The Register® — Biting the hand that feeds IT

Feeds

DoJ's top gun from MS trial joins Napster defence

The RIAA could be in for a rough ride...

  • print
  • alert

Regcast training : Hyper-V 3.0, VM high availability and disaster recovery

Nemesis surely looms for the unlovely Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), with the news that David Boies, the Wyatt Earp of antitrust law, has signed up for the Napster defence team. Boies, special counsel for the US government in its antitrust action against Microsoft, has spent much of the last two years reducing strong Microsoft execs to shifty, implausible blusterers.

And it's worse than that, Jim - from the statement he issued on his being retained by Napster, he appears to view freedom as the issue at stake in the case. The case "raises important questions as to the extent to which Internet directories will remain free to permit individual users to use a directory to communicate and, in some cases, to share files without monitoring and regulating what those users do."

Just the tiniest of soundbites, but already Boies is setting up the case with liberty on one side ("free", "individual", "communicate") and repression (monitoring and regulating") on the other.

Boies is taking the Napster line that essentially, all it and similar directory system do is help users "to engage in sharing," which is widely practised on a small scale in the form of recording audio and video for personal use. Napster is therefore the same, but bigger as "the scale of the Internet greatly increases the extent of the sharing."

The Napster case is due to be heard next month in San Francisco, but as the RIAA and the Music Publishers Association (MPA) are seeking a preliminary injuction against Napster beforehand, we may be due a few Napster-related outings by the entertaining Mr Boies quite soon. ®

Cloud storage: Lower cost and increase uptime

More from The Register

Thanks, NSA: Amazon sales of Orwell's 1984 rise 9,500%
Citizens of Oceania bone up on the new reality
 breaking news
BBC lied to Parliament about doomed £100m IT monster, thunder MPs
Axed DMI ballooned and burst while watchdogs sang Kumbaya
Microsoft to open Windows Stores inside 600 Best Buy locations
Product showcases 'must be seen to be believed'
 breaking news
Author Iain (M) Banks falls to cancer at 59
Misses the release of his final work
 breaking news
What did the Lehman Brothers implosion look like to a techie?
Insider tells all about the Gnab Gib at Lehmans
It's official: 'tweet' an English word – not just in the avian sense
If the Oxford English Dictionary says it is so, then it is so
 breaking news
The only Waze is Google: Ad giant tipped to gobble map app 'for $1.3bn'
Pac-Man-satnav-ish upstart in bidding war with Apple, Facebook
 breaking news
1-in-10 e-tomes 'are self-published'... most are 'rubbish' says book ed
Publishing man scoffs at go-it-alone writers, ursines still fouling in forests
 breaking news