In a move that may spell the end for Napster, the popular online music-sharing service, three judges of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled yesterday that Napster must prevent its users from exchanging copyrighted materials.
The 58-page ruling, which said that Napster may be held liable for copyright infringement when it does not properly monitor its system, stopped short of ordering an immediate end to the service.
Instead, Napster will be permitted to operate until a lower court revises and narrows the focus of an earlier injunction.
Though Napster's attorney, David Boies, vowed to appeal the decision, Napster users downloaded millions of songs over the weekend in anticipation of an imminent shutdown of the service. Napster serves an estimated 50 millions users, of whom 1.5 million on average are logged on at any given time.
Student reactions to the ruling were universally negative, though many expressed hope that Napster's demise might not represent an end for all forms of online file-sharing.
"It sucks, but I'm sure there are enough computer whizzes out there that will create new programs," Scott Gabbard '03 said. "I see it as a problem now, but it's only a matter of time before someone finds a way to get around it."
Morenike Balogun '03 saw the situation in a similar light. "I'm disappointed but hopeful," she said, adding that "something else will come up for sure to replace it."
Most, though, agreed with the decision on its legal merits. "It was the right decision, based on the law," Hemant Joshi '04 commented.
"I think the record companies had a valid point," said Keith Burdette '03. "They work so hard to market their products, and yet one person can downplay all the work they're doing."
Napster's case had rested on a 1984 Supreme Court ruling, which stated that VCR and videocassete manufacturers were not liable for the actions of people who used the devices to record movies.
In Monday's ruling, however, the judges saw Napster's purpose as a service expressly designed to promote file-sharing as different from that of the VCR manufacturers in the earlier case, and charged Napster of "having knowledge, both actual and constructive, of direct copyright infringement," according to the ruling.
Still, some students thought that the record companies had gone too far in their pursuit of Napster.
"I think it's unfair to punish the people who weren't abusing Napster's service in order to penalize the people who were," said Melana Yanos '04.
Wendy Wong '03 even saw a potential benefit of the service to the record companies. "It's how a lot of people hear about new singers and bands," she said. "I can see where [the companies] are coming from, but if you're a good band, your fans will still want to buy the CD's and go to your concerts and buy your merchandise."
Despite the predictable flood of negative responses from Napster users, little is likely to alter the finality of Monday's ruling, which was applauded by both the record companies -- among them Sony, Warner, BMG, EMI and Universal -- and by the rock band Metallica, which brought its own lawsuit against the service in April of 2000.
Should Napster be shut down, however, it is unlikely to simply disappear: if the service is taken offline, Bertelsmann AG, a German media firm, has pledged to provide capital to convert Napster into a subscription-based service that compensates artists and copyright holders.
