Napster has been shut down!

[Greebe]

A US district court judge has ordered Napster to shut down it's services until a ruling can be made.
Bummer :\

[skeoch]

just have to switch to gnutella, or audio galaxy, but a damn shame all the same.

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P3 700Mhz cB0 stepping, G400MAX,Abit BE6-2 RV Bios,Quantum KX 7200 13Gig,256Mb 100SDram,BT ISDN,SCSI 100Mb zip int,SB Live Value,Tosh 6702, HP 9110i.

[bongo]

This topic should be in SOAPBOX, not general Hardware.

[MultimediaMan]

Not quite...they have until Saturday 3PM PDT to have an appellate court hear and rule on the injunction order.

It seems likely that their appeal will be heard and their motion to stay the injunction will be granted, given that it affects their entire operation.

I think the judge overstepped herself: Essentially she accused and convicted each and every Napster user of copyright infringement by mere association; that is not fair or equable.

I also think she may have missed the spirit of the DMCA in ruling that Napster is not an ISP, because by definition, it does provide a service that requires a domain presence by its very architecture, and allows subscriptions.

By the wording of her ruling on that part of the case, remote email and homepage providers would not be covered under DMCA, which other courts have already ruled that they are.

Whenever you have two federal courts at odds with another's ruling, it gets booted to the circuit appellate court, and then, if there conflicting ruling between the circuit courts appellate, you go to the Supreme Court. This one will likely be fast-tracked all the way to the top.

Stay tuned.

[Greebe]

and my cookies still don't work, so bite me!