Don't Block Napster

Attorneys for heavy-metal band Metallica and rap artist Dr. Dre sent a letter to Harvard Sept. 6 asking the University to ban student access to the Napster music-trading service via the campus network. The letter, which carries the implied threat of a lawsuit and requests a reply by Sept. 22, asserts that Harvard has a "moral, ethical, and legal obligation" to block Napster access. Rather than accede to Metallica's demands, Harvard should make clear in its reply the University's commitment to open student access to electronic resources and its refusal to act as an electronic filter.

Metallica and Dr. Dre have been some of the most active musical groups in opposing Napster, whose peer-to-peer system has enabled the large-scale duplication of copyrighted music in compressed MP3 format. Many of Napster's users are students with high-speed Internet access through their universities, and Metallica and Dr. Dre have pursued perceived infringements accordingly: lawsuits filed under federal racketeering statutes against Yale, Indiana University and the University of Southern California were dropped only after those universities banned Napster access. However, those universities acted more for reasons of expediency than fear of legal sanction; a number of colleges have also banned Napster simply because the traffic it generates is too much for their networks to bear.

Harvard's network has so far withstood the onslaught, and so long as the bandwidth consumed does not interfere with academic use of the network, access to Napster ought to be maintained. The University does not have a legal obligation to block Napster. As an Internet service provider, Harvard should be protected by federal laws that properly rest responsibility for illegal actions with the user rather than the network owner. The Faculty of Arts and Sciences already prohibits intellectual property violations under its network policy; if Harvard were punished for violations of its own policies, it would feel pressure to place draconian and unnecessary restrictions on Internet use for fear of liability resulting from any possible illegal actions by students.

Any action by Harvard to restrict Napster access at this point would also be premature. The illegality of the service itself has still not been established; the file-sharing software is content-neutral and has significant legal uses. Although U.S. District Judge Marilyn Hall Patel has found Napster to be liable for copyright infringement and issued an injunction against the service, this injunction has been stayed until the appeal can be heard by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals this October. It would be foolish for the University to block access to a service that is currently legal to operate. Should Napster eventually lose its court battle, then the service will be shut down, and no action by the University would be required.

Although the University has not yet indicated how it will respond, we are heartened by administrators' recognition of the educational value of open Internet access. Harvard provides Internet access to students primarily in order to assist them in academic research; however, free and unfettered access also allows students to benefit from Internet communication as a social and cultural phenomenon. Any moral, ethical or legal obligations cited by Metallica's attorneys are placed on the students, not the University; part of character education is to entrust students with the freedom to make wrong decisions, and Harvard has good reason to expect its students to act as responsibly online as on campus. Harvard does not scan network traffic for copied MP3's, but neither does it filter World Wide Web downloads for illegal pornography or conduct random searches of dorm rooms for the underage possession of alcohol.

In terms of University policy, a Napster ban would set a troubling precedent; as technologies for music- and file-sharing become more advanced and more decentralized, blocking access would require ever more intrusive monitoring of students' electronic activities, reducing the online freedom that students enjoy and have rightly come to expect. Last spring, Dean of the College Harry R. Lewis '68 and Dean of the Faculty Jeremy R. Knowles both indicated that Napster had not caused academic problems among students; until that judgment changes, the University has no reason to take upon itself the role of electronic gatekeeper.