Napster still kicking

"This is disgraceful," fumed San Francisco judge Marilyn Hall Patel yesterday, when faced with evidence of how business continues as usual on the court injunction-bound Napster song-swapping service.

Business, of course, is not quite the word to use, given that Napster makes no money and that most of the songs swapped through it are pirated duplicates of copyright music.

But, regardless, Napster's popularity remains strong and filtering procedures put in place are failing to put the brakes on the violations the website makes so simple to carry out.

Logging on this morning, it was easy to find any tune from this week's chart. Even brand-new singles from well-known artists were there: the soundtrack album for Bridget Jones' Diary is all there for free, as is Janet Jackson's new single, All for You. The latter is on rotation at MTV and is pretty popular on Napster as well; I quickly found dozens of fellow users ready to share the file.

How are they getting round Napster's filtering efforts? Quite easily. The song-swapping service is asking copyright holders to verify they own rights to songs before it puts a simple block on the name of the track. So, look up that Janet Jackson song as "All For You" and nothing will appear. But search for "Janet Jackson" and you'll find hundreds of available files, including lots called "all4you" or "alll4u", or some similar arrangement of characters which makes it quite clear to the human searcher what the file contains, but which foxes Napster's filter.

As you might have guessed by now, Napster has hardly pulled out the technological stops to stop the illegal file-swaps. As Cary Sherman of the Recording Industry Association of America pointed out yesterday, "There are so many things that they aren't doing right now that they could be doing tomorrow." Like applying blocks by artist name, rather than song title.

"Maybe the system needs to be shut down," said Judge Patel in conclusion, but that is essentially already what she is demanding Napster do to itself by blocking all those copyright songs. Of course this turkey is reluctant to vote for Christmas and surely now it is only a question of how - rather than if - Napster as we know it now will simply have the plug pulled on it.

Will that be the end of Napster, or online music piracy? The answer to both questions is most likely: no. Napster's core song-swapping technology has done a great favour for the neanderthal record companies by showing what would work best for them online. Napster has already signed a deal with Bertellsman, the German media conglomerate, to launch a legal version of its service to paying customers. If it works as well as Napster does now (even under injunction), it will be very successful indeed, as the otherwise law-abiding majority of Napster users migrate to doing the honest thing, and others , put off by the moral conundrums of using Napster today, sign up too.

And what of online music piracy? The record companies would be stupid to think that, by stopping Napster, they will stop the music pirates. There are several alternatives to Napster (none, it must be said, with quite the same functionality or ease of use - so far) and we can comfortably predict that songs will continue to be copied and distributed illegally just like, for instance, expensive bits of software like Word and PhotoShop are in various "warez" newsgroups.

But the pirates will eventually return to being, once again, the minority, because most people accept that paying to be allowed to listen to music is a fair way of rewarding artists for their creativity. The only doubt is over exactly when the record companies will get round to allowing us to pay for digital music. Many online music fans will be wishing they would hurry things up by ending the pointless legal wranglings with Napster, and working instead to develop an effective, legal song swapping system.

Email
neil.mcintosh@guardian.co.uk

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