[WEB4LIB] Re: Napster Question (Was Audio Books Being Shared)

[Jennifer Heise]

> These paragraphs get at the crux of the matter.  I would add that
> among my friends and acquaintances, mostly young folk, they literally
> don't even think about copyright when they copy a video, music tape,
> or CD.  When it is time to copy an article, they only think about the
> printing and/or photocopying expense.  Basically, because fair use
> exists and therefore today's students see free use of materials in
> schools and classrooms, and because reproduction is easier than
> purchase, I firmly believe that anyone under thirty, and plenty of
> folks over thirty, have no knowledge of, belief in, or respect for
> copyright law.  Period.

I don't think that it is fair use and free use of materials that make
people prone to ignore copyright. Copyright is intrinsically a hard
concept to grasp, because unlike other property rights, there's no
clearly visible harm to the person being stolen from or infringed upon.
This is especially true when the 'individual' suffering this intangible
harm is quite visibly someone other than the creator of the material.

When I was a kid, people routinely taped albums, created their own mix
tapes, borrowed albums from one another, taped off the radio, etc. It
would never have occured to them that this was a problem, and if you
challenged such, you would get back a response similar to the old first
sale doctrine: "I bought it, I can do what I want with it."

The key to the current problem is that 'reproduction is easier than
purchase'. If obeying the copyright law were merely a trivial nuisance,
scofflaws would be rarer. However, the current economics of the
publishing industries means that any method of reproduction whatsoever
is a threat to their situation, inasfar as the costs are going up.

> I recently read an article about Napster, I believe it was in Rolling
> Stone, which basically said that most college students no longer buy
> CDs, they just download music. 

>From a CNET article:

"In those stores, SoundScan data shows that record sales have actually
dropped 4 percent in the past two years. In stores near the 67 colleges
that have banned Napster, citing an overload on their internal networks,
sales have dropped 7 percent in two years.  Those numbers compare with
an overall sales growth of about 20 percent across the music retailing
industry."

Hm. 

I'd like to see what the sales in the areas of the 67 colleges look like
in a year. It would be interesting if they continue to drop despite the
absence of Napster, wouldn't it?

-- 
/   Jennifer Heise, Helpdesk/Librarian, Lehigh Univ. Information
Resources
\ \ Fairchild-Martindale Library, 8A Packer Ave, Bethlehem PA 18015 
  / Phone (610) 758-3072          Email: jahb at lehigh.edu

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