Napster stays alive

With Napster's reprieve from a court-ordered shutdown last week, Cal State Long Beach campus opinion was heating up regarding the popular if controversial online music exchange site.

CSULB computer science major and senior Steve Carlson
was happy to see Napster stay online.

"I like the idea of music being free," said Carlson, one of 22 million Napster users worldwide. "I never buy music. You just buy a CD burner and that's about it."

Mint Luanpispong, a graduate student in information systems, echoed Carlson's comments.

"I don't care (about copyright infringement) as long as I can download music for free," Luanpispong said.  "I support Napster."

The two Cal State Long Beach students joined many college students across the country who support Napster in a lawsuit by the recording industry over the exchange of copyrighted music.

Last Wednesday, a federal judge sided with the Recording Industry Association of America and major record labels by ordering a preliminary injunction against Napster to stop allowing users to swap copyrighted songs.

On Friday, the day the shutdown was to occur, Napster received a stay of injunction from a federal court of appeals.  The site will continue until October when the appeals court is expected to make a final ruling on the injunction.

While Napster lawyers and executives have argued free speech rights in defending their site, Craig Smith, CSULB professor and director of the university's Center for First Amendment Studies, said their argument doesn't hold water.

"Copyrights protect creative products," Smith said.  "Since copyrights are mentioned in the Constitution, they have equal status with freedom of speech.

"(Napster's) best bet is to use the case that Sony used in the famous Betamax decision."

In that copyright infringement case, the court held that people were using beta tapes to "move things around for convenience of time," Smith said.

Consumers did not resell what they taped off TV, and neither do Napster users with digital music they download from the Internet today.

In the end, however, Smith believes the recording industry will win in court.

"But Internet users are ingenious enough to make sure there will always be an underground black market," Smith said.  "Napster's mistake was to come up for air."

Napster user and graphic design senior Michael Llaman-llananzares said he worked for a record label and found the recording industry to be "greedy."

"Record executives have big salaries, nice homes, more than what they should have for what they do," Llamanllananzares said.

Llamanllananzares said he believes most artists don't mind their music being traded online, mainly because it can lead to a wider audience.

"New groups especially like it because there are no expenses and no record companies to pay back," he said.

Napster is accessed heavily on campus during the regular school year, mostly by students living in the university dorms, according to Steve La, director of network services for CSULB.

La said the university's computing policy forbids illegal downloading of copyrighted material over its network, including MP3 files. However, the university would only shut off Napster use if it affected other campus Internet services such as e-mail, he said.

"Napster is not the only way for students to download copyrighted music and other materials," La said.  "The only way to prevent it is to shut down the Internet."

Napster is of particular concerns to universities such as CSULB because it is much easier to download the music through the school's Internet connection
than the typical home modem. With the T1 line that CSULB has, users can download files in less than a minute, in comparison to a 56K modem, which can take anywhere from 15 minutes to an hour.

Frank Homsany, custodian and ad sales rep for the Union newspaper, said he sides with the record companies in their lawsuit.

"It's almost like it's stealing their product," Homsany said of Napster.