I am definitely stuck in a time warp,
as far as music is concerned.
There is some new music I listen to (but I admit I haven't bought a CD in years).
I'm not so sure your analogy is accurate: But the difference is you are not taking your friend's B52 album home and copying it with 50 cassette recorders going 24/7
As far as I can tell, neither is Napster....or any Napster user.
As you may know, Napster itself does not possess or store any of the music on its own servers, nor does it do the copying. I'm no techie, but I understand that Napster is simply an "enabler," allowing two users to swap music. These users are also not making multiple copies of the same song, as there is no need to. So there is no one person or company making 50 copies of "Freebird" every day, but rather there are 50 individuals around the world each making his own copy from many other individual user's copies. The only difference between that and making copies via cassette tape is that with Napster we are able to track the volume of copies made......and music industry executives can get a printout and see exactly how much money they've been losing all of this time.
I like the idea of adding a surcharge to tapes to pay for copyright infringement. Of course, the fact that the tax is there is evidence that movie studios once considered taping to be an infringement....and a compromise was reached. It is the same with Napster, in my opinion. In fact, I believe that Napster is currently trying to negotiate some kind of similar surcharge from users for the same purpose.
P.S. If you have never used Napster before (and assuming it is still working), it is really amazing to be able to think of some obscure song that you haven't heard in twenty years, and within seconds to be listening to it. That "Dead Puppies" song is a good example. I never would have gone into a record store to try and find the album. I don't even know who sang it. I probably would never have heard the song again if not for deciding to try Napster to see what the fuss was all about. |
