Napster's legal dream team had a rather lengthy response to the recording industry's lawsuit, but the message could be boiled down into two words: Screw you.
In a brief filed in the U.S. District Court's Northern District of California, Napster's lawyers cited the First Amendment, the Audio Home Recording Act, and the 1984 Betamax case in their rebuttal to the recording industry's request for a motion to shut Napster down.
The documents also said that not only does Napster increase CD sales, but consumers also have a "fair use" right to the service.
"The use of the Napster service to sample a song is analogous to visiting a listening station or borrowing a CD from a friend, in order to decide whether to make a purchase," the lawyers from Boies, Schiller & Flexner LLP and Fenwik & West LLP said in documents filed with the court.
The Napster lawyers went on to cite Sony's development of its VAIO Music Clip portable player as a sign that the labels are only interested in shutting down Napster so that the industry can control music distribution on the Internet.
"While Sony Music now claims that Napster is harming the bottom line, Sony Electronics is seeking to profit from the vast number of MP3s currently available on the Internet," said the written document.
Maybe the best part of the document quotes an unnamed member of Metallica –- the heavy metal band suing Napster for copyright violation in a separate legal action –- when informed that their music was being encoded into MP3 files in 1997.
"We don't give a f***," was quoted in written documents filed with the court.
By calling out Sony, those settlement talk rumors between the industry and Napster seem to be long gone. If this is starting to sound a bit like a broken record, that's because not too long ago another outspoken MP3 advocate was taking on the major labels over similar issues.
MP3.com CEO Michael Robertson defended his my.mp3.com service on the grounds that his service was also protected under "fair use."
Robertson's argument, of course, was denied with a judge's terse, three-sentence statement that quite possibly was two sentences too long.
Essentially, what the judge said was, "No, screw you."
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The Last Great Act of Alliance: Not everyone in the digital music industry is being sued. In fact, a group of MP3 sites from four countries are getting together in hopes of creating legal ways to distribute music files while still protecting copyrights.
The MP3 Alliance, made up of MP3.fr (France), MP3.de (Germany), MP3.es (Spain), and MP3.it (Italy), are trying to create the largest one-stop shop for downloads in the world. With access to 20,000 songs from 7,000 artists, the quartet has quite a ways to go from here.
Along with creating the legal flea-market, the consortium will work to develop new technologies for sending MP3 files across wireless networks.
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Music to Your Ears: Now you can become your very own DJ –- and all you need is a cellphone.
Convergent technology company SSEYO announced its new "Concept Phone" which comes with an interactive audio component and Macromedia Flash.
The phone allows several types of sound playback, including the drum synth feature that will let users mix their own music.
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Music to Your Ears, Part II: For those people sick of listening to their audio files without commercial interruption, EverAd has got the solution for you.
EverAd's technology allows content providers to attach audio advertisements to music tracks, insuring that even if you post your latest song to Napster, the poor sap who downloads it will be forced to endure the commercial messages.
The company's new deal with listen.com, a guide to downloadable music on the Internet, makes finding these new ad-laced tracks easy.
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Plastic Houses: Enhanced CDs have not fared well in the market, but the House of Blues' new promotion offers something a bit different. Since less than half of the U.S. population is online, the HOB staff thought up a way to entice its concert-going audience to visit the HOB website.
Customers who attend a live event at any of the HOB's venues will receive a free CD-ROM, which offers a guided tour of the website. The kicker to the promo disk, other than getting a free tour of the site, is that one user a day will receive two all-access passes to the HOB network of clubs.
