"Future Shoes" by Michael Finley

If you have been following the Napster controversy, you probably already have an opinion.

If you haven’t been following, here's a recap. Napster is the free mp3 music uploading and downloading software (www.napster.com) that has rocked the recording industry. People with the software can upload and download their favorite tunes from one another, at no cost. With Napster, it's a snap to convert the tunes on a CD to mp3 format, then share them with 1,000 people.

Who likes it? People who enjoy swapping music. At any given moment, about 25,000 people are using the program, passing files back and forth. It's a quick, fun way to build a personal jukebox of songs on your PC, although currently, the people using it seem mostly to have alternative rock (Skinny Puppy), Top 40 (Celine Dion) and golden oldies (The Pretenders). If you’re into jazz, folk, or classical, you will need more people like you to swell the Napster ranks. (Just wait.)

Who doesn’t like it? Just about everyone else.

The Recording Association of America (RCIA) sees Napster as the end of the world -- free music means the collapse of proprietary formats (CDs, cassettes) and profits.
Recording artists who need CD profits to stay alive see it as the straw that breaks their backs, and they ferociously resent the feckless trading of the stuff of their livelihoods. Rockers Metallica and rapper Dr. Dre are suing not just Napster, but the fans who download their songs!
Defenders of copyright law see it as another Internet-driven nail in the coffin of intellectual property rights.
E-commerce music companies like CD-Now and Amazon.com see Napster as cutting into their business.
Employers and colleges are up in arms over the heavy drain Napster puts on network resources. When Napster is up and running, you're usually uploading and downloading eight 3 megabyte-sized songs simultaneously. Everything else on your PC, and on your network or ISP, slows down accordingly.

Then there is Napster itself, which started as just another innocent garage project, but in the space of a year has mutated into a heavily-invested dotcom enterprise. The money people now in charge steadfastly deny any harm to recording artists or companies. All they are doing, they insist, is expediting what music lovers have done since time immemorial -- swapping and copying favorite songs. Musicians didn't complain when people copied cassettes or sold old 45s at tag sales -- how is this noncommercial use any different?

Napster is fun to use but ticklish to defend. Check out the chat rooms at http://www1.napster.com/groundzero/ and you'll be swept away by a tsunami of inventive dorm-room rationalization:

That all musicians are rich, and don’t deserve payment. This overlooks that most musicians work a second job to make ends meet.
That art is its own reward, if you're a good person. I.e., it's your spiritual problem, not my ethical one. Corollary: music isn't work, what I do is work.
That if you were a truly good musician, you’d be making enough money so Napster swaps wouldn’t bother you.
That I'm poor, therefore I deserve free music. If we're entitled by nature to what we want, what don’t we deserve?
That the old distribution models (like, music for money) are outmoded, and should thus be ignored.

This is all very entertaining, but it misses, I think, the true point of Napster. Napster has created a new paradigm even for the Internet. In the past we have thought of our PCs as clients, and the big computers at our ISPs or on our office networks, with all the data on them, as being the servers.

Napster changes all that and makes individual PCs servers. We're not just downloading and uploading to another big computer any more. We're uploading and downloading substantial amounts of data from each other. It short-circuits the entire architecture of the Internet and introduces a host of new issues about security and access.

Napster itself is just a traffic manager. The magic is in the kinds of traffic we will soon be able to manage. It's as radical a new Internet application as e-mail was 25 years ago.

Because if Napster can link 50,000 PCs today transferring data at 56 kbps, swapping copies of "Smells Like Teen Spirit" and "Rainy Night in Georgia," there is no topside limit to what 100 million broadband computers can swap tomorrow. Things we think of today as digital -- text, graphics, music -- are primitive compared to what is coming. We will be beaming entire libraries to one another soon. We can transmit everything we know about ourselves, learn everything there is to know about others, and bypass the big boys to do it.

The mind boggles at this kind of exercise. But we don’t have to know yet what these mega-transmission will be or what they will look like. All we need to know is they can be very big, and we can drop them, like twelve-story buildings, anywhere we want.

The Napster idea will make monsters of us all.