Judge Issues Injunction In Napster Case
from the watch-the-RIAA-gloat dept
So, as everyone expected the judge in the Napster case has finally handed down the injunction. This doesn't really change anything since Napster already started blocking songs over the weekend. The question, however, is how the RIAA will respond. Already in the article you can see Hilary Rosen gloating over the victory. Now, how are they going to respond when songs slip through the Napster filters? Are they going to be understanding or are they going to keep going for the total kill?
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Go for the kill
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Future of Napster
Now the court has ruled that they do need to behave like an ISP at least in the sense that they must shut down any obvious copyright infringement. What that means is that it's no longer a place to avoid the scrutiny of copyright holders. In the long run I'd expect it to be as hard to find a copyrighted song on Napster as it is to find it on a warez ftp site. (That's not to say the files won't be there; the swapping will just have to go underground behind obfuscated names, secret passwords, etc. All the RIAA has to do is just to push the swapping scene far enough into a niche that mainstream users can't figure it out any more.)
Whether Napster survives depends on whether there's any legitimate traffic left, and whether the advantages of their P2P model, if any, are enough to justify its continued use for legal reasons.
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