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Justice sides with recording industry on key issue in Napster court fight
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The federal government sided with the recording industry on a key issue in the industry's landmark copyright court battle with Napster, the popular Internet service in which millions of people trade copyrighted music free of charge. The Justice Department document, filed in a federal appeals court late Friday, says the federal law that Napster has cited as a defense does not protect the service from claims of copyright infringement. A lower court ruled against Napster in July, but a panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco granted a stay, which prevented Napster from having to immediately shut down its song-swapping service.
The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) sued Napster, arguing that the service -- which lets fans swap songs for free by trading MP3 files, a compression format that turns music on compact discs into small computer files -- is really just a high-tech shortcut to music piracy. Justice: New equipment, distribution not coveredIn the government's friend-of-the-court brief, Justice Department lawyers argued that a provision of the Audio Home Recording Act does not protect Napster because the home computer is not a "recording device" as defined in the statute. Napster has insisted that the activities of its users are protected by a provision in the Act, Section 1008, which states consumers may tape musical recordings in their homes for their own use. The government rejected that argument, saying "Section 1008 was adopted to address a very different phenomenon -- the noncommercial consumer use of digital audio recording devices such as DAT tape decks -- to perform home taping of musical recordings." The Justice Department issued a three-point argument: • First, Napster's users are not using any "device" or "medium" specified by the law. • "Second," wrote the Justice Department, "when Napster's users create and store copies of music files on their computers' hard disks, they are not making 'digital musical recordings' as those terms are defined in the Act." • Finally, "... Napster's users are engaged not only in copying musical recordings, but also in distributing such recordings to the public." However, in recent "friends of the court" briefs, the Computer & Communications Industry Association (CCIA), which represents technology giants such as AT&T Corp., Oracle Corp. and Yahoo Inc., said the courts need to reinterpret and revise some of the "overprotective" models for intellectual property protection. Similar briefs filed by several other coalitions expressed concern that the ruling could limit users' rights to enjoy music and media and could impose copyright policing responsibilities on Internet service providers. Appeals court decision not expected for monthsAn estimated 20 million users have swapped songs on the Napster site. On July 26, U.S. District Court Judge Marilyn Hall Patel ordered Napster to shut down entirely or stop allowing its users to trade copyrighted music. Napster's lead attorney, David Boies, who led the government's antitrust case against Microsoft earlier this year, appealed the decision to the 9th Circuit. That court is receiving briefs in the case. Opening arguments are set for early October, but a decision is likely several months away. CNN Justice Department Producer Terry Frieden and Reuters contributed to this report. RELATED STORIES: Report: Napster banned at 34 percent of U.S. colleges RELATED SITES: Napster | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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