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Free-music supporters search for Napster substitute after stoppage

July 19, 2001

It seems the death of Napster as we know it is finally at hand.

Citing problems with its new filtering technology, the free music provider halted all file transfers earlier this month. And a district court decision July 11 ruled file transfers can’t be resumed until Napster achieves 100 percent effectiveness in screening out copyrighted works.

“Napster will obey this order, as we have every order that the court has issued,” a message posted on the official Napster Web site read.

Napster was ordered to start blocking copyrighted songs in early March by U.S. District Judge Marilyn Hall Patel after a lawsuit by the Recording Industry Association of America. The 9th District Court of Appeals asked Patel to revise an earlier injunction that gave the company room to continue its swapping service as long as it took all “reasonable” steps toward blocking copyrighted songs identified by the record companies.

The halt on file transfers came near when Napster was scheduled to inaugurate its new pay-for-music service, announced in June.

Napster Inc. still plans to launch a music subscription service through MusicNet, whose label partners include industry giants AOL Time Warner, Bertelsmann AG and EMI Group Plc.

Napster says the pay service is scheduled to open late this summer.

Sociology sophomore Maya McCoy said she used Napster to create her own CDs when the free service was up and running. But while she reaped the benefits of downloading free mp3s, she said it’s about time people started paying for Napster.

“I think it’s only fair,” McCoy said. “After all, they are ripping off the artists.”

But while McCoy thinks Napster should charge a fee for its services, she said it’s unlikely she’ll be willing to pay for the service in the future. She hasn’t used the program since file filtering began.

And McCoy isn’t the only one. While an average of 220 files were shared per user in February, that number had plummeted to 1.5 by late June, according to a recent report by entertainment research firm Webnoize.

The end of Napster’s free service is long overdue, said MSU music and integrative arts and humanities professor Albert LeBlanc.

“The free service is really something terrible in my opinion because it’s stealing from the little people in the industry - the secretaries, the stock clerks, the backup singers,” he said. “It’s really a gigantic violation of copyright law. I don’t know what took the judge so long to strike it down.”

But LeBlanc also says the commercial music industry hasn’t done enough to compromise with Napster.

“Napster’s not a bunch of saints, but the industry isn’t either,” he said. “The commercial music industry has been so inflexible and unwilling to compromise that they became very frightened when Napster came along. So they set up systems where you can just surf the Internet and download the music legally.

“They could have done that ages ago, but they didn’t until Napster came along.”

Though people can no longer get their free music fix from Napster, some students say they’ll just look to other, smaller transfer sites, such as Aimster.

Similar to Napster, files can be swapped from user to user through Aimster. But Aimster executives claim the program is more protected than Napster because its users can only share files with people designated on instant messaging “buddy lists.”

But LeBlanc said less popular transfer sites are likely to meet the same fate as Napster.

“For similar services to go undetected, they’ll have to be so small that people don’t find out about them,” he said. “But the question is, if the service is so small, how do you know you can trust what you’re downloading from it?”

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