A judgment in a California appeals court about the Napster file-sharing website could have widespread effects on the future of the internet. Like the efforts of the pharmaceuticals to suppress cheap competition, reported in the Guardian this week, and US companies trying to profit from discovery of the map of the genome, it is all about corporations exploiting intellectual property rights.
Napster is an ingenious piece of software that enables users to swap files from the hard disks of their computers. If you want, say, a rare Frank Sinatra track, you type it into Napster's search facility. It scours member-computers all over the world and comes up with a list of available recordings, ready to be downloaded for nothing. It was last year's unexpected Big Thing on the internet and over 50m people have now downloaded the software.
At one level, as when people swap rare recordings long since out of production, it is harmless. But what worries the companies is that no one will buy CDs in the shops if they can download recent recordings from Napster or its imitators. Most of these are much safer from the law because, unlike Napster, they do not use a central computer. They go straight from one hard drive to another.
In principle the ability to swap files instantly with anyone is one of the finest achievements of the internet's mutual principles. But clearly artists, whether film makers or musicians, deserve royalties for their work. A recent survey found that 70% of Napster's users would be willing to pay something. The question is to whom.
The Californian case was brought by the five biggest record labels, who control about 90% of popular music. The prospect of such awesome market power trying to squash a fledgling company is one reason why so many users feel it is fair game to copy files to each other. They would not mind if more modest royalties went mainly to the users, rather than to intermediaries who make money from controlling the intellectual property rights of performers.
Interestingly, this so called peer-to-peer technology still offers a genuine chance of legally cutting out intermediaries. The first person to devise a globally acceptable way for artists to get a direct royalty from music and other files swapped over the net will open up a new, cheaper era for the music industry - but it will not necessarily include the big five. No wonder they are treating this case as a fight to the death.
