Napster's legal troubles may have finally made their way to Duke.
In a Sept. 8 letter to President Nan Keohane, lawyers for popular recording artists Dr. Dre and Metallica asked that Duke immediately ban access to the popular file-sharing service whose software allows millions of users to exchange music over the Internet.
"We believe that Duke University has a moral, ethical and legal obligation to take appropriate steps to assure that it is not a willing participant in and an enabler of the theft of intellectual property through Napster," the letter reads.
Keohane said she has not decided how to respond and that she will await advice from University Counsel.
Los Angeles attorney Howard King, whose firm represents the recording artists, argued that universities, including Duke, can be held legally responsible for acts of copyright infringement that take place on their servers. The vast majority of the millions of songs available for download on the Napster service are copyrighted.
"Napster is nothing but a 100 percent rip-off of intellectual property and it's facilitated by universities' high-speed connections," King said, adding that universities have a special obligation to respect intellectual property laws because such laws protect the universities' research.
Although the access to Napster remains unfettered for now, this latest request poses an additional threat to the site's access by Duke students. Approximately one-third of the nation's universities have already banned access to the service because of either its copyright implications or the unnecessary strain it places on university servers. Because of the large size of the digital music files being traded, Napster traffic comprises over fifty percent of Internet traffic at many universities and Internet service providers.
Three universities-University of Southern California, Yale University and Indiana University-were named as co-defendants in the recording artists' lawsuit against Napster, which King's firm filed in April. All three schools responded by blocking access to the site.
Now, King hopes this letter will prompt Duke and other schools to do the same. Twenty top universities, including Harvard, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Columbia and Stanford, received the letter last Friday. "We looked at universities that hadn't banned Napster, then went for a geographical cross-section of schools of high caliber," King said.
None of the universities have officially responded to the letter yet. "I don't think university administrations move that fast," King said. But in a preliminary response published in last Saturday's Boston Globe, Harvard spokesperson Sally Baker said it is unlikely that Harvard would cut off access to the service.
Duke's course of action remains undecided as well. In an e-mail, Keohane wrote that University lawyers are reviewing the contents of the letter and would advise the administration soon. "Meanwhile, we are learning more about what other universities are doing," she wrote. "We will discuss our options and make a decision within the next few weeks."
Those weeks will prove crucial for Napster, which is currently embroiled in another lawsuit filed last December on behalf of 18 major U.S. record companies. A San Francisco appeals court judge granted a preliminary injunction against the site on July 26 that would have shut the service down. A higher court stayed the injunction hours before it went into effect, allowing the site to remain in operation. But with oral arguments scheduled before a California appeals court Oct. 2, time may be running out for the popular service.
There are two likely outcomes of the hearing. First, the court could find Napster guilty of violating the 1992 Audio Home Recording Act, which prohibits unauthorized digital transmission of copyrighted recordings for all but non-commercial use. That would make the service illegal and force it to shut down or restructure. Alternatively, the court could find that Napster is not responsible for the content transmitted by its users. That ruling would put responsibility onto individual users, as it is now.
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