Rick Lockridge: Offer means 'a vastly different Napster'

Rick Lockridge

CNN Technology Correspondent Rick Lockridge has been following the Recording Industry Association of America's lawsuit against the computerized music sharing service Napster as the parties await a federal judge's revised order in the case.

Q: Napster announced yesterday that it would start blocking copyrighted material from its service. It has also offered to charge a fee for downloading music. What will that mean for the case?

LOCKRIDGE: This offer Napster has made may well allow it to remain a free download service, but it will be a vastly different Napster. The pay service cannot go forward unless the record industry agrees to cooperate, and so far it has not agreed to cooperate.

Napster made its offer that it would filter out about a million copyrighted tunes. It asked the music industry to provide a list of copyrighted tunes that it said it wanted to see stopped. The industry provided a list of 5,600 songs. Those are the first tunes that the music industry wants to see Napster stop the sharing of, but it doesn't feel that it's going to be a complete resolution to this issue.

Q: What's the future of Napster under that offer?

LOCKRIDGE: It's not going to be the Napster we know, where you could get just about anything you wanted. The next thing to happen is to see if the judge allows Napster to do it this way that it has proposed.

Since the music industry seems to have no further beef with it, that could mean Napster could stay on life support until they decide what to do with it, whether it can be revived as a viable business. It could end up being just a distribution arm of Bertelsmann (the German conglomerate that bought Napster last year).

The other record companies will have to decide whether Napster's technology makes sense for them as a distribution platform, and maybe not even Bertelsmann will use it ... so Napster becomes another fringe player now, at least for the time being.

Q: Since there are so many alternatives to Napster, is the court order going to address the practice of peer-to-peer file sharing in general?

LOCKRIDGE: That's a good question. This doesn't have anything to do with peer-to-peer file sharing.

The music industry would love to get onto those sites like they did with Napster. Peer-to-peer is a bigger threat to the music industry than Napster was. It's not as easy as Napster, but the people who download music have shown they're highly motivated ... if they start using those technologies it will be much harder to track and prosecute copyright violators.

Q: What are similar services doing as they watch Napster await the judgment?

LOCKRIDGE: The ones we've talked about are aggressively moving forward. However, at the same time they are being very careful not to market themselves as an alternative to Napster.

In fact, iMesh says on its warning page that you should not swap any files for which you do not have the copyright or permission from the copyright holder. However, the makers of these programs know full well the primary use for the programs is to swap music files.

Peer-to-peer does have many legal and very desirable uses, such as computers swapping virus protection back and forth and teachers swapping lesson plans and lesson materials back and forth. So even Napster had some good uses built into it, and in fact the judge was told to protect the free speech rights of people who wanted to share information that could legally be shared.

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Napster
Bertelsmann

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