The Napster affair has been fascinating to follow. It has important implications for companies trading on the Internet, dealing in information, entertainment, or music. There are commercial, legal, and technological aspects to it, and this makes it relevant to people in all those (increasingly converging) areas of industry. It is global, too, so it involves everyone. Napster itself grew out of an idea to turn everyone’s PC into a small file server, in order to access and pass on online music, peer‐to‐peer. Gnutella grew up as well, with no central server to the network. The 1980s and 1990s saw the online music revolution, and Napster is at the heart of it. Issues there will go on resonating for years to come, as new commercial and legal models evolve.
Alderman writes on new media for Wired and Salon.com, and is culture editor for Wired News. He brings a journalist’s eye to the ins and outs of this affair, capturing the human interest of the people who set things up and fought the lawsuits, bringing suspense and gossip but also a lot of background information and interpretation. He explains how all this came about – the structure of the music industry with the big five (Warner, Universal, Bertelsmann, Sony, and EMI), the role of the Recording Industry Association of America, the growth of independent distribution and Websites which allowed for interaction between musical artists and fans/consumers, and trigger technologies like MP3 for shrinking and disseminating digital music files. All these come together in the widely‐reported Napster trials. The RIAA alleged that Napster was an organization knowingly based on infringement, while Napster retorted that it merely enabled P2P sharing (and when was sharing and swapping defined as infringement?).
There was a David‐and‐Goliath overtone to it: the big conglomerates – Vivendi, Bertelsmann, Sony et al. – and the little guys, free spirits like Shawn Fanning, who started Napster and named it after his nickname, because as a child he had wild hair. It had been widely (and wildly) reported in the media and examined in/on countless e‐mails and bulletin boards. It was (and is) partly a generational thing. Alderman summarizes the 2,000 lawsuits in the USA, ending with the appeal confirmation of the Patel injunction on Napster. But that’s not where things end. New partnerships (Napster and Bertelsmann), new subscription models, and the unpredictable innovations of the marketplace led by consumer demand, promise further developments. Alderman is right to end by asking us to consider whether any Internet service can fully balance business, legal, consumer, and social interests. He takes no sides, and at a readably competent journalistic level, provides a useful and topical insight into one of the most fascinating tangles in modern music.
