Napster, Planned Obsolescence & Control

["Richard Jasper" <richardj@library.tmc.edu>]

A little bit of background on me:

I've been a librarian for 15 years, almost all of that time having been
spent in acquisitions and collection management in large research
libraries. I've been dealing with licensing agreements for electronic
materials since, oh, I dunno, about 1992. I've attended a Lolly Gassaway
class on copyright (ACRL / Birmingham, circa 1992) and the ARL workshop
licensing electronic materials (Chapel Hill, 1998?) I'm a firm believer in
the value of and need for intellectual property rights; I'm also
thoroughly aware of the fact that licensing agreements can expand or
contract those "rights" based on the mutual agreement of two or more
parties.

So what have I been doing for the past week?

Playing with Napster and loving it. It's too cool -- in three days I've
learned more about the music I grew up with than in the previous 42 years
of my life. I've never been able to put lyrics and song titles together
with artists and, now, thanks to the sheer number of songs that have been
archived (others would say "pirated") by music afficionados around the
world, I'll be able to say "Ah, ha! That was the Hollies!" when
_Cherrie-Anne_ pops up on the radio.

As a librarian, I suppose I should be ashamed of my enthusiasm for
Napster. In fact, I'm ecstatic. And, because I'm a librarian, the
dichotomy has me thinking about possible solutions. Napster (the idea, at
the very least) isn't going to go away and if it does Gnutella is waiting
in the wings. Nor do I want it to go away -- would that we had something
as easy to use for medical literature!

Still, how is the creator of the intellectual property to be recompensed?
I don't want people to stop making and selling new music, even though more
has already been recorded than I'll ever be able to listen to.

Which reminds me of things like the 30-day free trial and planned
obsolescence. Publishers long ago figured out that if you give someone
something for free for 30 days chances are good that they will still want
it -- and pay for it -- on Day 31. The trick (for the publisher) is making
sure that you get it back if the customer decides s/he doesn't want to pay
for it.

So what if Napster invented a little program (a virus?) that attached
itself to every mp3 file downloaded with its software which said the
following:

<Thanks for using our software to sample the world's recorded music. The
<file(s) you downloaded will self-destruct in 30 days unless you agree to
<pay $10 to the Napster / Music Industry Royalty Fund. You will be
<prompted at the end of 30 days regarding whether you want to retain the
<file for the specified fee.

Is it really that farfetched? I don't think so. Would there be a whole
slew of technical obstacles to overcome? Of course. Would the music
publishers howl? Most certainly.

On the other hand...

I'm beginning to think that internet and more specifically the world wide
web really is the death knell for control of information, at least control
in the old sense of "you can't have it unless I give it to you." Come hell
or high water, people are going to get electronic information, whether
it's recorded music or medical literature, regardless of whether the
author of that information wants them to have it. The only way it *won't*
be distributed is if it's never committed to electronic form in the first
place. The question will be how to persuade people to pay for what they
can freely obtain. One way to do that is to cheapen the value of what's
freely obtainable (it falls apart in 30 days) and offer them something
relatively permanent in exchange.

I think we as librarians are facing a similar end to control. We've spent
the past 150 years advancing the idea that information could be
controlled, in the sense of identified, classified, cataloged, indexed,
annotated, etc. Until the web came along, this mission was still at least
theoretically possible, no matter how far behind we might have been at
time. With half a billion pages on the web and an unfathomable number of
individual files sitting on servers, this idea no longer seems plausible
to me. We're NOT going to be able to control it, in the sense of being
able to classify, catalog, index or annotate more than the smallest
fraction of it.

What does all of this mean for licensing? Or for those of us who have
spent a goodly portion of our lives building collections and the
bibliographic edifices which support them? Your guess is as good as mine.
All I know is that any sense of accomplishment I have with respect to
licensing -- and we've made a LOT of progress since the days when we were
arguing with publishers regarding whether we were licensing materials to
run on individual computers or within individual buildings -- pales to
nothing when confronted with the possibilities of Napster.

Yours in licensing...

rpj

Richard P. Jasper, M.Ln.
Assistant Director for Collections
Houston Academy of Medicine-
Texas Medical Center Library