BY KARL MILLER
Over the last couple of years, a company called Napster has been one of many trying to make money from the internet.
The company borrowed a few ideas and came up with some software that allowed listeners to share music through its web site. Napster gave the software, the music and the web site access away if you gave it your email, and tried to make money by selling advertising space on its web site and software.
None of these ideas were new, but the time was right. Napster had 20 million registered users by the end of 1999, and uncounted songs available through its servers.
The music industry started to take notice. The industry owners weren't losing any money yet, but they weren't making money out of this new method of distribution: someone else was. Time to take action.
The Recording Industry Association of America is an umbrella organisation of all the major record labels in the United States. It has traditionally been the RIAA's job to ensure that music distribution stays under the control of the big labels, companies like EMI, BMG and Warner Brothers (all members of the World Economic Forum, which will be meeting in Melbourne on September 11-13).
The RIAA has a standard approach to the situation Napster had created: take the new guys to court and round up some music industry "names" to promote the RIAA line to their media outlets (did someone say cross-ownership?).
The RIAA line is that it is on the side of musicians: if it wasn't for the RIAA defending musicians' copyright, pirates would simply distribute all music for free and musicians would never get paid, so they'd never produce any music. What's worse, record companies would go broke!
The RIAA is wrong on several counts. Artistic copyright wasn't around to help Mozart or Shakespeare get paid, but somehow they managed. In fact, artists generally don't own the copyright to their music: the standard contract gives the recording company control of the copyright for 75 years or so. Furthermore, the recording companies own the master copies of the recorded music.
The real care that the RIAA has for music copyright was shown in November 1999 when the RIAA covertly slipped a small change through the US Senate to reclassify musicians working for record companies so that the companies owned the copyrights instead of simply controlling them.
As for the big labels going broke: a recent study showed that Napster users are more likely to buy CDs than non-Napster users. Music industry profits for the 1999-2000 financial year showed that more money was made from selling CDs than ever before.
On that note, the RIAA's major members were sued by 28 US states in February 2000 for price fixing. The five major record labels had got together with three major music retailers, the record labels agreeing to pay for television ads about the retailers, and the retailers agreeing not to drop the prices of top-20 CDs below a certain level. Standard stuff for monopolists, but very little of all that extra profit goes to the musicians the RIAA says it's so concerned about.
The RIAA hasn't been idle in defending the big labels' control over music distribution and profit levels. In the early 1980s, for example, the RIAA prevented a software company from distributing music through Ataris (precursors of Playstation and Nintendo-style game machines).
And the RIAA has already had a couple of scraps with internet-distributed music. The most common format for distributing music on the internet is called MP3. A company called Rio had produced some profitable players that would play MP3 songs. The RIAA took them to court until they agreed to share the profits with RIAA, and made a lot of noise about not using "pirate" music on the MP3 players.
The RIAA has also taken the web site to court to prevent it from distributing music recorded by the labels and some groups like Public Enemy which have tried to distribute its own music using the MP3 format were stopped.
So, will the Napster case be any different? Not if Napster has anything to do with it. It has repeatedly shown that its profits are more important than any users' rights.
For example, when Metallica sued the company — right around the time that the RIAA started its campaign against Napster (what a coincidence!) — Napster quickly agreed to make a list of all those who had downloaded Metallica music through Napster and ban them from the site.
But at the same time, the Napster case has roused many who dislike the hold the major labels have on the music industry. Musicians like the artist formerly known as Prince and Chuck D. from Public Enemy have taken Napster's side in the court case.
Chuck D. writes on his web site: "But the question remains will the corporations that dominate concede to sharing the musical marketplace with another industry parasiting out of its side? ... Many musicians believe direct interaction with fans is the most revolutionary aspect of music on the Web. Instead of being just consumers, the new audience is composed of participants."
And some programmers have taken up the cause as well. Napster's music distribution software was designed so that all the music sharing would go through Napster's site and thus be exposed to the ads that Napster was making money from. The obvious alternative is to write decentralised sharing software that links from user to user with no middle-profiteer. Gnutella is the best-known of many examples of this approach, which is rapidly gaining ground.