Universities have rejected a request by the heavy metal band's lawyer to ban Napster. While they don't condone piracy, the academics say they won't censore Internet access.
Saying open access to information trumps copyright fears, several major US universities, including Stanford and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, have rejected a lawyer's demand that they bar students from using the Napster song-swap software.
Los Angeles attorney Howard King, who represents recording artists Metallica and Dr. Dre in copyright infringement lawsuits against Napster, sent letters to about a dozen US universities this month asking them to ban access to the wildly popular service from campus computers.
But officials at a number of universities declined the request, saying that, while they do not condone copyright infringement, they would not take the step of limiting access to the Internet.
"MIT has had a long history of providing its faculty, staff, and students with uncensored access to the Internet and its vast array of resources," James D. Bruce, MIT's vice president for information systems, said in a letter to King.
"As an educational institution providing its community of users with Internet access, we do not monitor or bar access to use of the Internet."
Stanford: Request too general
Stanford concurred, saying it "was unaware of any requirement that it invade and monitor specific usage by its faculty, students and staff of such online services."
"Be assured that Stanford does not condone copyright infringement, and is mindful that the rapid development of technology poses challenging issues in this regard," William Abrams, a lawyer representing the university, wrote.
He said Stanford would take appropriate action if informed of a specific instance of copyright infringement.
Several other major universities, including Harvard, said they needed more time to determine their position.
One-third ban Napster
The suit brought by Metallica and Dr. Dre is separate from a larger legal action against Napster Inc. by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), which represents some of the top recording companies in the nation, including Seagram Co. Ltd.'s Universal Music, Bertelsmann AG's BMG, Sony's Sony Music and Time Warner's Warner Music Group and EMI.
But they both revolve around the question of technology and copyright infringement and have focused in part on college campuses, where students have thronged to online services that allow them to trade personal collections of recordings stored in MP3, a digital compression format used to convert music on CDs into computer files.
A recent study by research firm Gartner Group found that 34 percent of 50 US colleges and universities surveyed had banned students from using Napster. But other song-swap services continue to proliferate.
Setback for Metallica
University administrators have taken different approaches to the issue. Some, including Yale and the University of Indiana, banned access to Napster earlier this year after they were named as co-defendants in the rock musicians' suit against the service.
But others are resisting, saying they should not be forced to police students' computer use.
"This is not a statement of support for Napster, nor are we condoning copyright infringement," said Bob Harty, a spokesman for Georgia Tech. "To unilaterally block access to a site is an overly blunt response to this issue and we believe that it constitutes an unwise policy."
While the universities' rebuff marked a temporary setback for Metallica, Dr. Dre, and other recording artists opposed to Napster, the larger question of the song-swap services' future will head back to court soon.
Opening arguments in the RIAA's Napster case have been set for October 2nd after an Appeals Court in San Francisco stayed a judge's order that would have pulled the plug on the service.
