How many times have we all heard that some innovation or invention is going to "change everything"? The end of this! The end of that! Everything’s going to be different from now on! Really!

Yeah, yeah, blah, blah, blah. We TPCUG members have heard it all, and then some.

And just about then something comes along that really does "change everything." I’m talking not only about the Napster and Gnutella phenomena, but about the very notion that we are rapidly---and I mean really fast---approaching a time when anything which consists of "sensory information" can be virtually limitlessly reproduced and transported, at virtually zero cost. What do I mean by sensory information? You name it: For your eyes, any and all writing including novels, articles, poetry, books of any kind and any type…and any type or kind of picture, film, video, artwork, sculpted representation, etc. For your ears, music, music, and music, not to mention audio books, audio novels, audio poetry, audio-anything. For your taste buds, your nose, and your sense of touch (to round out the five overt senses), we’re not there yet. But we will be, you can bet on it.

Right now the ability to endlessly copy and trade audio recordings is what is driving the death of the music industry. First, a few words of explanation: Napster is a program that can be downloaded from virtually anywhere on the web. When you install it the program will hook you up with a web server named Napster.com which then enables you to "share" for copying all the music (that you specify) on your computer with whomever and wherever in the rest of the world people may be looking for what you might have.

And then there’s the other side: Not only can you share what you have, but everyone else in the world running Napster is similarly sharing all their music files with you. So, you download Napster, crank it up, run a search for whatever you might be interested in, and in a few moments a whole giant list of what you’ve been looking for pops up on your screen, from Napster users all over the world. From there you just specify which ones you want to download. Then, you’ve got the music to use and share as you see fit, with the result that you don’t have to go out and buy $17.95 CD’s anymore (more importantly, our kids don’t have to spend their money that way…and we all know they’re better on computers than we are).

All of which is why the Recording Industry Association of American (RIAA), hard-metal rocker band Metallica, and rapper Dr. DRE are all piling on Napster.com, suing them for zillions of dollars and asking a federal judge to issue an injunction shutting the web site down. Permanently.

Which is where Gnutella comes in. This program is what might be called a "next generation Napster." Except it dispenses with the inconvenience of a central server. Everyone in the world running Gnutella can connect and share music files directly, without any central coordinating location. That is, no location that can be legally attacked and shut down. Um.

The more important implication of Napster and Gnutella type programs is how they extend the notion of "sharing" property which was previously protected and kept sacrosanct for owners and creators (often not the same people, remember) by federal copyright law. The emerging "ebook" industry is already being held back by worries about how Napster-type sharing can be prevented for text-based works of art. I mean, there’s music and there are books, right? And books are made out of paper and ink, right? Not for long. Already the Softbook Reader and Rocket Ebook are on the market. And while they’re primitive and expensive as first generation "electronic readers," the future is quite clear for those who care to contemplate it: Printed and bound paper-and-ink books will soon shrink drastically as a method of transferring written information and eventually may be totally supplanted by electronic text on small, inexpensive, portable reading appliances.

Now. Let’s talk. What about copyright? What about musicians and authors? What about a concept as simple as the right to "private property," i.e. being able to enjoy the fruits of that which is yours. Especially when that property was created by you. That’s what the growing legal, media, and ultimately cultural battle is all about. How can artists hope to be compensated, when as soon as their work is released it becomes instantly available to the entire world for free? Perhaps more importantly, how can we as a society hope to encourage artists and writers and sculptors and playwrights and musicians and poets and other "purveyors of beauty" to work when they may get paid nothing for what they create?

And that’s where the struggle now stands. To the leaders of the "music industry," and plenty of musicians, the kids who invented Napster.com are simply encouraging thievery, threatening an entire industry with wholesale theft. Many of the millions of people who are actively using Napster and Gnutella snarl back that the music industry has been ripping off consumers---not to mention the musicians themselves---for far too long with their overpriced CD’s and cutthroat contracts.

So where should the rest of us come down? If the copyright law is clear, this is just wholesale copyright violation. But wait! The Napster.com kids and lawyers are arguing in court that, first of all, they don’t have any responsibility for what other people do with the program (and even have, ahem, a somewhat disingenuous anti-copyright-violation warning on their web site). And secondly, they argue that the copying and sharing of music files among private citizens, where there’s no money changing hands, isn’t a violation of copyright law anyway! I mean, if you have a record you like, and you copy it and give it to your friend to hear, is that a violation? Or does it come under the copyright exception rubric of "fair use"?

Interestingly enough, the most erudite and thoughtful writings I have seen on the subject have come from two big-time rockers: One from the (in)famous bandleader and widow of grunge rocker Kurt Cobain, Courtney Love, and the other from Grateful Dead confidant and songwriter John Perry Barlow.

First Courtney Love: In a long and very insightful speech she gave just a few weeks ago as a keynote speaker at the Digital Hollywood Conference in New York City, she argued that the Napster phenomenon is a "radical democratization of music," resulting in betterment to both musicians and fans. Citing dismal figures from the recording industry that make it look little better than chattel slavery of musicians, she proclaimed that in fact artists will also ultimately benefit financially from the Napster wave. Said Love, the "real" music pirates are the record companies and the RIAA, who have recently successfully changed federal copyright law so that musicians and bands are little more than "sharecroppers."

Clearly Courtney Love has not endeared herself to either musicians on the other side of the barricades, or the RIAA (which may be one reason she’s involved in a ferocious legal battle with her former recording label, Geffen Records, which maintains it is owed five more albums by Hole, the rock band that Love fronts). Yet if you read the unedited text of Love’s speech, she makes eminent sense. (Which may be why it took me a so long to find an unedited version on the Web: Go now, before it’s too late, and download her speech from http://www.undercover.net.au/rncourtney.html. Read what she has to say yourself.)

The other quite thoughtful and important writing I’ve seen about the Napster phenomenon was written by John Perry Barlow, a former songwriter for The Grateful Dead, co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which exists to lobby the government in favor of the Internet and cyberspace in general. To give you an idea of where Barlow comes down on the issue, his essay begins like this: "I expect most of you are aware that the Recording Industry Association of America has been fighting a desperate struggle against technologies that would end its century-long enslavement and exploitation of musicians. One of these developments is something called Napster.com…."

Barlow, like Love, is an insightful observer of the modern music industry, having been involved in it himself for decades. "The music industry," he observes, "is generally despised by both music-lovers and musicians, to whom they’ve been returning about five percent of the retail value of their works." What will happen? "I’m convinced that the traditional music business is finished," Barlow states. "Napster and other environments like it will polish off the likes of BMG and Tower Records within five years. Personally, I can’t say I’ll miss it. For over a century, it has exploited both musicians and audiences….Whatever models evolve to protect the creation of music, I am not concerned that we will fail to economically support its makers….For some reason, humans absolutely require music, and they were providing for the material needs of musicians for tens of thousands of years before copyright law, just as they will do so for tens of thousands of years after this brief and anomalous period has been forgotten."

You can read Barlow’s entire essay by reading or downloading it (for free!) at http://www.technocrat.net/958163435/index_html.

How will it all play out? Can’t tell now. My guess is that Barlow is right, and the "music industry" will be destroyed, to be replaced by more direct contact between artists and their fans. Perhaps the most straightforward statement came from a friend of mine who lives and works close to a center of the music industry in southern California. When asked about the apparent copyright violation aspect of Napster, he tried to beg off by saying "My stuff is music that’s long out of copyright." But when I pressed him and asked "What about music being downloaded that is still covered by copyright?" he paused, then said "Well, I guess they’ll just have to kiss my ass."

Chalk up one more supporter of Napster.com. u