Friday is supposed to be a good day, but Redwood City-based Napster wishes the last one never came. Twenty groups, lead by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), and even The White House itself filed briefs in the Ninth Circuit United States Court of Appeals late Friday denouncing the popular online music-sharing resource, and asserting their support for the Recording Industry Association of America's (RIAA) copyright infringement suit against the company.

The MPAA, which represents practically all of the American motion picture, home video and television industry, filed the brief along with both the Writers and Directors guilds of America, the Professional Photographers Association, and even the National Basketball Association. The White House also voiced support for the RIAA Friday, saying Napster's recent argument that Mp3 technology had turned computers into home recording devices (and, consequently, protected by the Audio Home Recording Act) was self-defeating, and would elevate copyright infringement to a "scale beggaring anything Congress could have imagined."

"With one voice, we band together to send a simple and clear message: It is wrong to build a business that relies on the theft of copyrighted materials, and we oppose Napster's business model for doing just that," says Jack Valenti, President and CEO of the Motion Picture Association of America.

Napster was quick to rebuff the filings, saying the Audio Home Recording Act (AHRA) is only one facet of legal support for the company's case. Napster Attorney, David Boies, in a statement Saturday, says the government's focus on the AHRA was clear neglect of several other precedents.

"We noted with interest that the government, in focusing only on the AHRA, explicitly chose not to take a position regarding Napster's liability and did not address...the DMCA or any other issue raised in the case," says Boies

The DMCA, or "Digital Millennium Copyright Act," may very well end up being Napster's trump card. Originally passed in 1998, the Act, among other things, limits Internet service providers from copyright infringement liability for simply transmitting information over the Internet. Napster has said its service falls under that same liability protection because it's proprietary software simply enables users to search for music on other Napster members' computers, similar to a service provider enabling someone to search the entire Web. What the user does with that "content," goes the claim, isn't Napster's problem.

The fact that Napster never actually stores any of the infringing songs in question on its own servers is primarily what has (so far) kept its case alive. Last Wednesday, MP3.com, another popular digital music distributor which has also voiced opposition to Napster, was handed down a whopping $200 million dollar fine because the service allows members to store copies of CDs on its site. The company claimed it took measures to assure members could only upload and listen to songs from CDs they had purchased beforehand, but both the court and the RIAA (which filed that suit as well) obviously disagreed.

While the media continues to blanket the public with coverage of the ongoing case, representatives from all sides agree that the end result will set tremendous precedent for the future of copyright law on the Internet. Not everyone in corporate American opposes Napster either. Many companies, including Yahoo!, Oracle, and AT&T, are worried as to what an anti-Napster ruling might imply to the whole field of online copyright law, and recently filed joint statements suggesting current intellectual property protection laws as they apply to cyberspace are "too controlling." Even the American Civil Liberties Union has cautioned the Court to be wary of a strict ruling against the service.

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List of Friday's filers:

Association of American Publishers,
American Federation of Musicians of the United States and Canada,
American Federation of Television and Radio Artists,
American Film Marketing Association,
American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers,
American Society of Media Photographers,
Amsong, Inc.
Broadcast Music, Inc.,
Directors Guild of America,
Graphic Artists Guild,
Interactive Digital Software Association,
Motion Picture Association of America, Inc.,
National Basketball Association,
Office of the Commissioner of Baseball,
Producers Guild of America,
Professional Photographers Association,
Reed Elsevier, Inc.,
Software & Information Industry Association,
Songwriters Guild of America,
Writers Guild of America, West, Inc., and The
White House.