Court Decision Left Out the Key Players: Meet Generation Napster

Today could be the day the music dies. For Napster at least.

The Internet song-sharing site has been ordered by a federal court in San Francisco to shut down by midnight, pending a stay. The preliminary injunction handed down Wednesday was at the request of the Recording Industry Assn. of America, which sued Napster over copyright infringement.

“Pooh!” said my 19-year-old sister when she heard. A student at Kenyon College in Ohio, Kathleen has downloaded hundreds of songs for free from the site. Many of the 20 million Napster users who could be affected by the shutdown are college students like her. The software has been particularly popular on college campuses where computers are typically hooked into high-speed networks, which allow songs to be downloaded in no more than a minute or two.

As much as the RIAA might think otherwise, Napster’s software has not caused my sister to buy fewer CDs; it has encouraged her to buy more. That’s because not all songs on an album are posted on Napster, and the sound quality is inferior. “There were several times I bought CDs online while I was listening to Napster, just because I was thinking about it,” she said.

Most of the songs she and her friends download are by bands just starting out--not by powerhouse acts like Dave Matthews. And certainly not by the heavy metal band Metallica. The music industry could have learned a thing or two from Napster, if it had bothered to try, Kathleen said. “Kids listen to music by song. If the industry could figure out how to charge by song, they could make a lot of money.”

The judge may have spoken, but the party is far from over. In fact, one can almost hear the collective snicker ringing out from Internet chat rooms.

“There is no way this ruling will prevent music-sharing,” my sister said. “As soon as I get back to school, there will be some other software up.”

Today’s teens and 20-somethings are proud of their technological prowess. They feel like they know computers better than the politicians in Washington, D.C., the lawyers in the Napster case, or any adults, for that matter. “We feel invincible,” Kathleen said.

This digital divide evokes the generational politics of the 1960s, when clueless adults tried in vain to rein in a glut of media-savvy kids. And isn’t it ironic that it’s musicians--the messengers of the 1960s youth movement--who are biting back at rebellious youth in the year 2000?

Young people today have been so over-marketed and over-sold, they’ve turned into hardened cynics. One of the defining characteristics of the E-generation is its suspicion of corporate entities, whether it be the Gap, Coca Cola or the RIAA. A huge part of Napster’s appeal is that it had nothing to do with that commercialism. “Everyone knew they were doing something illegal. It was about defying big business--even though we eventually bought the CDs,” my sister said. Song-sharing will go on, whether the courts pull the plug on Napster or not. In the meantime, why should the site and its 19-year-old creator, Shawn Fanning, suffer when it is the participants who are to blame for swapping copyrighted tunes?

“It’s not him,” Kathleen said. “It’s me.”