages 1 2 The PRS (Performing Rights Society) represents songwriters and composers, collecting royalties on their behalf from radio and TV stations, venues, jukeboxes and other locations in which music is played. The PRS this month published a report on Napster entitled "This program completed an illegal operation and will be shutdown". I have written the following letter in response to one of the pieces in its feature, written by Alistair Davies of Briffa Solicitors: "Napster, the internet web site that allowed browsers to enter the hard drives of other users and download music..." "it was the infringing use of the music available which lured users to the site". "why then is there talk of the site closing down" I would first like to point out the simple factual inaccuracy of Alistair Davies' repeated description of Napster's service as a "web site". While Napster does have a web site, there is little on the site's few pages that has caused any legal controversy. Napster the company should more properly be referred to as a software firm or, at a stretch, an Internet service provider; it is in fact the Napster software application which stands at the heart of the recent debate. This is not mere pedantry on my part; instead I would argue that an inability to distinguish between these two definitions is fundamental to the music industry's general lack of understanding regarding Napster and MP3-trading. Napster itself is not aggregating music, storing it and serving the songs from a webspace or site. Hence why the company is being sued for vicarious rather than direct copyright infringement. It is Napster's users that are "pirating" copyrighted works; Napster, like Yahoo or the Yellow Pages, provides the directory required for users to rendezvous and navigate each others' hard drives to find the tracks they wish to download. I agree that Napster should provide artists and composers with the ability to opt out by requesting that their works be blocked from the directory; indeed I predict that the outcome of the current court case will involve such a ruling. And I believe that Napster the company has misled the courts by claiming that it would be impossible to bar the majority of major-label downloads from its system. But calls to close Napster down completely are misguided and, ultimately, would be counter-productive. For our answers we should be looking not to Napster's whizzkid programmers and venture capitalists but to its users - by the last count estimated to be 32 million registrants, of whom nearly 7 million are regular downloaders each month (source: MediaMetrix). Around 1 billion files were transferred in the month of August, meaning that the average Napster fan is grabbing over 120 tracks each month. By downloading from Napster, users are expressing a clear consumer preference: that CDs are too expensive, that they prefer individual songs over filler-bloated albums and - most importantly - that they demand a central online repository from which every track in the history of music can quicky and easily be accessed. One of the most interesting aspects to Napster in my view is that it does not offer top chart hits alone. Users are swapping obscure independent music, comedy tracks, home-made remixes, TV themes and sound effects, of which few would be accepted through the usual A&R filtering process and even fewer are available in record stores. comment on this article e-mail this to a friend start a discussion 
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