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Something for nothing
How using Napster is comparable to robbery

  Andrew Bissell - Arrow Staff

   "There is no such thing as a free lunch." According to this wise old saw, all economic products must be produced by someone's effort. A free burger at McDonald's isn't really free because someone has to pay the farmer who raised the cattle, the trucker who shipped the meat, and the teenager in the restaurant who cooked it. In essence, you can't get something for nothing. Recently, an internet program known as Napster challenged this idea, and made many of its users believe that stealing the works of artists is not robbery.

   Napster, whose use is very popular among high schoolers and college students, depends on compressed music files called MP3s for its existence. The program allowed its users to log in to a central server, which they could then use to access the hard drives (and, in turn, the MP3s) of other Napster users. By using Napster, one could search for a particular song and the server would respond with a list of users (often numbering in the hundreds) who had that song in their MP3 library. The song could then be downloaded, free of charge, from one of the users on that list. The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) sued Napster, arguing that the free availability of songs on Napster's servers constituted copyright infringement. A federal court rightly ruled in the record companies' favor.

   Now, a small but loud group of Napster users, lawyers, and artists is beginning to voice its indignation at the court-mandated shutdown of the file-sharing system. Their most convincing argument is that Napster helps musicians because it generates interest in their work. In other words, they argue, most Napster users will download a song and buy the CD if they like it. They point to rising CD sales that coincided with increased Napster use as evidence for this claim.

   The fact that CD sales have risen in the past few years, in truth, has no more to do with the widespread use of Napster than increased real estate transactions and automobile and furniture purchases. The healthy economy that the United States enjoyed for the past few years contributed much more to the rise in music purchases than online music file sharing. One need only consider the fact that CD sales actually declined around college campuses, where Napster use is most common, to realize that a general increase in CD sales does not necessarily mean that Napster users are buying more CDs.

   But, Napster-philes argue, movie companies sued Sony to stop their production of VCRs in the early 1980s because they were concerned that their copyrighted material might be duplicated and shared. MP3s, they say, are essentially the same as VHS tapes. There is one fundamental difference, though, between the Sony of the 1980s and the Napster of the 2000s: Sony had no specific knowledge as to which of its customers used its products illegally. Napster knows which of its users engage in illegal file swapping, and does nothing to prevent such offenses.

   Napster is not a device for playing music files; it is a corporation that provides a forum for copying and exchanging such information. If a company established a "movie pool," where users could exchange tapes, copy them, and return the originals, no one would oppose its prosecution for copyright violation. Actively facilitating the duplication of copyrighted materials is and ought to be illegal, whether those materials are stored on VHS tapes or MP3 files.

   The final and most blatantly erroneous argument of Napster users is, to put it simply, "Record companies make too much!" Napster users assert that they are right to bilk companies that charge $17 for CDs that cost them 50 cents to manufacture. Napster users have also been known to break open candy machines to avoid being ripped off by corporate giants like Hershey, and are prone to shoplifting their Nikes, since to do otherwise would only argument the obscene profits of a huge conglomerate.

   It's time Napster users faced the most important fact in this debate: it is the moral right of artists and the record companies charged with distributing their work to receive compensation for their productive efforts. We live in a society of property rights (and that includes intellectual property) because individuals are rightfully entitled to the profits they can secure in exchange for their work. If Napster users feel someone is making too much money and wish to curtail their revenues, they have only one choice, the choice not to buy things from them. Of course, then they would be left without music, and therein lies the catch.

   Napster users want it both ways: they want the music that artists invent and record companies distribute, but they don't want to give either entity a single penny for having provided them with that service. We should all recognize and expose the true nature of the arguments of Napster users, arguments that attempt to rationalize and explain away their true belief - that they should be given something for nothing.