Redwood City, Calif. – July 28 – A federal appeals court has granted Napsters
request for an emergency stay to keep the music swapping service operating.
Napster no longer has to pull the plug at midnight, and fans rejoiced.
Long Live Napster! Napster employees screamed jubilantly at hearing a stay had
been issued, a company spokeswoman said. I am happy and grateful that we do not
have to turn away our 20 million users and that we can continue to help
artists, said Napster founder Shawn Fanning. “Well keep working and hoping for
the best.”
In a brief order, two judges from the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said
Napster could stay in business pending a further resolution of its case. The
appeals judges said substantial questions had been raised about “the merits and
form of the injuction.”
The preliminary injunction issued by the district court in this matter is
stayed pending further order of this court, the appellate judges said.
The decision put on hold a Wednesday directive by U.S. District Court Judge
Marilyn Hall Patel that ordered Napster to stop online trading of songs covered
by copyrights owned by a raft of recording industry heavyweights.
Before the stay, tens of thousands of outraged users had pledged to boycott the
recording industry in retaliation for its lawsuit – and looked for alternative
music-sharing programs.
The decision was greeted with glee by users of the wildly popular online music
service, which has attracted some 20 million devotees around the world.
Long Live Napster! A user wrote in one Internet chatroom devoted to the
service. Recording Industry Association of America President Hilary Rosen was
disappointed with the last-minute reprieve but issued a statement saying: “We
remain confident that the court will ultimately affirm once it has had an
opportunity to review the facts and the law.”
“It is frustrating, of course, that the tens of millions of daily infringements
occurring on Napster will be able to continue, at least temporarily,” Rosen
said.
The appellate courts decision could mean a delay of up to several months in
resolving a bitter feud between the Silicon Valley upstart and the giants of
the recording industry, who have charged Napster with facilitating wholesale
piracy of copyrighted material.
“What this means is that the appellate court wants to take a closer look. They
could uphold the district court, or they could overrule the district court,”
said Leonard Rubin, a lawyer specializing in intellectual property rights at
Gordon and Glickson.
“Everything is back up for debate, and it is a very complicated case. It could
be months,” he said.
When Napster attorneys on Thursday asked the court of appeals to stay Patels
injunction, they argued it would bring down the company and force Napster to
lay off its 40 Napster employees within days.
“This would essentially destroy Napster as a business, and deprive the more
than 20 million Napster users of their service,” Napster said in its
motion.
Napster Chief Executive Officer Hank Barry, in response, had asked all 20
million users of the song-swap service to stage a “buycott” and write the
record companies telling them they support their artists.
“Were encouraging users to go out this weekend and buy their favorite albums
and write the labels, telling them Napster users are their most active
customers and want to keep Napster alive,” Barry said.
Patels injuction had been hailed as a major victory for the RIAA, which sued
Napster in December for copyright infringement. But critics said it would do
little to stop fans intent on downloading songs for free.
Indeed, Patels move spurred Napster users to download free music in droves
before the injunction was to take effect.
Other programs, the best known of them Gnutella, work on a distributed network
system. Instead of having central servers maintain a list of available files,
each users computer is in effect a server.
“I have Gnutella and its supposed to be RIAA proof,” wrote one music lover in
a Yahoo chat room.
On one Web site, more than 75,000 people had signed an electronic petition
vowing not to buy music unless the RIAA dropped its lawsuit against Napster.
That would cost the industry more than $1 million if each refused to buy just
one $15 CD.
Other Napster fans attended a Dallas rally organized by an independent hip-hop
record label that supports the song-sharing software.
Both Napster fans and technology experts said this is only the beginning of the
battle over copyrights on the Internet, noting that a number of other file-
swapping software programs such as Gnutella had emerged that could be even more
difficult to police.
