A student’s project has started a revolution in digital distribution
Edward Hellmore
Shawn Fanning may look like a typical 19- year-old American science student in a T- shirt and a University of Michigan baseball hat, and until last summer – when he unleashed his first ever attempt at writing computer code – he was.
But in a few months, he has gone from being the kind of customer the music business cherishes to the creator of its latest headache.
The program Fanning wrote as a class software project, Napster, lets users turn their computers into servers for the purpose of swapping MP3 music files.
It is remarkably easy to use: just download it from www.napster.com, let it install itself, designate a directory where your files are stored and gain access to an index of millions of songs stored on computers that have already downloaded Napster.
The free service has grown faster than anyone could have imagined. Now transformed into a company based in San Mateo, California, Napster claims its user-base grows between 5% and 25% daily.
By early March some five million people had retrieved the software, and traffic to the service has clogged ser-vers at American universities.
In January, officials at the University of Indiana noticed 20% of the available bandwidth was taken by students leaving Napster on all the time, downloading hundreds of songs; by February that figure was 60% and steps were taken to block the service. Other universities have followed suit.
The music industry is in no mood to work with Napster as the company has suggested.
Since almost everyone uses Napster to swap unauthorised music files, the industry has filed suits against the company, charging that its primary function is to enable and encourage copyright violations and alleging that Napster ”has created and is operating as a haven for music piracy on an unprecedented scale”.
It’slllll goingll to be a difficult case to prove under copyright and property law.
Since no illegally duplicated music actually passes through Napster’s computers (it simply matches up the Internet addresses of the downloader and downloadee), it doesn’t control the files and, its lawyers argue, no law has been broken. Napster is no more than a software program, they say, and since it is essentially powerless to prevent users from trading copyrighted material – as opposed to, say, their own compositions – it should not be held responsible.
”We just put the software out there,” says lawyer John Lynch. ”So the plaintiff has to prove Napster is inducing illegal activity. And inducing is not what they’re really doing.”
Moreover, if the industry, under the umbrella of the Recording Industry Association of America, loses, the only recourse would be to sue Napster’s millions of users, a clearly futile undertaking.
Fanning, a musician himself, claims he envisioned the service would benefit indie bands making their MP3s available for download without going through intermediaries like MP3.com. Though Napster does not store or sell music, like MP3.com it is a means of distribution that is not controlled by the record industry and gives control to consumers.
Elizabeth Brooks, Napster’s vice- president of marketing, says it never intended to go up against the industry.
”We always intended to work with the industry but we simply weren’t allowed to. It wasn’t like, ‘Oh, we don’t know what we’re doing,’ but it was never the goal to get into some kind of battle with the industry.”
Brooks suggests it’s incumbent
on the record industry to take advantage of the new medium.
”The reality is that the availability of digital distribution is going to wreak changes on the industry,” she says. ”It’s here. What do we do? We need to figure out how to make that work.”
But Napster itself lacks a viable business plan and how it will ever earn revenue, let alone profit, from its service is unclear.
There is talk of selling advertising, e- commerce ventures like selling concert tickets, promotional involvement with enlightened record companies, even linking users to record companies.
For the time being, the start-up is being financed by angel investors and venture capital.
It is looking toward an initial public offeringthat would doubtless create a market value in the billions.
Further into the broadband future, Brooks envisions Napster acting as a nexus for video and film distribution.
But as much as Napster might protest shock at being drawn into a fight with the music industry, it has also bought valuable attention.
Not only has it saved the company from the single largest expense of a dot.com start-up – advertising – but the strife only serves to increase its appeal. And the harder the music industry fights, the more users Napster is likely to attract.