LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Napster: Music
built 651 days ago
Construing Section 1008 to protect Napster would mean repudiating, rather than preserving, the quid pro quo underlying the Act. On the one hand, Napster would be permitted to facilitate the copying and distribution of copyrighted sound recordings on a scale far surpassing the "home taping" that Congress foresaw when it enacted the AHRA. On the other hand, the products employed by Napster and its users -- computers and their hard drives -- are not subject to royalty payments (by Napster or anyone else) and are not required to be equipped with anti-serial copying circuitry, because the royalty and serial copying provisions of the Act apply only to "digital audio recording devices" and "digital audio recording media," and as shown above, those terms exclude computers and hard drives. 17 U.S.C. §§ 1002(a), 1003(a), 1004; see p. 15 supra. As a result, the music industry would bear the burdens of the statute without receiving the corresponding benefits.
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This week Napster announced their latest flash player to work with the Napster subscription music service. The player itself seems pretty mediocre, but it has a decent price tag—with a catch, of course. The player only has 1 GB of storage space and supports MP3, WMA, WAV, MPEG-4 and JPEG. It includes a FM radio tuner and rechargeable battery capable 35 hours of playback time. It will retail for $120, but if you sign up for a year of Napster To Go service at a ball-busting $14.95 per month, this player can be yours for only $50. Not too bad, really, and a pretty good deal if you actually want to use Napster To Go.
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On April 3, 2007 Napster reported it now had over 830,000 paid subscribers. Press Release. This was because in January 2007, Napster announced the acquisition of AOL Music’s subscription service. They added 350,000 new subscribers, and ... obtained new promotion on AOL's music websites.
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In another new feature, Napster automatically creates a playlist of the last 200 songs you played, and the Napster home page now displays the last three radio stations you selected. In a nod to Yahoo Music Engine, tracks are now encoded at 192Kbps, up from 128Kbps. All files are in WMA DRM format.
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While Napster founder Shawn Fanning was attending Northeastern University in Boston, he wanted an easier method of finding digital music than by searching IRC or Lycos. Using his knowledge of programming, he created the initial version of Napster: A decentralized, easily-distributed program that would allow users to share music and other files directly from peer-to-peer over the internet.
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While shutting down Napster would be irrelevant because users would just switch over to another service, the recording industry didn’t consider that there may be greater evils than Napster’s service. Gnutella and its variants allow users to download all types of media in addition to music. Furthermore, this second generation of peer-to-peer technology was smarter: there were no central servers, and ... no easy target to litigate. The unexpected consequence of forcing Napster to shut down was that programmers wrote better code which would be very hard for the recording industry to stop.
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