Scour's gone, we need Napster

Last week was bad. Really bad. Worse than Y2K bad. Worse than new-Backstreet-Boys-album bad. Worse than contracting-a-venereal-disease bad. I'm talking about our-sun-imploding-and-all-life-in-this-universe-ending bad. May God help us all. Last week, Scour Exchange was shut down.

What am I going to do now? Where am I going to go? I feel like I might wander out to the corner of York and Elm begging students to give me 10 MB of music for a flower. "May I recite to you a monologue from Macbeth for a copy of Bon Jovi's `Living on a Prayer?' Please? Or how about the Rolling Stones' `Gimme Shelter?'"

There is, of course, an easier solution. Yale should end its Napster ban. Sure, Metallica was suing the school, but it should also have sued every other Internet-providing American university. The best it could do was go after Yale, USC, and Indiana University and reap what it could from the publicity. And though it sent warning letters to other schools, even staid institutions like Harvard did not cave. Clearly, the band understands that it cannot settle this music-sharing "problem" by blaming those who actually use the program. My 15-year-old sister uses Napster and I've yet to see Lars Ulrich and his dumbass heavy-metal-cohorts slap my parents with a lawsuit, although I'd certainly love to see that happen.

By restricting access to Napster, Yale is handing its lunch money over to big bully Metallica when Yale should instead stand up for itself and punch the band in the face—or at least tell the teacher on them like my CA roommate used to do.

The source of this whole thing is the program itself, and any other avenue of preventing Napster use is just a delay until the suit against Napster is decided. Music download site EMusic.com announced that on Tuesday it started policing the Napster community for songs it has licensed. It said it will ask Napster to block the accounts of customers who are identified by the software as offering EMusic's licensed material. This is not the answer either. Once again, they have just sidestepped the issue—blaming the effect instead of the cause.

If there is an answer, it is shutting down Napster entirely or finding a manner by which the music industry can be compensated for downloaded MP3s. The announcement that Napster had cut a deal with Bertelsmann shows that this process might actually be underway, and that Napster might finally start charging a fee to its users. Of course, like others whom the music industry would like to believe are anti-capitalist anarchists bent on cheating recording "artists" out of their royalties, I think this is nonsense—who cares about free music that isn't really free? I'm certainly not paying $19.95 to listen to Mr. Big's "To Be With You" or any other tune that I feel some strange need to download at 2 a.m. on a Wednesday.

Everyone knows Napster will most likely die the death that Scour Exchange did, so until then I say screw it. End the ban and give it back to us. Or simply restructure and reopen the Network Neighborhood so that we can steal songs from our fellow students without messing up the bandwidth. We Yalies currently have so little to boost our morale, what with all the construction, the men's basketball team, and George W. Bush, DC '68, becoming president.

By all means, restrict Napster use during business hours. Open it from 1:00 a.m. to 1:05 a.m. for all I care. Just open it. Metallica won't even know about it. I won't tell, I swear. It's not like the Sandman is starving to death.

Yeah, so it's a long shot, I know. In the meantime, I've found a non-Gnutella way of downloading my free music (but sadly, no free pornog...uh...movies), but I won't tell you what it is because Yale will probably be a bitch and find some way to shut it down too. Still, I miss my Scour Exchange, with its easy-to-use interface, 143,000 users and that cute spinning cube with the X on it. The only thing that can replace that cube? The cat with the headphones. Gimme Napster.

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