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 in July. And a district court decision July 11 ruled file transfers cant 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 debut 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 its about time people started paying for Napster.
I think its only fair, McCoy said. After all, they are ripping off the artists.
Although McCoy thinks Napster should charge a fee for its services, she also said its unlikely shell be willing to pay for the service in the future. She hasnt used the program since file filtering began.
And McCoy isnt 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 Napsters 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 its stealing from the little people in the industry - the secretaries, the stock clerks, the backup singers, he said. Its really a gigantic violation of copyright law. I dont know what took the judge so long to strike it down.
But LeBlanc also says the commercial music industry hasnt done enough to compromise with Napster.
Napsters not a bunch of saints, but the industry isnt 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 didnt until Napster came along.
Though people can no longer get their free music fix from Napster, some students say theyll 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.
LeBlanc said less popular transfer sites are likely to meet the same fate as Napster.
For similar services to go undetected, theyll have to be so small that people dont find out about them, he said. But the question is, if the service is so small, how do you know you can trust what youre downloading from it?