Why did Metallica commit rock & roll suicide? Well, I suppose because they believed in their cause and felt the alienation of half a million fans was not too high a price to pay for protecting the rights of major artists' like themselves. You can't be too hard on the band. Being a musician myself I realize we're not real smart when it comes to legal issues and industry politics. That's why they have managers. And Metallica's managers should have talked them down on this one (I almost said "managers & lawyers", but in this day and age where everybody sues everybody for everything isn't it the lawyers who really profit?) Don't get me wrong, I can sympathize with the whole creative property infringement issue, but this is nothing new. The sole function of the home cassette recorder was and is to MAKE COPIES. I was recording songs off the radio and off records even before cassettes were invented. And just like then, if I really like the music I'll go buy it cause I want that superior sound quality, but if there's only 3 or 4 songs worth listening to it's hard to justify 15 to 17 bucks for a CD. Artists complain they can't make money when we don't pay this because they only get about 80 cents out of a 17 dollar CD since so many people within the industry want a piece of their pie. Seems like maybe we've got the wrong target here. I'm reminded of Woodstock when the guy gets on the loudspeaker in reference to the National Guard presence and states "We don't hate soldiers. Many of our loved ones are soldiers, and we pray they will come home safely. We don't hate soldiers. We hate the war." I would love to see the artists get their share of my money, but they're not. And in all fairness to Metallica, the artists probably get the shortest end of the stick, mostly because of the bloated music industry infrastructure that encourages "tape trading" to help cushion the ridiculous consumer cost of the end product. I could rag on the business for hours, from the record companys to MTV to ASCAP to Sam Goody's, but let's not get too distracted from the Napster thing by real issues. I agree that the Napster service has a certain "shady potential" and could easily be abused by those who burn and sell CDs containing Napster-aided downloads, but being a user of this service myself (oops, I mean EX-user), I find it to be a great tool for finding music, especially in areas where the radio stations play the same stuff over & over & over and the record shops only carry what the industry crams down our throats. The abuse potential is the same as your garden-variety dual-well cassette, except that the selection is much greater than your local public library's. If you buy a CD and loan it out to someone it's not illegal, but what makes this different than "tape trading" is the fact that the files cannot be played from their host location and have to be COPIED from one hard drive to another. I know, this is nothing new. EVERYONE has recorded something sometime in their life and it was illegal then as it is now. On the internet though, it's the "global community" and not contained to local activity. My opinion has always been so long as you receive no monetary compensation for use of copyrighted works you should be free to enjoy them and promote them to others (who may be new to the music and will want to buy it for real). If you sell these works you're making money off someone else's labor. So is this Metallica's gripe, that there might be a small black market out there for crappy sounding homemade CDs? That risk just goes with the fame and notoriety, deal with it and look at the upside. Lesser known bands would kill for this kind of exposure. And is it really fair to take away access to ALL music in Napster? Napster users are not only cut off from Metallica's music but from EVERYONE'S. Those lesser known bands may have lost their fan base as well because of this and probably don't care about the legal implications, they just want their music heard (kind of like Metallica 10 years ago). It makes you wonder if they're worried that if people hear stuff off the albums other than what's force-fed to us by the label that the albums as a whole will fail. Certainly they have more confidence in even their "filler tunes" than that. I'm not a die-hard fan myself so I don't know if their "filler tunes" suck or not. For now I'll take this lawsuit for what they have outlined it to be, a crusade against bootleggers that caught a lot of innocent bystanders in "friendly fire". Two statements bother me, though. Metallic's vow to "bury Napster", which sounded way too personal given Napster's minimal involvement in this aside from the irresponsible distribution of potentially abusable freeware (a lot of programs can be abused. I got hit with the "Love Bug" but I'm not suing Microsoft Outlook). Another even more disturbing statement was that Metallica would "be around another 20 years. If the fans don't want to go along that's their problem". Newsflash guys, it's YOUR problem. If you seen the movie Spinal Tap you've seen the fine line between Madison Square Garden and Six Flags. They've lost over a quarter million fans, but they could recover. Rock & roll is fickle at best. But if they don't loose the God complex they could easily end up behind the microphone saying "Hello Detroit ! .... uh, you want fries with that?". This whole thing has become more of a joke than a controversy, and it breaks my heart to see a band who has given us so much good music over the years fall from grace over a few deadbeats who wouldn't buy their CDs anyway, Napster or no Napster. The best thing that might come from this is the further development of anti-copyright software for Napster and the dozens of programs that work like Napster. I don't know how this works, but it's obviously not contingent on MP3 labels because the easy hack would be just simply change the spelling (Mettalica?). If this does get hack-proofed maybe we can put this whole thing to rest and get back to the Rock & Roll.

5/12/00
jw.

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