First, no jury has yet heard the legal merits of Napster's case. Boies will also remind the jury that Napster has not profited from its music-swapping technology. But for the millions who simply share music as they would a VCR tape, you would be smarter to compete by trying to serve customers than interfering with their lives. If a jury accepts this argument, the recording industry's profits will dramatically be lowered. These Napster clones are not as vulnerable to copyright law violations because they utilize an open source format that connects computers directly to other computers without relying on a central server.
Users can trade pirated materials but there is no way of monitoring what is on the network.
Finally, Napster's millions of users are going to lobby Congress for protection. And, as Sen. Hatch indicates, Congress is listening. MIT economics professor Lester Thurow has long argued that Congress should establish a component of the National Science Foundation to adjudicate technology-generated claims to determine what knowledge belongs in the public domain and what knowledge deserves intellectual property protection. Congress may well consider Thurow's proposal to resolve the Napster mess. Napster will argue that in the past it has been like a free radio station and in the near future it will work like a premium cable station.