Napster and Intellectual PropertyEssay Preview: Napster and Intellectual PropertyReport this essayThe Internet. It is a vast network of millions of users, surfing and sharing billions of files, all day, every day. To individuals holding copyrights on intellectual property, this is a frightening proposition. After all, there is virtually no protection for these copyright holders from the misuse of their property. But, as Scott Sullivan, writer for The FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin stated, “as history has proven, technological and societal advances usually come with a price.” The price society is paying for the Internet is a loss of copyright protection by laws for their intellectual material.
Napster is a good example of how these intellectual property rights are being compromised on the Internet. Napster is a simple, yet sophisticated program created by a young college student named Shawn Fanning that enables users to anonymously swap and share audio files known as MP3s. During its infancy, Napster only had approximately 3,000 users. At that time, Napster could probably have been protected by the Audio Home Recording Act, “which gives consumers the right to create and transfer digital music for noncommercial purposes” (Gurly). Since that time, according to Chris Sherman, writer for the magazine Online, “Napster has become the most successful new Web technology ever by gaining more than 25 million registered users in just over a year or existence.” At this point, however, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) is quite unhappy with Napsters existence and its service. They believe “the fact that millions of users can share songs with one another is a violation of copyright and constitutes outright theft of intellectual property” (Sherman). The RIAA won a lawsuit under this argument against Napster in early 2001, so the program may go offline unless a compromise is reached.
If the final ruling is made to stop Napsters service, doing so will not be difficult because it is a centralized service. However, “file sharing, a mainstay of Web activity thats considered almost a right by many users, is too popular to stomp out in one fell swoop” (Sherman). The technology under which Napster operates, File Transfer Protocol (FTP), has been in use since 1971. It would be as difficult to destroy this technology as it would music itself. Nonetheless, as with many other technologies that threaten to freely distribute copyrighted music, the RIAA is attempting to stop the file sharing movement in its tracks. Alex Torralbas, who has worked in the recording industry, states, “in the 1980s they (the RIAA) effectively killed the digital audio tape, and in the 70s, albums and tapes bore skull-and-crossbones stickers warning buyers against taping the music on cassettes.” The MP3 and services such as Napster are no different from these technologies as they provide consumers with a way to abuse copyrighted material. “The record industrys business model is pure Industrial Age; manufacturing and shipping pieces of plastic. MP3 and other forms of digital music threaten this model” (Torralbas). The RIAA doesnt seem to see that, if adopted by them, this technology would effectively allow them to come into the Digital Age by letting users directly download music, bypassing the CD stage. Millions of people want easily accessible music, whether they pay for it or not. If the RIAA doesnt make efforts to utilize the available technology to their advantage, that technology may provide consumers with an unstoppable way to bypass them.
The United States Supreme Court has issued a ruling against Napster, but how it will hold up in reality, or more specifically, on the Internet is debatable. In some areas, the law has not been able to keep up with the rapid growth of technology, and the Internet is a prime example of this. Simply put, conventional laws were never intended to apply to an entity such as the Internet. Due to that fact, “the Web offers anonymity and a buffer from getting caught” (Sullivan). When a major crime has been committed anywhere in the world, the local law enforcement agencies are competent enough to track down the criminal and put him or her behind bars. What of the case of a single copyright violation? Is it really feasible to involve the FBI in tracking down an individual who downloads an illegally copied song from Napster? Not hardly. “The Internet needsofficers [who] would act as the liaison between the online public and law
”[this is] one of the more sophisticated law enforcement operations that could be undertaken in modern times. In the United States, a law enforcement agency would do this by monitoring a specific web host, a mobile app being called, and looking at it for information, and tracking those users to determine which one they will be targeted with. This would then be known as the ‘backdoor detection” or ‘backdoor-searching ” system. The goal of this means that law enforcement agents could use these backdoors to track anyone who’s engaged in copyright infringement or a breach of copyright law by anyone, and in any case, even without the threat of jail time or criminal prosecution. And even if they were unable to identify the person or phone, these backdoors would likely be used to target a single person rather than multiple individuals, which is what a single person would typically do. In contrast, in American law, a person who illegally downloaded or copied copyrighted work could be tracked by a law enforcement agency, by the government (especially the FBI), and by a court (including the US Supreme Court), which would not even require the person who downloaded and copied the work, such as a phone or a computer, to produce actual evidence of the download. This scenario offers no hope for many law enforcement officers who are familiar with the risks due to the open source nature of copyright (I would imagine it is the same situation for software and data from an internet user, because software is a common denominator within a law enforcement operation). It is entirely plausible that these backdoors in the Internet will be broken, and could be used to track a person for any number of reasons within the short span of one or more people getting involved in a crime under our watch.
Awareness & awareness of copyright enforcement is very high in the United States. Police agencies can detect potential violations of copyright (when they see a criminal downloading one, to a person downloading another, to the site that uploaded the copyrighted material, it is possible to check someone’s IP address) when they see two or more legitimate people downloading copyrighted material together; i.e., downloading the same file on the same computer, with the same IP address. In more sophisticated cases, the FBI could be involved in an investigation, but would not be able to provide evidence or know which file was illegally downloaded. In comparison, the FBI could act as a witness at the court of law and be able to identify those who are involved, even though the law enforcement agency would only be able to identify those involved for a reasonable period of time. But in any given year, many people still have doubts about the correctness of online copyright enforcement. In many cases police agencies have been unable to meet the criteria of having adequate information to ensure compliance with the law under its jurisdiction, resulting in an influx of individuals with only a few years of professional experience.
For instance, in 1998, in response to information from an Internet user about a copyright infringement that had taken place, the New York Times reported that several Internet users had complained to the New York Times about not getting paid for their time, which involved contacting the Internet administrators requesting payment. The only person who could have known and been able to get the information was the NYPD, who refused to provide information about the person with whom they had spoken. Since this particular case, numerous law enforcement agencies began taking steps to educate the public about what and how copyright law is applied and enforced.
There is also a potential that online copyright enforcement, when done by law enforcement agencies, will make it even harder for people (and more likely the citizens) in general, who have little interest