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Much ado has been made recently about Napster, and more specifically the potential for this program to aid and encourage the violation of music copyrights. The most recent manifestation of this is the suit being brought by Dr. Dre against Napster for the distribution of his music. In a bit of irony, Dre is being sued for copyright infringement himself.

First to address the Dre issue: Dr. Dre is being about as hypocritical as anyone I know. His lyrics openly encourage murder, arson, robbery and delinquency in general. For him to get so upset about such a minimal amount of piracy is ridiculous, especially in a time of such enormous music sales. (12% increase over last years in product sales, 20% increase in profit.)

The point, of course, is not to attack Dre’s ethics or the idiocy of his actions. It is to address the overall ignorance of the music industry and point out to them that “hey, it will only get worse.” Right now Napster is a company, with a hierarchy and centralized servers that have access to hundreds of thousands of loyal fans. The result, obviously, is that Napster is also a target for lawsuits. If these lawsuits continue, regardless of their merit, Napster will spend all of its money on legal bills and be forced out of business. This would make the music industry happy, but it would not solve the problem. In fact, the problem would get worse.

Napster is a revolutionary idea, but there is nothing more than mediocre about the program that executes it. Since the idea is now public, it would only be a matter of time before code that emulates Napster pops up. Only next time, there will be no company behind it, no central servers. In short, there will be nothing for the music industry to sue.

The reasonable course of action, therefore, is to alter the way Napster does business. The music industry could feasibly attach advertisements for their songs onto mp3 files, release demos, test new bands, or any number of things that would make them more profitable. The best part is that the network to do this is already in place. You have your backbone; you have your end users. So what’s stopping you?

Stupidity.

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