:Why Napster was shut down:
In
spring of 2000, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) along with musical groups such as Metallica heard
about Fanning's Napster service, which at this point only had a few hundred
thousand users (By February 2001, Napster had 50 million users(5)).
The RIAA believed that Napster should be held accountable for copyright infringement
because the service enabled millions of people to share music for free, which
deprives artists of revenue they are entitled to under their copyright.
The biggest issue in this case was how to deal with copyright laws in a new domain: the Internet.
In lower court decisions, Napster was left with broad rules to follow, such as to "block the copying of music" without the RIAA identifying which songs were under copyright. It was also difficult for Napster to identify which songs users were sharing, meaning the site would have to shut down all together unless they could be identified.
"I think the critical point to remember is that Napster is being accused of helping users commit the bad act....The party who drives the getaway car for his bank robber friends surely shouldn't be allowed to skirt liability for bank robbery, right?" says law professor Douglas Lichtman of FindLaw via a chat with CNN.com.
RIAA's lawyers presented documents to the court that came from Napster's business plan. These documents showed that Napster was basically trying to undermind the recording industry.
Quotes from the business documents showed that Napster "wanted to 'unsurp' and 'undermine' the industry, and do business 'unhindered by cumbersome copyright schemes.'
In it's bid to 'seize control of digital distribution,'Napster 'expressly designed a system to make avilable to millions of users unlimited copies of what Napster itself accurately labeled "pirated music,"'RIAA said."(6)
The RIAA further stated that a company
cannot complain that it will be damaged when their business is based on copyright
infringement. Also, Napster was causing extensive harm to the recording industry
because they were not getting paid.(6)
U2's guitarist, The Edge, aka, Dave Evans, spoke with CNN about Napster in the heat of the cases about his predictions.
"If they think Napster's bad, I can tell you there's a lot worse coming," he said. "The software that is untraceable is just around the corner."
Ben Berkowitze, a technology reporter for Inside.com, had his own predictions as well.
"I know for a fact that there
are other systems in development that are being programmed right now and developed,"
he said. "I think (that) even if Napster goes away, the idea of file
sharing will be very, very hard to defeat."(4)
In January 2001, the three-judge panel in the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals
ruled that Napster would be forced to stop its millions of users from downloading
copyrighted files.
"We are delighted that the court has upheld the rights of all artists to protect and control their creative efforts,"
said Metallica in an interview with CNN.(5)
In February of that year, Napster offered a $1 billion settlement to the music industry in exchange for working towards building a file sharing service where users pay a monthly fee to access it. In the past few months, the new paying Napster service has been publicized muchly.