NAPSTER...

[Hellekin O Wolf]

[J'ai reçu ça de John Perry Barlow, co-fondateur de l'EFF]


NAPSTER.COM AND THE DEATH OF THE MUSIC INDUSTRY


I expect most of you are aware that the Recording Industry 
Association of America has been fighting a desperate struggle against 
technologies that would end its century-long enslavement and 
exploitation of musicians. One of these developments is something 
called Napster.com, a system that indexes and makes available digital 
music files that are stored on the private hard disks of its 
subscribers.

About a month ago, the New York Times asked me to write an editorial 
about Napster and the general state of copyright in the world of 
music. I jumped at the chance and only after nine drafts and a lot of 
nocturnal hair-tearing did I realize how impossible it would be to 
both describe the situation in sufficient detail and comment on it in 
no more than 700 words. I eventually gave up, but I did write 
something that I would like to pass on to you, in the interest of 
stimulating your thoughts on the subject. (If it resonates, feel free 
to pass it further on.)

Of course, things have been moving very rapidly. In the time since I 
wrote this piece, something called Gnutella has emerged. Gnutella is 
a distributed indexing system for any kind of on-line content. The 
fact that it has no central server nor identifiable individual in 
charge means that it can't be shut down or sued.

Furthermore, I heard today of another development called Freenet. 
Freenet, the work of a 23 year old Irish copyright anarchist named 
Ian Clarke, is a system that makes it possible to exchange any 
copyrighted material anonymously. Freenet would also make the storage 
location(s) of the material impossible to locate, thus frustrating 
such efforts as Metallica's current crack-down on Napster subscribers 
who have stored their songs.

(You gotta love Metallica. There were a pain in the ass to their 
parents. Now they're going to be a pain in the ass to their kids.)

There's plenty of action in this zone, and since one of my current 
missions in life is to kill the music business and midwife the birth 
of the musician business and audience business, I'm keeping plenty 
busy.

In any event, here's what I had to say about it a month ago:


NAPSTER'S ENORMOUS MUSIC ROOM
An Op-Ed Piece for the New York Times
By John Perry Barlow


Last fall, an obscure 19 year old student named Shawn Fanning quietly 
inflicted the wound that I believe will eventually kill the music 
business as we know it. He set up a Web site called Napster.com.

Of  course, the recording industry, like other traditional 
publication media, was already suffering a likely terminal illness. 
Because of the Internet, almost any informational product can be 
infinitely reproduced and instantaneously distributed all over the 
planet without cost. This obsoletes the material containers 
previously necessary for information transport as well as most of the 
industries that manufactured them. The biggest remaining obstacle to 
this free flow of digital liquid is legal, not practical.

But so far this impediment - copyright law - has been sufficient to 
make most of  the 20th Century's best musical creations and 
performances very hard to find online. Nearly all of this material 
has been commercially released and is therefore in the white-knuckled 
grip of the companies that recorded it. Commercial MP3 sites are too 
visible to risk legal assault by copyright patrols from the RIAA (or 
Recording Industry Association of America.), so they traffic mostly 
in recent or insignificant works.

But Fanning realized there is a lot more digitized music in 
Cyberspace than one might think. This is because millions of ordinary 
listeners have converted portions of their purchased music 
collections into the MP3 format and copied them onto their hard 
drives. He further realized that many of these personal hard disks 
are continuously connected to the Internet, generally because their 
owners, mostly students, hold accounts on academic networks.

Fanning also knew that people have an old and deep impulse to share 
music with one another, so, in essence, he designed an immense and 
growing virtual space, Napster.com, where they could do so. Napster 
creates a vast community of folks who can play music directly from 
one another's PC's, rather as they might play one of their roommate's 
CD's on the stereo in their dorm room.

But of course, in this environment, what can be played can also be 
copied. When I reach through Napster to the hard disk of some kid in 
Ohio and grab his copy of, say, Cassidy by the Grateful Dead, I can 
also place it on my hard disk as I listen to it.

It is this characteristic of Napster that so haunts the RIAA . They 
believe that making this copy is as clear a case of theft as if I'd 
shop-lifted a CD from Walmart..

But what is being "stolen?" And from whom? Speaking as the fellow who 
co-wrote Cassidy, I don't believe that the kid in Ohio is injuring my 
economic interests by sharing it with others. Deadheads have been 
sharing our songs with each other for decades and it's done nothing 
but increase the demand for our work.

Of course, the RIAA takes a very different view and has lately been 
laboring by means, both legal and technical, to eliminate fair use, 
requiring payment to be made every time someone hears the music they 
claim to own. They regard Napster to be a global thief's bazaar.

But what can they do about it? Nothing, I'd say. Napster is legally 
safe from them because no copyrighted material is actually stored 
there. Nor is there any practical way to prosecute the burgeoning 
multitudes who have already made over 380, 000 musical pieces 
available there.

Appeals based on moral principles will avail them little. Cyberspace 
is and always has been a "gift economy" where sharing is considered a 
virtue, not a crime. The music industry is generally despised by both 
music-lovers and musicians, to whom they've been returning about five 
percent of the retail value of their works.

Further, most musicians agree with Public Enemy rapster Chuck D, who 
recently said that the recording industry's legal assertion that they 
own the music they distribute is as senseless as would be a claim by 
Federal Express that they should own the contents of the packages 
they ship.

Also, from an economic standpoint, many musicians have discovered, as 
the Grateful Dead did, that the best way to make money from music is 
to give it away. While scarcity may increase the value of physical 
goods, such as CD's, the opposite applies to information. In a 
dematerialized information economy, there is an equally strong 
relationship between familiarity and value. If your work is good, 
allowing what you've done to self-replicate freely increases demand 
for what you haven't done yet, whether by live performances or by 
charging online for the download of new work.

For these, and far more reasons than I can state here, I'm convinced 
that the traditional music business is finished. Napster and other 
environments like it will polish off the likes of BMG and Tower 
Records within five years.

Personally, I can't say I'll miss it. For over a century, it has 
exploited both musicians and audiences. By its proprietary practices 
and crass insistence on mass appeal, it has desertified the ecology 
of auditory epiphany, impoverished genius, fattened lawyers, turned 
plastic into gold, and offered gilded plastic in return.

Music expresses the soul of a society. It is perhaps the most 
singularly human activity of our peculiar species, since, unlike the 
rest of our major endeavors, it doesn't support our physical 
survival. But the 20th Century music business has transformed the 
deepest currents of our culture into mere currency.

To be fair, I will confess that it had its purposes and time. Without 
the record industry, I would never have heard The Rolling Stones, 
Stockhausen, Handel, Billy Holiday, Bob Dylan, Robert Johnson, Ravi 
Shankar, or Balinese Monkey Chants. Nor, more importantly, would they 
have been able to hear - and thus build upon - each other.

I also recognize that some percentage of those who work in it appear 
to be human beings. As a former cattle rancher, I feel a pang of 
compassion at their economic demise. But history is littered with 
such casualties. The people who worked in them found other jobs.

The graceful industries go down gently when they've outlived their 
utility, but doesn't appear that this one is going to. They appear 
prepared to bury with themselves an entire epoch of music under a 
thick crust of copyright law, leaving a century-sized hole in the 
history of music.

We can't allow this to happen. If it does, it will cause the 
still-birth of what is presently gestating on Napster.com: the 
musician business. (And even, with luck, something one might call the 
audience business.)

In Napster's enormous room, music will arise in spontaneous and 
global abundance in the space between creators and listeners so 
interactively that it will be hard to tell which is which. No longer 
will we mistake music for a noun, as its containers have tempted us 
to do for a century. We will realize once more that music is a verb, 
a relationship, a constantly evolving life form.

But you can't own verbs, nor relationships, nor divine gifts. 
Whatever the current legalities, I personally find defining "my" 
songs to be a form of property to be as philosophically audacious and 
as impractical as would be a claim that I own "my" daughters, another 
blessing that just happened to pass into the world through me..

As with my daughters, I want to exercise some control over what 
happens to the songs for which I was the mere conduit. I don't want 
them to be altered, abused, exploited, or used by others for their 
own commercial purposes. Developing the proper legal and ethical 
instruments to assure me that ability will be tricky. But more than 
control, I want my songs, like my daughters, to be free to roam the 
world and be loved by as many as can appreciate their occasional 
beauty.

Whatever models evolve to protect the creation of music, I am not 
concerned that we will fail to economically support its makers after 
we quit calling it property. For some reason, humans absolutely 
require music, and they were providing for the material needs of 
musicians for tens of thousands of years before copyright law, just 
as they will do so for tens of thousands of years after this brief 
and anomalous period has been forgotten.