Word: napstering
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Harvard's lawyers are preparing a legal analysis of whether to ban Napster from Harvard's network and have contacted computer administrators to discuss the feasibility of such...
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...
...action by Harvard to restrict Napster access at this point would also be premature. The illegality of the service itself has still not been established; the file-sharing software is content-neutral and has significant legal uses. Although U.S. District Judge Marilyn Hall Patel has found Napster to be liable for copyright infringement and issued an injunction against the service, this injunction has been stayed until the appeal can be heard by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals this October. It would be foolish for the University to block access to a service that is currently legal to operate. Should...
...terms of University policy, a Napster ban would set a troubling precedent; as technologies for music- and file-sharing become more advanced and more decentralized, blocking access would require ever more intrusive monitoring of students' electronic activities, reducing the online freedom that students enjoy and have rightly come to expect. Last spring, Dean of the College Harry R. Lewis '68 and Dean of the Faculty Jeremy R. Knowles both indicated that Napster had not caused academic problems among students; until that judgment changes, the University has no reason to take upon itself the role of electronic gatekeeper...