So Napster is a dead duck. The jubilation of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) over its success in the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals has brought a whole new interpretation to the term Pyrrhic victory. It also made one wonder what the goons who run the RIAA are on.

Consider what it has achieved. In December 1999, it launched a high-profile lawsuit against a file-sharing service which - however much it may have been a thorn in the RIAA's side - had hitherto been a relatively marginal player on the internet.The main effect of the legal action was to alert millions of kids worldwide to the fact that it was possible (a) to store music files on one's hard disk and (b) to swap same over the net. These discoveries brought hordes of new users to Napster who might otherwise have never heard of the service. When the lawsuit began, the service had less than a million users a month. Since then it has climbed steadily to around 9 million a month and a total subscriber base of around 50 million people.

For most teenagers, Napster was a concept only marginally inferior to sex. Of course the fact that it enabled them to build up collections of free music on their (or their parents') hard disks was a large part of the attraction . But what was also significant was that Napster enabled them to undermine the recording industry's practice of selling music only in album-sized bundles - which forces music fans to shell out for an entire disk even if all they really want is a couple of tracks (for which most of them would be willing to pay). These twin attractions were what made Napster the fastest-growing network in history - from zero to 50 million subscribers in less than two years - a faster growth rate than the web itself.

The RIAA moguls rejoicing that they have finally put a stop to this nonsense seem to have overlooked a few vital points. The first is that the majority of Napster users are (a) music lovers and (b) young. That is to say, they are the prime customers of the aforementioned moguls and their best hope of cashing in their stock options before retirement.

Second, there are now 50 million of these prime customers with music tracks on their hard disks who have acquired the habit of swapping them over the net.

The publicity surrounding the court case has alerted them to the fact that they need not abandon this agreeable practice - they can turn to systems like OpenNap, iMESH or Aimster which do similar things. 'The entire Napster-using public is going to figure out that they don't need Napster to share files,' wrote Eben Moglen, a Columbia University law professor, in Salon. 'The music industry will then discover that the lawsuit was the stupidest part of five years of stupidity. It will discover that this lawsuit fully popularised, publicised, promoted and spurred the development of the very alternative distribution system it was trying to eliminate.'

The RIAA may have succeeded in closing down Napster the company. What then? Are RIAA lawyers going to knock on 50 million doors? 'They've attempted to murder Napster, and they've actually shot themselves in the head,' says Professor Moglen. 'Self-murder or suicide, they're dead either way - it's an untenable business strategy in the long run to be at war with your own customers. But shutting down Napster will give them no one to sue but the listeners. This is one of those rare, but important, situations in which victory in a lawsuit is defeat in the world.' My only concern about calling it a Pyrrhic victory is that old Pyrrhus might sue for defamation.

john.naughton@observer.co.uk
Napster