Napster Piracy

Lyrics © 2000 Stephen Savitzky. CC-by-nc-sa.\ To the tune of Barrett's Privateers by Stan Rogers

Lyrics [pdf] [txt] [cho]

Oh the year was Nineteen Ninety Eight

When people first heard of MP3

And music out on the Web for free.

Shawn Fanning he wrote a program kewl

A fairly trivial piece of code

For sharing files from node to node

But the clever part was the Napster site

Where people could trade their songs for free

And pay not a nickle of royalty.

So I got a big disk and a cable line

Then I logged on and began to get

The biggest collection on the net

There were thousands of songs there up for grabs

I was hooked up in one of the fastest ways

But to fill a hundred gig took two whole days

At length they were sued by RIAA

They said ``You have done us many wrongs

To go and make copies of all our songs.''

But Napster said ``There's no music here.''

``We're a kind of search engine, don't you know.

(Our users may have some trouble, though)''

So it looks like Napster may get off clean

I laughed 'til the summons came down for me

And the charge they made was piracy.

Well I learned my lesson and paid my fine

But they can't take my MP3's away

'Cause I got Gnutella yesterday.