The record labels' only hope was to lose this court battle. Now that they've won, they've really lost.

To understand this paradox, you'll need to ponder with me the implications of a front-page article in the Wall Street Journal Wednesday. "When Its Own Assets Are Involved," the headline declared, "Napster is No Fan of Sharing." The story tried to tar Napster as a hypocritical company -- for on the one hand promoting the free-for-all sharing of music files online but on the other resorting to old-fashioned corporate bullying when it comes to protecting its own copyrights and software code.

The big problem with the Journal piece -- and with much of the media coverage of the Napster saga -- is that it confuses Napster the company with Napster the phenomenon.

You already know what Napster the phenomenon is: A program that helps Net users find and download music files from one another's computers. In the short months since its debut last fall, Napster has become both a revolutionary banner for anti-establishment music lovers and a lightning rod for media-corporation paranoia over piracy and copyright infringement.

Napster the company is something different, more prosaic: It's a venture capital-backed Silicon Valley start-up with a lawyer at its helm. It hopes, somehow, eventually, to make big money from Napster the phenomenon. Those hopes look darker after today's ruling.

Here's the problem for the record labels and their trade group, the RIAA: Napster the company is an institution they could cut a deal with if they so desired. It's a legal entity; it runs a relatively small group of servers that can be shut down; it has incentives to reach a compromise with the recording industry.

Napster the phenomenon is something else entirely. It's not a corporation -- it's an idea. Napster Inc. could disappear off the face of the Earth tomorrow and it wouldn't matter. Think of what happened to Netscape; the company lost its fight but the company's idea -- the Web browser -- took over the Net. The idea of Napster -- of "peer to peer" software that lets individual Internet users trade music files (and other files) with one another -- lives in millions of minds. And the Internet itself gives those minds ample opportunity to keep the idea going.

Already, projects like Gnutella and Freenet are beginning to provide Napster-like functions with one key difference: There's no central server, and thus no one to sue. Napigator lets users find Napster servers that aren't run by Napster Inc. Over at Opennap, open-source programmers are developing free, Napster-like software for every computing platform under the sun. On the open Net, a thousand new Napsters are blooming.

And what will be the impact of the court-ordered shutdown of Napster? These projects -- small, underground efforts that grew unnoticed in the shadow of Napster the company -- will be flooded with energy. Users will flock to them, and talented software hackers will work overtime to perfect them.

From the recording industry's point of view, it is slaying one enemy only to seed the field with a thousand new opponents -- opponents who are, not incidentally, its own best customers.

The Free Software Project
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