Word: napster
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Attorneys for heavy-metal band Metallica and rap artist Dr. Dre sent a letter to Harvard Sept. 6 asking the University to ban student access to the Napster music-trading service via the campus network. The letter, which carries the implied threat of a lawsuit and requests a reply by Sept. 22, asserts that Harvard has a "moral, ethical, and legal obligation" to block Napster access. Rather than accede to Metallica's demands, Harvard should make clear in its reply the University's commitment to open student access to electronic resources and its refusal to act as an electronic filter...
Metallica and Dr. Dre have been some of the most active musical groups in opposing Napster, whose peer-to-peer system has enabled the large-scale duplication of copyrighted music in compressed MP3 format. Many of Napster's users are students with high-speed Internet access through their universities, and Metallica and Dr. Dre have pursued perceived infringements accordingly: lawsuits filed under federal racketeering statutes against Yale, Indiana University and the University of Southern California were dropped only after those universities banned Napster access. However, those universities acted more for reasons of expediency than fear of legal sanction; a number...
Harvard's network has so far withstood the onslaught, and so long as the bandwidth consumed does not interfere with academic use of the network, access to Napster ought to be maintained. The University does not have a legal obligation to block Napster. As an Internet service provider, Harvard should be protected by federal laws that properly rest responsibility for illegal actions with the user rather than the network owner. The Faculty of Arts and Sciences already prohibits intellectual property violations under its network policy; if Harvard were punished for violations of its own policies, it would feel pressure...
There are those who say the music industry must adapt to a wired world. They point to the decades long rise in CD prices, even as manufacturing costs came down and to data that shows Napster may actually increase sales of CDs by music-hungry customers, as evidence that the music industry is simply afraid of a new technology...
...other camp are those who argue that Napster is nothing more than a tool for the wholesale infringement of intellectual property rights. Artists like Metallica and Dr. Dre argue that users will not be willing to purchase music if they can get it for free on the Internet, and artists will therefore not be properly rewarded for their effort...