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?
Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
Reader Comments
Subscribe: RSS
View by: Time | Thread
Go for the kill
[ link to this | view in thread ]
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.
[ link to this | view in thread ]