A win for intellectual property rights

The federal Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has upheld a trial court's preliminary injunction against Napster's online exchange of copyrighted music and issued a convincing rebuttal of the company's arguments that its members engage in a fair use of copyrighted material. The decision is a major victory for the music record industry, and more broadly for all creators of original material.

The Internet is a revolutionary medium whose long-term benefits we are only beginning to fathom. But that is no reason to allow it to become a duty-free zone where people can plunder the intellectual property of others without paying for it. That would ultimately stifle, rather than encourage, creativity. Reconciling long-established law to new technologies is never easy, but the recognition of an author's ownership in an original creative work is one of our legal system's core principles.

Some Napster fans will undoubtedly migrate to alternative free online music services that are even harder to police, such as those using Gnutella's "peer to peer" model. These allow for direct links between computer users, making it more difficult to establish who is doing the downloading and doing away with the obvious party to hold liable the central server. Outfits like Napster could also set up offshore. Protecting intellectual property rights on the Internet will be a technological and legal challenge. But it is not one our society can shirk.

-- The New York Times