SAN FRANCISCO, July 26 (Reuters) - Handing the record industry a major win in the first big battle over copyrights and the Internet, a federal judge on Wednesday issued an order shutting down Napster Inc., saying evidence indicated its wildly popular song-swapping service could be a cover for piracy.
U.S. District Judge Marilyn Hall Patel, issuing a preliminary injunction requested by the Recording Industry of Association of America (RIAA), said it seemed clear that Napster's millions of users were not all simply engaged in swapping their personal favorite songs.

"When the infringing is of such a wholesale magnitude, the plaintiffs are entitled to enforce their copyrights," Patel said after a two-hour hearing in San Francisco court, instructing Napster to cease trade in copyright-covered material by midnight on Friday.

The ruling marked a victory for America's giant recording companies, which had targeted Napster as a high-tech haven for piracy and copyright infringement...
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What is the battle that is being fought here?
Who's rights are being abused, and how long does the RIAA think this will last?

I am absolutely floored at the judges ruling!
It seems to me that the RIAA presented it's case in such a way that it got everybody focused on the tree rather than the forest. Can they really crush the demand for a service by creating bogus laws that only affect Americans? What happens after that? Do they ban ICQ? Do they ban IRC? Do they ban every other form of file-transfer? What is going to stop somebody in another country from creating a similar website? I HOPE it happens! I HOPE somebody starts it in Australia, or Brazil, or The United Kingdom or ANY OTHER COUNTRY that has free rights!

It turned my stomach to watch some of the turncoats on television spewing out what they were told to say by their attorney.
How dare they insult the artists of the world, united in a common "rage against the machine" by advocating censorship!

The thing that everybody is overlooking is the REASON that the situation is present in the first place. The DEMAND of the users for what Napster provided is what created Napsters following. Demand is what is drives any industry, and prohibition of products that are in demand leads to criminal activity as well as a host of other social problems.

Rather than trying to stop out technology and retain the stranglehold on music industry, the RIAA should be broken up as a monopoly, thereby allowing independent artists the opportunity to let DEMAND drive the industry. This would give them a better opportunity of making a decent living at one of the hardest professions in the world!

The internet is changing everything. Maybe it's time to re-think the music industry rather than trying to enforce an outdated system that no longer works.