No decision yet on response to Napster letter

To ban or not to ban -- that is the question University President Judith Rodin was supposed to have answered by today. But Rodin has not yet made an official decision about whether to ban Napster on Penn's campus. According to University spokeswoman Phyllis Holtzman, the evaluation of the matter is still in progress. "We didn't feel we needed to meet that exact deadline," she said. The University received a letter from lawyers representing rap artist Dr. Dre and and rock group Metallica on September 12 asking them to limit student access to the Internet music service Napster. The letter requested a response by today. Yesterday, Pennsylvania State University, which received a letter similar to Penn's last week, announced it will ban student access to Napster through their Web server. And earlier this year, the University of Southern California, and Indiana and Yale universities received similar letters to the one received by Penn. When the three refused to ban the service, the two artists filed a lawsuit against them. Shortly thereafter, the schools settled the suits and limited Napster access on their campuses. But Howard King, attorney for Metallica and Dr. Dre, claimed that the letters his office sent to Penn and other schools this month were never meant to be threats of litigation. Even though Rodin has not made an official decision on Napster use, several Penn professors have been active supporters of the program. Marketing Professor Peter Fader has been an outspoken proponent of Napster throughout the service's various legal squabbles. Fader gave expert testimony on behalf of Napster when it was sued by the Recording Industry Association of America, disputing claims that the service Napster provides constitutes music copyright infringement and hurts record sales. "There's basically a universal finding that use of Napster stimulates [album sales]," Fader said. "People go to Napster and they encounter music that they wouldn't have otherwise, and they want to buy the CD." In addition, Fader points out, the "new artist search function for users interested in learning about new artists... help[s] those artists gain exposure to music listeners." Fader also noted that college students are not the only people who use Napster. "The majority of Napster users are not students," he said. "For a lot of people who don't have a built-in community like college students, they use Napster to find out what music to buy." Stanford Law Professor and Wharton graduate Lawrence Lessig testified on behalf of Napster as well. Napster, he said during his testimony, has "potential uses that extend far beyond this single potentially troubling use [of sharing copyrighted files]. "In extending the ability of Omany' to work with Omany,' the technology is simply an extension of the fundamentally decentralizing principle of the Internet itself," Lessig testified. King said his clients are targeting universities because "there is an irony of having wonderful creative and dramatic arts programs... yet encouraging Napster use, which [if] left unchecked would deprive" students of a chance to make a living in the creative arts in the future.