A rchive Date
[ 04-07-2000 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Napster ]
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[Napster will change its tack in court
It will say its users' song sharing is legal Los Angeles Times
July 3, 2000, 9:31PM
Napster, whose song-swapping software is reshaping the music industry, insists that pulling music off the Internet for personal use and not paying for it is legal.
That position was detailed in a rebuttal filed Monday in U.S. District Court in San Francisco to a recording industry lawsuit. Napster asserts that what its members do - sharing with each other their own copies of copyrighted materials - is as legal as people using a VCR to watch a borrowed movie.
The recording industry suit has charged the company with creating an illegal online marketplace for bootlegged music. Napster's defense, outlined for the first time, is an aggressive gamble and a strong shift in legal strategy.
The man behind the change is Napster's lead attorney, David Boies, most recently known for his success as the chief litigator in the government's antitrust suit against Microsoft Corp.
Boies dismissed the Recording Industry Association of America suit as a misuse of copyright law and a misunderstanding of the fact that Napster can increase rather than diminish record sales.
"It's the kind of new technology that can threaten the economic control of a dominant trade association based on the existing technology, and the RIAA is trying very fast to catch up and shut down Napster until they can dominate," Boies said a news conference.
Legal experts are calling the Napster suit one of the first great battles over intellectual property rights in the digital age and are closely watching the case. The first hearing in the suit will be July 26. The case is not expected to go to trial until later this year.
Recently, the RIAA filed a motion for a preliminary injunction against Napster, seeking to remove all the songs owned by the trade group's members from Napster's song directories. If the injunction is granted, Napster would essentially be shut down because the bulk of the material downloaded by Napster users is by mainstream artists.
But technology experts insist that, even if Napster loses in court, fans of its service will continue to swap pirated songs, thanks to a bounty of Napster-inspired copycats flourishing on the Web. More than 10 million people have downloaded Napster's free software, which allows users to scour each others' computers in search of digital music.
Napster's technology acts as a means for users to find each other and exchange music. It does not store copies of the audio files on its own computer system. Initially, Napster sought protection in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which blocks some Internet service providers from liability for the illegal acts of their subscribers.
But Federal Judge Marilyn Hall Patel ruled in May that Napster was not an ISP, and therefore did not qualify for such legal safe-harbor. So the case will hinge on whether Napster users themselves are violating copyright law by using the company's software, said Boies.
"If they are not, then we are not," Boies said. "A person who shares with a friend is protected" by federal law.
Not everyone agrees with that logic - especially not the record labels.
Contending that Napster is making it easy to steal tunes, the RIAA and the National Music Publishers Association filed suit against the company late last year in U.S. District Court in San Francisco. ]
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