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Technology Stocks : Destiny Software (DSNY) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Brad who wrote (328)	8/14/2000 10:22:01 AM
From: DanielleC	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 369

I think it's being pumped on other boards. Look for a selloff here soon. Ran up too quickly.

To: Brad who wrote (328)	8/15/2000 4:12:12 PM
From: CIMA	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 369

Judge Expands on Napster Order thestandard.com Marilyn Hall Patel puts her ruling, which has since been stayed by an appeals court, in writing. By Roger Parloff In a brutal, methodical, 45-page opinion released Friday in the recording industry's case against Napster, Judge Marilyn Hall Patel fortified, caulked and sealed her July 26 oral ruling, which ordered the temporary shutdown of the service. The written ruling, formalizing the one given from the bench, had been expected. (On July 28, an appeals court stepped in to block Patel's preliminary injunction order while it considers the case.) So disdainful was Patel of the centerpiece of Napster's argument – the claim that noncommercial sharing of sound recordings had been legalized by the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992 – that she refused to dignify it with extended discussion. Instead, she dispensed with it in a footnote, the judicial equivalent of scraping something off your shoe. (The act does not apply to copying performed by computer hard drives, she ruled, and the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, whose opinions are binding on Patel, had so held in June 1999.) Worse still for Napster, a key piece of its evidence – a survey concluding that Napster was in fact spurring sales of the plaintiffs' CDs – was found to be ''gravely flawed'' and inadmissible. As Patel explained at greater length in a separate order issued the same day, Napster's expert, Peter Fader, a marketing professor at the University of Pennsylvania, had only ''distantly supervised'' the study and had failed to disclose ''statistical breakdowns of survey respondents and their answers'' so that they could be fairly scrutinized and critiqued. Napster had attacked the RIAA expert's analogous study, which concluded that at least 41 percent of Napster users were buying fewer CDs as a result, because it had only surveyed college students. But Patel concluded that even if the file-swapping service only depressed CD sales among college kids, that was still plenty injurious, since they indisputably represent a significant segment of Napster users. In addition, Patel focused even more attention – as had Judge Jed Rakoff in the record industry's case against MP3.com (MPPP) 's My.MP3.com service – on the impact of the defendant's actions on the record labels' ability to enter into new Internet-related markets. ''Plaintiffs have invested in the digital-downloading market,'' she wrote, ''and ... their business plans are threatened by a service that offers the same product for free.'' The bulk of the ruling hinged, as anticipated, on whether Napster fell within the protection afforded by the U.S. Supreme Court's 1984 landmark ruling in Sony Corporation (SNE) of America v. Universal City Studios. In that case, the court had upheld the manufacture and sale of VCRs, notwithstanding that they would inevitably be used for some infringing purposes, because they were also ''capable of substantial non-infringing uses.'' But as Patel laid out in more convincing detail than ever before, Napster's purported non-infringing uses – distributing, with permission, the music of unknown artists; enabling users to ''sample'' music before buying it in the form of CDs; and allowing users to ''space shift'' their music, by allowing them to access it from any Internet-connected computer – were each ''contrived'' or ''peripheral.''