Digital Hits and Misses.

Thanks to an online service called Napster, downloading free music is easier than ever, but that doesn't make it any more legal

When the local alternative rock station in Eugene, Oregon, listed the 300 top songs of the millennium last December, college freshman Adam Campbell decided it would be nice to own the entire collection. Two hours later, using the fast Internet connection in his University of Oregon dorm room and a new online service called Tapster, Campbell had retrieved 275 of the tunes--free. They sit nestled on his computer hard drive, along with 800 or so other songs he has accumulated the same way. "That's three days of continuous music," he says with pride.

The music industry is already disturbed about how easy it is to copy music via the Internet without paying for it. But in recent months Tapster has greatly magnified the threat. Acting like a music search engine, the software makes it easier to find and copy a far wider array of music. It also makes it easier for individuals to offer their own music collections to others. About a million people use the service every day, despite the distinct possibility that downloading music that's been copyrighted could be considered theft.

"There's an incredible disconnect out there between what is normal behavior in the physical world versus the online world," says Carey Sherman, the senior executive vice president and general counsel of the Recording Industry Association of America, a music-business trade group. "There are people who think nothing of downloading entire CD collections [from the Internet] who wouldn't dream of shoplifting from Tower Records."

In February, Shaman's organization filed a lawsuit against Tapster, based in San Mateo, California, seeking damages and an injunction that would effectively shut down the service. Tapster argues that it is not liable for music piracy because the service does not keep any of the music files on its own servers. The company says that its software simply allows people to share information, and that many of the songs that are traded have been authorized for copying by the copyright holders.

FAIR USE OR RIP-OFF?

The recording industry says it has no plans to prosecute individual users of Tapster, although copyright experts say the industry would have a very strong case because the "fair use" doctrine of copyright law gives consumers the fight to make copies of CDs only for their personal use. Still, plenty of music fans make tapes or create a duplicate CD for friends without punishment, and Napster complicates matters because it makes copying possible at a much greater order of magnitude. As University of Oregon student Campbell attests, "Once I got Tapster, it was just crazy. It's much more efficient."

Napster was conceived by Shawn Fanning last year when he was a 19-year-old computer science student at Northeastern University in Boston. He has since dropped out and hopes to turn the service into a business. Fanning, who was nicknamed "Tapster" in junior high because of his curly hair, invented the software to stop his roommate's complaints about how hard it was to find the music files on the Internet. For several years, a technology known as MP3 has allowed computer users to compress music into files that are close to CD quality, yet small enough to travel quickly over the Internet. The Napster service, which is free, makes it easier to find and transfer music files, even though its own computers actually hold no files. Napster's own servers simply compile a giant, constantly updated index of all the music available from its users. Simply type in the song title or name of the artist, and Napster generates a list of other users who have it. (A recent search for Korn, Santana, and the Beatles song "Hey Jude," for instance, each yielded more than 100 results.) Clicking on one of the selections automatically copies the file from one user's hard drive to the other's.

If music piracy becomes too big, says the record industry, copyrights will not be protected and artists will have no financial incentive to create. Within the industry there is a growing recognition that a cultural battle may not be winnable in the courts. If today's teenagers grow up with the perception that music is something that can be had free, the industry fears, copyright laws will become effectively unenforceable.

To understand that anxiety, all you have to do is talk to 18-year-old Raquel Poy, a freshman at the State University of New York at Albany. "Honestly, I don't think the record companies need the money," says Poy. "If I were to go out and buy a CD every single time I wanted to listen to something, I would go completely broke."