Mark Crumpton
Spring 2020
BUS203
Week 4- Research Paper
Napster Case Review
When I read the details of the Digital
Millieum Copyright Act, I immiedtely
thought of the first news report I heard of
people getting arrested to fined for
downloading or sharing music. In early
2000 I lived in Los Angeles, I would often
pass the Napster office on Melrose
Boulevard on my way to Hollywood to shop
and enjoy the ares entertainment.
Commanding the news headlines at the
time, Napster was the prime example of
what ay in store for the users of the
internet and the growing availability of
media content and communication
avenues across the globe.
I wanted to revisit the details of the case
and review it when compared to the
information from this weeks chapter on
Intellectual property and the intentional or
inadvertent sharing of that information
without permission.
In his case review of the Napster Case and its
implications, Professor Kenneth Crews in his work
“Implications for Digital Medial Library” stated
“Members of the music industry brought a lawsuit
against Napster, Inc., alleging copyright infringement,
and in July 2000 the District Court for the Northern
District of California issued a preliminary injunction
against most uses of the plaintiffs’ copyright files.“
The appeals court agreed with Napster that the DMCA
provisions could conceivably apply in this case.
But the court outlined a series of questions that remained
unresolved with respect to the parties’ compliance with the
specific procedures in the code and whether Napster itself
is a service provider within the meaning of the statute. The
appeals court left these questions for the lower court to
resolve at trial—should thi
In the Napster Case...
The essence of a copyright infringement is the use of a work in violation of
one or transmission can constitute a “distribution” of the work.
If each request is a technological means for making a copy and sending it
to an individual elsewhere more of the rights of the copyright owner.
The rights at issue were the owner’s rights to make reproductions of the
work The concept of “file sharing” builds on exactly those activities.
Users of Napster might, for example, purchase a compact disk of a
copyrighted sound recording and duplicate the work into the memory of the
user’s computer. By then connecting to Napster and permitting access to
the personal computer, other users of the system are in effect requesting
the system to make additional copies of the work and to transmit those
copies through the Internet to the requestor’s computer. With each request,
the system makes an additional “reproduc tion,” and the
I researched the details of the case online and found a concise
summary of the details surrounding the Napster case. In,
Implication for Digital Library, the author details the actions
taken by the recording industry to stop Napster from allowing its
users the ability to copy published and protected music and/or
circumvent protection preventing such duplication
The Supreme Court upheld a lower courts decision to find
that Napster was protected by the DCMA and given safe
harbor from various actions by its users, but the cased
remained unresolved as Napster failed to reply to
questions regarding the protections of this law and its
actions regarding protecting copyright material being
distributed.
When looking at this case and the DCMA drafted and
passed by Congress in 1998, the protection as a safe hard
on from actions of users is applicable but the willful and
intentional promotion of its services as an avenue to
circumvent protection sources on copy written material is
debatable. In agree with the outcome of Court and also
the necessity of having the DCMA to protect online
content producers.
Congress enacted the DMCA in October 1998,
and it is a lengthy and complex bill
addressing numerous issues of copyright law
and making many fundamental changes In
the Copyright Act
One of those changes was the addition of
provisions offering a“safe harbor” from
liability for “online serve providers” that
provide access to computer network systems
on which a user may ultimately commit a
copyright infringeme nt. The DMCA holds the
possibility of protecting Napster itself from
liability for the infringements committed by
its users.
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled
on 12 February 2001 that the music filesharing system known as “Napster”
committed repeated infringements of
copyright law as million of users
uploaded and downloaded copright
protected sound recordings.
Works Cited
Retrieved From:
http://variations2.indiana.edu/pdf/AnalysisOfNapsterDecision.p
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