A long while back, so long that it must have been in the 80s or something, music publishing companies sued the makers of blank audio tapes, saying that they, in essence, were taking money away from legitimate artists by allowing individual music listeners to copy songs (either from another tape, an album or those new fangled disc things called CDs) without the authorization of the music publishers. So we were stealing money from artists, you see.

When you buy a CD or audio tape, you don't own the music. You own the CD and have the right to play the CD whenever you want as long as it's not part of a business activity. But if you dub a tape for a friend, you've taken from the invisible profit margin in the sky. Your friend probably isn't going to shell out $15 for a new CD when they can just play that $1 tape over and over. The result of that lawsuit is that every time you buy a blank audio tape, you are paying a slight surcharge (incorporated into the price of the tape) to every artist in the world who has a publishing agreement with the interested parties of the lawsuit.

I'm pretty sure the money derived from these blank tape sales never gets in the artists' pocket, rather it stays with ASCAP or BMI or the other music publishing companies so they can pursue other idiotic lawsuits on behalf of their banks of artists. But justice has been served, right?

Blanks tapes are the least of music artists worries these days. They have to deal with CD Burners hooked up to computers (which makes computers essentially like those dual cassette decks that were so in vogue ten years ago), MP3 downloadable music files and a crazy little program called Napster.

Napster doesn't copy anything, actually. It's merely able to find other computers hooked up to the net that have the music you're looking for and directs your computer to copy and download the file from that specific computer. Napster, like the web itself, brings like-minded people together for mutual benefit. But for all those artists who feel that someone is stealing from them, Napster is a big old bullseye target.

Last week Metallica and Dr. Dre served the Napster company with a 60,000 page lawsuit detailing 350,000 names of individuals who have listed Metallica songs as part of their hard drive in the Napster directory.

For those who are less than web-savvy, basically these 350,000 people have at least one Metallica song digitized into downloadable form somewhere on their hard drive and have registered this fact with Napster, which directs everyone who uses it to these specific places.

Many, if not virtually all, of the people who use Napster (mostly college students because they are the biggest demographic of people in the U.S. with high speed Internet connections, thanks to the benefits of higher education) thought they were doing so anonymously. The fact that Metallica could find 350,000 names of people probably scares about 340,000 of those people.

At issue here is whether Metallica--or any other music artists--should get money for all of these digitized music files. And who is going to pay for them? Metallica and Dr. Dre have decided to sue Napster rather than individual users. One would have to assume that the individuals with Metallica files probably are fans (never, ever sue your fans, unless they come after you with a knife), Napster on the other hand is worth millions of dollars and a prime target for lawsuit.

I've heard the arguments from many sides and what I think is this: Metallica and Dr. Dre have enough money to bring lawsuits against an Internet directory (which is what Napster is), so they probably don't need whatever they might be able to get as a settlement in this case. Starving musical artists--most of whom give their music files away for free on the Internet because no one knows who they are and would love to find out that 350,000 people had one of their songs somewhere on their hard drive--aren't part of this fight. So I characterize it as this: the rich want to get richer without doing much at all.

Of the 350,000 people who have a Metallica song on their hard drive, maybe 50,000 of those might think about actually buying a CD. And, most likely, the way they got that song there in the first place is from an actual CD--not for free over the Internet. The number is so small (Metallica sells millions of CDs a year, 50,000 CDs isn't really that much of a cut in sales), they shouldn't care. Just like someone who buys a used CD isn't lining the pockets of that artist again (the CD was already bought once), these songs are swapped like trading cards. They are, in essence, the Pokemon of the college set.

And to put a legal spin on things, Napster doesn't store or copy or distribute any of these files, the program merely points a user in the right direction. They have been charged with copyright infringement and racketeering (these are charges that usually go against the mob, by the way), even though they don't make money from individual transfers, only from copies of their own program.

Metallica, Dr. Dre and the rest of the freaked out music companies need to chill. They'll still make money--as long as they make music that people want to hear.

Long live the new mix tape, better than the old mix tape, which old fogies like me still use to get to and from work every day.

Matt Worley would love it if 350,000 people were stealing from him--it would mean that he had something valuable.