When the law gets caught napping

I've been leading a criminal lifestyle for several months now. It's gotten so bad that I sometimes violate federal law several times before breakfast. In fact, I'm engaging in an illegal conspiracy right as I'm typing these words.

Yeah, I'm a Napster user — and Uncle Sam stands about as good a chance of disabling my file-swappin' software as he does of confiscating Charlton Heston's AK.

I suppose it all began when I was freed from the constraints of my undergrad university (which will go nameless, though I will mention that the place is regularly denounced by anti-sweatshop activists, grad student unionists and other assorted neo-Naderite troublemakers as "stale," "pale" and, oddly for Jodie Foster's alma mater, "male"). The school had been sued by Metallica, and, frightened by the prospect of staring down Lars Ulrich in a court of law, chose to ban Napster from the campus network. With the possible exception of a single arbitrated settlement with the Beastie Boys after Public Safety deprived the group of its right to party, however, Princeton has never been involved in any legal disputes with any major-label recording artists. Moments after I first plugged my laptop into Jersey's most glorious Dormnet, I found myself happily back beneath the Jolly Roger and aboard the flagship of music piracy.

Now, as you're already well aware, The Man is shutting Napster down — or at least forcing it to filter out all copyrighted music, which would leave web surfers with little more than Sousa marches and Chopin nocturnes to trade back and forth. When I first read about the decision, I was worried for a moment that I might be unable to download the next in Elton John's series of duets with prominent homophobes (which, by the way, will reportedly be a remix of "Tiny Dancer" featuring Pat Robertson) or any other future hits.

I was only worried for a moment, however. After a few seconds spent searching the Web, I discovered there was no need to end my criminal activity. For one thing, Napster-compatible servers have been popping up all over the Net faster than even Lars himself can shut them down. What's more, there are tons of Napster clones out there, many beyond the reach of American law. One popular program called I-Mesh, for example, seems to be based in Israel, where they're having bigger problems than music piracy right now. If the music industry will have to wait until after the successful completion of the Middle East peace process for the international authorities to crack down on I-Mesh, then I should have no problem using it to download MP3s of a menopausal Christina Aguilera's 2053 comeback special.

As a semi-salaried moral and political theorist, however, it troubles me that breaking the law is so darn easy. Even worse, it's something I've grown accustomed to doing without any sense of guilt whatsoever — me, a nice Jewish boy who is normally unable to so much as think about Jennifer Lopez without feeling a crippling sense of guilt, let alone to commit such heinous criminal acts as violating a copyright or shoplifting a bottle of Pepto-Bismol. (Shame on you, Nathan. What would your mother say?)

I think it was Montesquieu who wrote, "When the people make a mockery of the law, then the law becomes a mockery of itself." Or maybe it wasn't; pretty much everything Montesquieu wrote, after all, was in French. Regardless, the fact remains that current copyright law is like the monkey that didn't see that the world had changed with the coming of a big black monolith called the Internet, and the surfers of the world are the monkey that did notice the monolith and are now bashing in the other monkey's brains to the tune of "Also Sprach Zarathrustra." It's 2001, kids, and an FBI warning at the beginning of every rented VHS just ain't gonna cut it anymore.

So how ought a government to defend the legitimate claims of copyright holders in the ever-changing high-tech media landscape of the twenty-first century? I haven't the foggiest. But I do know that in approximately 30 seconds I will have finished downloading both "Also Sprach Zarathustra" and "Oops! I Did It Again." Unlike naughty little Britney, however, I have no regrets for my misdeeds. Michael Frazer is a politics graduate student from Riverdale, N.Y. He can be reached at mfrazer@princeton.edu.