>From Napster to . . . socialism by Eric Lee November 16, 2000 Last week, one of the giants of global media corporations, Bertelsmann, announced news that shocked its rivals: it was joining up with the controversial Napster file-sharing service in a partnership deal. Napster, as you may be aware, is currently embroiled in a lawsuit with the whole music industry (Bertelsmann included, until last week). The record companies are claiming that by giving music away for free, Napster is undermining their intellectual property rights (and profits). For those of you who've heard the term but don't know what Napster is, let me try to explain. Napster is a system that allows anyone connected to the Internet to share files -- mostly music files in the new MP3 format. To use Napster, you have to download its client program for your PC or Mac. When you connect to any one of its 114 server computers, you've connected to everyone else using the system. When you search for a song or artist, Napster's central servers search through the hard drives of the computers of everyone using Napster at that moment. As Napster has over thirty million users, a million of whom are likely to be online at any given time, that's a lot of computers and that's a lot of songs. To give an example of how this works in practice, I recently fired up Napster on my PC and asked if there was a copy of Bruce Springsteen's version of Dylan's "Chimes of Freedom" around somewhere. About a second later, a screenful of links appeared. I could take my pick and download the song from a number of different computers. It cost me nothing. Napster was launched about a year ago. Even more than the World Wide Web, which is now a decade old, it has exploded the notion of intellectual property rights. The songs I was looking for were not actually stored on Napster's own clusters of servers. Napster merely acted as a conduit between its millions of users -- this is its defense in the court action. What I was tapping into wasn't just the websites that this or that corporation decided to create for me. I was able to tap into the hard drives of millions of individual computers. In technical terms, this is called peer-to-peer networking. In practice, it means something much bigger than the web with its millions of pages. How can corporations -- and more importantly, musicians -- protect their rights to their recorded music? This is the issue that has arisen in the wake of Napster's rise. Though most musicians probably still earn their keep from live performances, a not insignificant number of them rely on royalties from recorded music, just as authors need their royalties from book sales. Eliminate such royalties completely -- as Napster seems to be doing -- and the question arises, how are musicians to be paid? I recently wrote to a friend, saying that we have to come up with answers to the difficult question of how to protect the livelihood of musicians and other artists whose work could easily be copied and distributed for free using Napster and similar peer-to-peer systems. He wrote back, saying that there was a simple answer to this dilemma, and it was socialism. I smiled reading the message, but thinking it over, there is more to it than a clever retort. Because my friend had actually touched on something essential, something which Marx himself noted about the capitalist system a century and a half ago. Technological change is crashing against the barriers of an archaic social system. That system has become a fetter on further growth and change. The new technology of peer-to-peer computing with its possibilities of file sharing has made the old capitalist way of selling recorded music obsolete. There is no technical solution to the problem of providing an income for musicians within the context of the traditional free market in recorded music. This development provides socialists with one of those rare opportunities when we can talk about some of our longer-term vision -- about a new society, instead of just talking about stopping cutbacks somewhere or fighting off another right-wing assault. When we look at the revolution in digital music and the broader issues raised by peer-to-peer networking, which allows the free distribution not only of music but of books, articles, art works, software, and so on, we can begin to sketch out a socialist program for culture and the arts in the twenty-first century. That program would include a guaranteed income for musicians, writers and artists, based on state support, while also guaranteeing no state control over the arts. In such a society it is unlikely that any individual musicians are going to become very rich, but with the way technology is heading now, they're not going to get rich under capitalism either. In fact, the vast majority of musicians (and writers and artists) are well aware of the fact that only a tiny fraction of them will ever earn the big bucks. The vast majority of them struggle like the rest of us to make ends meet. Those musicians and other artists should welcome a new technology that allows their work to reach large audiences without the intermediary of a handful of global corporations who attempt to dictate global tastes. Some do welcome the new technology, particularly young and struggling musicians who see in technologies like Napster their best chance at reaching an audience. Is there also an openness to new ideas about society as well? Perhaps. - - - This article appeared in the 10 November 2000 issue of Action for Solidarity. Action's website is located at http://www.actionforsolidarity.org.uk
