May 4, 2000

9:20 AM

Metallica and Napster: The Chat.My favorite quote: "For the doubters out there, Metallica will carry on for the next 20 years," Ulrich said. "Whether you're around for the ride or not, that's your problem, not ours." Oh, really?
posted by baylink (9 comments total)

I wasn't much of a Metallica fan to begin with, but these days, I'm anti-Metallica.
posted by howa2396 at 10:37 AM on May 4, 2000

You can read the full transcript of the chat on theMetallica's Artist Direct page. The best thing about this chat is the way James and Lars constantly refer to Metallica in the third person, as in "Metallica has never been in the back seat" and "Metallica should be in control of how our music is brought to people".I found the transcript rather interesting. They make some good points, though the band seems to have a limited understanding of what exactly Napster is and how it works.
posted by sixfoot6 at 10:58 AM on May 4, 2000

I love it when the refer to Napster (the company) as a machine. If we are going to start labeling entities in this whole music war thats going on, I think we should call the RIAA 'The Machine'.

But seriously, does anyone feel that Metallica stands a chance of winning thier case against Napster? Its like suing a gun company because their gun was used to kill someone. While we are at it, we should go ahead and sue Ford because the murderer drove a Mustang.
posted by howa2396 at 11:06 AM on May 4, 2000

The federal court ruling in favor of the RIAA that mp3 had violated copyright law won't make Napster's fight any easier.
posted by birgitte at 12:31 PM on May 4, 2000

Being an optimist hopefully Metallica will lose this thing and, in a fit a rage, swear to never subject us to anymore of that cheeze metal they produce.
posted by Nyarlathotep at 1:01 PM on May 4, 2000

The MP3.com case is much different from the Napster case. MP3.com went out and bought 80,000 CDs that they encoded themselves into MP3 and then redistributed to registered users; the crux of the argument is that MP3.com didn't have the licenses to share others' music. Napster is, as its heads continually point out, a directory and not a knowing collaborator or copyright violator. Doesn't make it any more or less legally valid, but the verdict of the one lawsuit has a much different focus than the other.
posted by werty at 1:23 PM on May 4, 2000

Let's home Metallica's stuff gets lifted from Napster, there'd be much more bandwidth to trade the decent stuff. (Athough all the best music is on Gnutella, anyway.)

Oh, and while they're feeling litigious, can they stop Atlanta's 99X from doing their "Nine O'Clock Mandatory Metallica" every single night? Now that is a real fucking infringement on my civil rights.
posted by holgate at 2:51 PM on May 4, 2000

To clarify on werty's comments: the assertion is that MP3.com *needed* mechanical reproduction rights in order to legally load those songs onto their servers, even though they would only be played by subscribers who had already paid for their own personal performance rights in buying the disks themselves.

Radio stations, of course, do the same thing every day, loading their new music into their on-air playback systems; the legalities of that process are something I'm not familiar with, but certainly it's pertinent.

I'm told that it's ok for mobile DJ's to do this, as long as they've bought the album, and paid ASCAP and BMI for the performance rights. If this is true, then it sort of guts the case against MP3, as far as *I* can see...
posted by baylink at 3:08 PM on May 4, 2000

The Napster and mp3 case are different, but since both are concerned with unprecedented areas of the law - according to the suit, I don't know if I necessarily believe that, but hey, what do I know?- a judge, like the one assigned to the Metallica suit, will wait to make a decision on motions filed with the court until a higher court rules on a "similar" case. The mp3 decision is just the kind of thing they will wait for.

The two are not necessarily the same, but whether it is right or wrong, rulings made on one of the cases will influence the other.
posted by birgitte at 4:09 PM on May 4, 2000