Netizens make grab at Napster service
Users rush for downloads fearing that court could shut site down
Roughly 12,000 of Napster's claimed 57 million users were connected simultaneously to just one of the network's 100-plus servers on Sunday evening. On average, the total number of users on all the company's servers in November was 850,000, according to Net research firm Webnoize.
The Napster faithful fear that today's opinion, to be issued by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals at 11 a.m. PST, may uphold an injunction levied against Napster last July, but vacated just hours after.
If the three-judge appeals court panel reinstates the injunction, Napster will have to shut down, pending the result of a full trial later this year, in which the Recording Industry Assn. of America and the five major label groups will try to demonstrate that the service operates in violation of copyright law.
But the industry isn't hanging all its hopes on the courts. To lend weight to its case on Capitol Hill, the RIAA has called in none other than former senator Bob Dole to help lobby Congress in matters of digital file-sharing that come before the legislature.
Dole is the latest addition to a team that the RIAA has been building for months. Among the top politicos engaged to advance the org's causes are Ed Gillespie, the former communications advisor for George W. Bush's presidential campaign, and Anthony T. Podesta, one of Washington's most powerful media lobbyists.
If the injunction is upheld, Napster will likely have to focus more intently on a planned legal, membership-based alternative service that the company is developing as part of a joint venture with German media conglom Bertelsmann.
Speed up
Bertelsmann topper Thomas Middelhoff said earlier this month that the service would be up and running by this summer, but an injunction on the current network could prompt the partners to speed things up a bit.
If the panel allows Napster to operate until the trial, however, the decision could be seen as lending weight to the company's argument that sharing music files on the Net constitutes a "fair use" of the material under current law.
Either way, Napster's future is far from secure. Presiding over the full trial later this year will be Judge Marilyn Hall Patel -- who issued the initial injunction last year.
And the company's scheme to build a legal alternative reportedly isn't winning any friends among the other four majors, which are keen to pursue their own models for digital music distribution.
(Pamela McClintock in Washington, D.C., and Reuters contributed to this report.)
