Napster and the cyber-thieves

Unless you’ve been hiding in a cave in Marpi somewhere–unaware that the war is over–you’re aware of the Napster flap that’s flaring in the states. Napster is a website that enables folks to send each other music over the Internet. As in, commercial music.As in, the same stuff that’s on the CD that you were going to buy at the record store but elected to just download for free at www.napster.com.

If you snare the tunes off the Internet, the musicians who recorded the music get shafted out of their royalties. Of course, so, too, do the CD producers, which is why the litigation has been so hot and heavy.

I’m not one to have much sympathy for the vampires in the mainland’s electronic entertainment industry. They are a tight cabal of some of the nation’s most devious minds. And to the extent that the world wide web is a legitimate challenge to their otherwise unchallenged monopoly on news and entertainment, I say good for the web. Along these lines Matt Drudge, of Drudge report fame, is consequently one of my modern day heros.

But Mr. Drudge isn’t a maggot, a plagiarist, or a copyright thief. Napster, by contrast, is a wholesale scheme to get around legitimate copyrights, and to essentially cheat musicians out of their intellectual property (I guess music is considered intellectual property, I don’t really know).

Napster doesn’t actually have a data bank of the music at issue. It is merely a cyber meeting place–a market place, if you will–where folks can meet and swap their stored tunes via Napster’s site. Since the tunes are for “home use,” and copied from individual to individual (i.e. one guy’s computer to another guy’s computer, via the Internet) Napster lamely claims that it isn’t facilitating copyright infringement.

Sorry, folks, but if you index the songs–as Napster does–and exist solely to exploit a wholesale, international market in under the table copying, you’ve gone far beyond the “home use” schtick of a guy making a “road tunes” cassette copy of his (legally purchased) favorite CD.

Naptser isn’t about freedom of speech. It’s about freedom of conspiracy, and I hope some judge somewhere eventually holds every user of that site personally liable for the royalties and fees they cheated the musicians out of.
Thieves–be they shoplifters, burglars, or intellectual property swipers–are amongst the lowest scum of the earth, and no punishment is too harsh.

Like all enabling technologies, dot.com has empowered the crooks as well as the rest of us. After cars came car thieves. After credit cards, the number thieves. And–natch–after dot.coms, the cyber thieves.

The issue has hit the ink stained wretches of journalism, as well, and the Author’s Guild is hot on the trail of publications that cyber-swipe material they never paid for.

The Feds should use their big hammer on cyber-thieves, and should start sending them to prison along with their low tech, ghetto thief counterparts. In the meantime, we’ll see a lot of nasty litigation flying around, and, hopefully, the courts will not only shut Napster down, but extract payment from everyone who participated in Napster’s dirty deeds.