Napster CEO Hank Barry has a warning for America's libraries: Change the copyright laws for digital media or suffer the same fate as his company.

"This is a very big battle that were all engaged in and it has very little to do with Napster," says Barry. "It's a battle over access to information."

Speaking before the American Library Association's annual conference in San Francisco Saturday, Barry cautioned librarians who are toying with similar peer-to-peer file sharing for things like documents and books. Just because Napster's copyright problems are subsiding with its recent deal with three of the five major record companies, Barry says that is no reason to think a similar system, even provided by American libraries, wouldn't come under the same scrutiny.

For more than a year now, some Libraries have been looking into a Napster-like system called Docster. The idea is to share files and documents between library branches. Currently, most libraries rely on scanning documents each time a user requests the information.

Barry says that one danger to libraries looking into systems like Docster is the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. He claims the current language in 1988 law allowed the recording industry to force the Redwood City-based company to police its own site resulting in a drop of more than 300 million files available in March 2000 to a mere thousand or so before Napster signed with MusicNet.com

Is The Docster In?

Docster's structure is very similar to Napster's... the requests, that is, not the files.

According to one Library Journal article, it might look like this:

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Researcher A at institution X needs an article... his Docster client is configured to use the X University Library Docster server.
X University Library Docster server searches for his article at other friendly university Docster servers.
Y University Library knows that local researcher B has it.
Y University Library claims the request.
Y University Library tells researcher B's Docster client to send a copy to Researcher A.
Researcher A reads the article, applies to research, wins Nobel prize, donates winnings to X University.

In this transaction (which might take only a few seconds for queries and download time), both libraries know about the article being requested, but X Library can keep A's identity private. Likewise Y Library can keep B's identity private.

Thus the transaction might consist of identification at the institutional level, ensuring the privacy of both parties. But if a copyright payment needs to be made, X Library might pass that through to an enhanced EFTS-like system and then charge Researcher A's grant number (assuming, of course, that Researcher A knowingly signed up for the service). Y Library didn't have to pull anything from the stacks, and Researcher B might have been cooking dinner through the entire process.

Neither library ever stored or transmitted a copy directly; rather they only determined who had a copy (Researcher B) and had a copy sent to the requester (Researcher A). And the paper publisher gets paid. Everybody's happy.

Barry says the problem is that "copyright absolutists" would be able to argue that the files, even though legally available in hard print format, are still subject to intellectual property laws. He called on lawmakers and lobbyists to look even closer at the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.