Napster, the on-line music community, was recently given a new lease on life. Its technology allows users to share mp3 music files, via a convenient search facility. Of course, hundreds of thousands of mp3 files are also available on newsgroups and "secret" FTP sites.

Although there are many issues in play here, it ultimately comes down to perceived value. But let's not get ahead of ourselves.

Black's Law Dictionary defines "copyright" as an intangible, incorporeal right granted by statute to the author or originator of certain literary or artistic productions, whereby he is invested, for a specified period, with the sole and exclusive privilege of multiplying copies of the same and publishing and selling them.

In essence, then, owning the copyright gives one the right to multiply and sell certain types of intellectual property.

Note that without some form of technology, it would not be possible to exploit a copyright. Even if Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and all the rest were somehow able to collect royalties on their work, without the printing press, "multiplication" for profit would be unthinkable.

For quite some time, the music industry was the only entity that could multiply songs, for profit, or otherwise. One could capture the experience of hearing a song on the radio for free, and even be induced to purchase the record in this way. A small number of people were using wire recorders and tape recorders to "steal" music off the radio, but "home taping" was not perceived as much of a threat until 1979.

Although the cassette format had been introduced earlier, it took the release that year of The Knack's "My Sharona" to catalyze the home taping explosion. Even though the single went Gold (selling 1 million copies), many more music buyers purchased the album, at an unprecedented nine dollars. Unfortunately, the rest of the album was terrible, much worse than the usual so-called album cuts. The public felt that they had been ripped off.

To get back at the rapacious record companies, many consumers had no problem taping albums or just taping off the radio to share. If this was stealing, they reasoned, what about the nine bucks for one song?

In trying to explain how a group could have the number one single of 1979, and then vanish into obscurity, naive rock critics mentioned how commercial and phony the Knack was, and discussed the song's misogyny, as if commerciality, phoniness, and misogyny were not inherent in the majority of rock songs. Make no mistake. The Knack died, and home taping skyrocketed because the public felt cheated.

Intellectual property predates copyright, but natural law predates intellectual property. This term denotes a system of rules and principles for the guidance of human conduct which, independently of enacted law or of the systems peculiar to any one people, might be discovered by the rational intelligence of man. Applied here, it would suggest that it's not right to rip people off! And, by inference, people would find means around getting cheated.

Put another way, if the price of recorded music were reasonable, Napster wouldn't exist.

If you need more ammo, consider the ripoffs on the other side, whereby singer/songwriters are forced to sign away some or all of their valuable publishing rights to the record company, thus losing revenue based on radio airplay, among other things.

Of course, this entire situation can also be explained with a cynical reading of the Golden Rule: Do to others whatever you would have them do to you. The music industry did to others, and now the others are doing it back.