Students chew on possibility of life after Napster
By Billy O’Keefe
TMS Campus

Officially, the RIAA acronym stands for Recording Industry Association of America.

But to many students and fans of Napster, which faces shutdown in the wake of numerous lawsuits and a mammoth decision this week by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, it stands for something else entirely-specifically, the “Rat-Infested A**holes of America.”

That, along with other equally kind words, have been splattered all over Napster’s message boards since Monday’s decision threatened to put the popular music-swapping service out of commission.

“Make every day anti-RIAA Day!!” read one post. “I’ll never throw any of my money to the big guys again!”

Around campuses everywhere, students showed a little more reservation, but for the most part expressed similar disappointment.

“I’m definitely going to miss it when it’s gone,” Phyllis G. Maloney, a Harvard University freshman, told the Harvard Crimson student newspaper.

Several students expressed fears that the decision could put the freedoms associated with using the Internet in jeopardy.

“It’s a sign of the continued growing regulation of Internet and people’s choices of what they’re doing with it,” University of Georgia student Steven Carroll told the Red and Black.

Some students do agree, however, that Napster’s “free-for-all” approach went a bit over the edge.

“Five to 10 dollars a month is no big deal and it’s definitely worth it,” Penn State University senior John Mulhern told the Penn State Collegian. “I think it’s a good move by Napster anyway because it would appease the music industry, and since there are so many users, they’d make lots of money.”

Fellow senior Robin Suhrie told the Collegian: “I think the artists have the right to let users listen to music for free if they want to.”

So is this the end of a really short era? Not quite. While students expressed sorrow over the likely demise of Napster as we know it, the buzz on Napster’s heir was thick. Use of programs like Gnutella, Freenet and Hotline, which work in a similar fashion to Napster but are difficult and sometimes impossible to regulate, are likely to increase should Napster’s service disappear.

“The record labels should have been kissing Napster’s [butt] and thanking their lucky stars for Napster!” read a message Monday night on a forum at one of Hotline’s several thousand independent servers. “If they had let Napster continue, they could have at least controlled it a little. Now, with Gnutella, forget about it!”

Students feel the same way, and say that the RIAA’s problems are far from over.

“There are at least 50 other places to go-even better ones,” University of Oklahoma freshman Cody McGoodwin told the Oklahoma Daily. “Stopping Napster is not going to do anything.”