Napster Wins Stay of Injunction, Allowing It to Remain Online
A WSJ.COM News Roundup
SAN FRANCISCO -- Two federal appeals judges Friday granted
Napster Inc. (www.napster.com) a stay allowing the music-trading service
to remain online in its current form, at least temporarily.
The wildly popular service was facing a midnight PDT (3 a.m. EDT)
deadline for shutting down after a lower-court judge sided with the
recording industry, which claimed Napster allowed users to violate
copyrights.
Napster employees screamed jubilantly at hearing Friday's news from a
two-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, a company
spokeswoman said.
The 11th-hour rescue for the controversial service came two days after
U.S. District Court Judge Marilyn Hall Patel ordered Napster to stop any
Web-site operations that enable copying of music recordings copyrighted
by a group of record companies and songwriters that had sued Napster.
In granting the stay, the appeals judges said "substantial questions" had
been raised about "the merits and form of the injunction."
Infringement of copyright protection of
popular music recordings "was the whole
reason for Napster's existence," Judge Patel of
the U.S. District Court for Northern California
said.
Napster, the dorm-room project of
programmer Shawn Fanning, has grown into an Internet phenomenon with
a million new users a month. Hummer Winblad Venture Partners and other
investors poured in millions, installed a high-powered chief executive and
seasoned music-industry executives, and relegated Mr. Fanning to a
smaller role in the company.
The Recording Industry Association of America sued Napster in
December, accusing it of encouraging an unrestrained, illegal, online
bazaar. Music publishers and the artists Metallica and Dr. Dre also sued
the service.
On Wednesday, Judge Patel rejected Napster lawyer David Boies's
argument that the company's Web site should be allowed to continue to
operate unfettered because it had legitimate uses that didn't involve
copyright infringement. The order didn't affect recordings or music not
owned by the record companies and songwriters that sued Napster, a
closely held San Mateo, Calif., company.
Friday's stay came as tens of thousands of outraged users pledged to
boycott the recording industry in retaliation for its lawsuit and looked for
alternatives.
A 'Mafia'
"The recording industry is a mafia," said Christian Viveros, a 37-year-old
amateur musician from Russells Point, Ohio, encountered in a Napster chat
room. "Too much greed in the world."
On one Web site, more than 60,000 people signed an electronic petition
vowing not to buy music unless the Recording Industry of America drops
its lawsuit against Napster. That would cost the industry nearly $1 million if
each of those people refused to buy just one CD priced at $15.
In a brief filed earlier Friday with the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in
San Francisco, the recording industry had said that giving Napster a
reprieve would "increase dramatically" the harm it has suffered by allowing
continued "massive copyright infringement."
Napster, meanwhile, had advertised a "Buy-Cott," urging users to
purchase the CDs this weekend of artists who have embraced the
file-sharing phenomenon, including Limp Bizkit, Chuck D. and Marianne
Faithful.
As users world-wide held Napster download marathons, developers of
alternatives to Napster's Net-distribution system worked feverishly to
provide their software to people hooked on Internet music trading.
"We're trying to give the people what they've been looking for," said Dale
"Diego" Hayes, a developer of AudioGnome, a Napster clone originally
scheduled to be released in a few weeks.
Racing the Deadline
After Judge Patel's ruling setting the Napster shutdown deadline of
midnight Pacific daylight time Saturday, AudioGnome programmers
accelerated their work.
Their program, which was promised for release sometime Friday, is
designed to do everything Napster does and more, said Mr. Hayes, a
34-year-old Californian who runs a United Kingdom-based Web site
called Naphoria.
But here's the trick: Instead of relying on a centrally located batch of
computer servers like Napster, AudioGnome will rely on some 70
independent servers running a free program called OpenNap. Those
servers are located mostly in the U.S., but are also found in Britain,
Canada, Italy and other countries.
Mr. Hayes said Friday that the numbers of servers had doubled in the past
few weeks and added that he expected them to keep multiplying in a
post-Napster world. |
