September 01, 2001
Who owns the music? Intellectual property after the Napster controversy
Napster forum: 8pm, September 5, 2001 Glenn Memorial Auditorium 1652 N. Decatur Road. Doors will open at 7:30pm. Parking is available at the Fishburne Deck. No RSVPs necessary.
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The late 1990s saw the advent of online digital music trading, and if any one medium symbolized that brave new world, it was Napster. Created and founded by college dropout Sean Fanning, Napster enabled its users to anonymously swap song files over the internet – free and easy music by any measure.
But controversy soon surrounded the new “killer app.” The huge multinational record labels decried lost profits, even as their bottom lines showed substantial gains. Several artists–most notably Lars Ulrich of Metallica–charged much the same. The lawsuits began, and media publicity followed.
Meanwhile, supporters of Napster claimed that their online music trading was responsible for the record labels’ soaring profits. They held that digital music wants to be free. Artists the likes of Courtney Love hailed file swapping as a long needed counter to the exploitative power record labels have over their signed artists. Unsigned artists began to upload demos of their songs to free music sites like MP3.com, welcoming the new technology as a way to reach new audiences without the support of a major label.
As the ups and downs of the court cases filtered through the news media, many users turned their attention to Napster’s many descendents: Gnutella, Napigator, Scour, and Morpheus. Scour shut down due to legal problems long before music giant Bertelsmann bought out the flailing Napster, and Napigator –which allows Napster users to search for music on several non-Napster file servers – has seen digital traffic jams as Napster users have left en masse. Gnutella has offered a more independent way to trade files – there is no central server that a court could shut down – but it is not nearly as user friendly as its file trading cousins and has been confined to the realms of the tech savvy. Sponsored by MusicCity.com, Morpheus boasts more features than Napster and has fared well to date.
But the proliferation of methods to swap digital music files does nothing to answer the broader ethical questions in the age of MP3s: Who owns the music? Who does file trading harm? Or is it providing a valuable service to artists and audiences alike? Are record labels exploitative? Is file trading an act of civil disobedience or a slacker’s way to a free ride?
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Panelists:
Emory alum Amy Ray, best known as half of the Indigo Girls. owns Atlanta-based independent record label Daemon Records. She released a solo album earlier this year.
Regina Davenport works as Director of Art & Repertoire for Aquemni Records, which is owned by the Atlanta-based hip-hop group Outkast.
Music industry attorney Bobby Rosenbloum works with both musicians and record labels at Greenberg & Traurig. He frequently addresses the ethics of intellectual property.
In a recent edition of Academic Exchange, Emory sociology professor Timothy Dowd compared the current Napster controversy with turn-of-the-century radio and record company conflicts.
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