Today I'll talk about Napster. As usual I'm not very informed on the subject, having picked up a few things as I've gone through the news sites I frequent. I've always associated Napster with rampant music pirating, which is one of its major uses. But it was originally created as a simple file sharing system, much like Apple File Sharing, except over the Internet. And although you can do Apple File Sharing over TCP/IP because Apple licensed Open Door Network's implementation, it is very slow. AppleTalk is quite chatty and building a TCP/IP wrapper around it won't solve it's performance problems. But I digress.

In any case, Napster keeps a centralized database of some kind. People can search for files stored in other people's hard drives, along with that info is a couple of other things I think like the quality of the sound file, the server connection speed and latency. It's a bit MP3 based concidering it's supposed to be a generic file sharing program. There's also a chat function, which makes Napster look a lot like that other annoying file-sharing program used by warez people.

So, Napster allows people to "share" music files and its a centralized system. RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America?) sued Napster because its software is a facilitator for music pirates. Napster says "hey, we're just selling the guns, its up to people to use them responsibly", disregarding the fact that they do have a centralized system where they keep a database of available files and that they know perfectly well what people use Napster for.

Its inevitable that Napster would lose this fight (although they are appealing the decision). I've listened to some discussions by users and some other pro-Napster people. Their arguments seem to be along the lines of "you can't stop it and we're going to find a way to pirate music anyway". "You can't enforce the copyrights, are you going to arrest the 27 million users?"

One of Napster's arguments is that pirates do buy more music than they otherwise would. It's always strange for me to hear this. How do you find out? You can ask people, but how do they know if they'd buy more or not based on having listened to pirated music? Listen to a song, like it and buy the CD. That's what radio has been doing for decades. There's the "I only want one song and if the recording industry had a mechanism for buying the one song then I would do that". Geez, that's what CD singles are for! There are of course songs that aren't played on the radio and in that case probably not on CD singles.

To the previous two arguments I can say "so freaking what?!" To me it's a simple question of copyrights. You can't force people to distribute their works in a way they do not want it distributed, even if the end result helps them. Even if music pirates buy more music than they otherwise would (and I keep phrasing it that way because most pirates still don't buy enough music to cover all the stuff they've pirated and kept), you don't have the right to force that on the copyright holders.

You don't have the right to go to a painter, take his paintings without permission, make a million photocopies, and sell it, giving him most of the profits (minus a small handling charge, which is what Napster is doing, otherwise it's not making money). For the most part you don't have the right to force people to do things (there are exceptions). Doing it for their own good doesn't make it right. It's that "ends justify the means" argument.

As for the "if you can't enforce it, why bother" camp. Once again, justifying your actions by saying "well, they can't catch me" is not a morally or ethically correct stance in my view. As a slight aside, it's strange to me that supposedly moral people think it's ok to set aside those morals if the other side does it first. They're breaking the rules, so that gives us the right to break the rules too. Morality doesn't work that way. You always have to keep your moral and ethical beliefs, no matter what other people do or think. It's your personal convictions and if you're willing to set them aside when provoked then you didn't really believe in them in the first place. Tough stance, but I don't think being ethically right is easy.

So the "it's not enforceable" camp (and they justify it in many ways: record companies are corrupt and milk users for money, I can't afford it and I wouldn't buy it anyway, I'm not hurting anyone) is just as far as I can see, stealing because they can get away with it. We're talking about artists and the rest of the supporting industry who have put in a lot of time and effort and money into creating these works of the mind. They're ideas (but ideas aren't copyrightable), but more than that, they're the expression of their ideas. The artist (or copyright holder) should have the right to say how their works will be distributed (to a certain extent, subject to fair use and such). You're violating other people's rights by pirating, and it's really sad that people can justify that to themselves. I suppose it's one thing to know that you're doing something wrong, it's another thing to do something wrong and not think that you are doing wrong.