Napster Piracy
Lyrics Copyright 2000 Stephen Savitzky.  CC by-nc-sa/4.0.

	To the tune of Barrett's Privateers by Stan Rogers

Oh the year was Nineteen Ninety Eight

    How I wish I was on Freenet now
When people first heard of MP3
And music out on the Web for free.


    God damn them all!  I was told
    You download all your computer can hold
    We'd take our music and pay no fee
    Now I owe three years' pay in royalty
    Because of Napster piracy

Shawn Fanning he wrote a program kewl

    How I wish I was on Freenet now
A fairly trivial piece of code 
For sharing files from node to node

But the clever part was the Napster site

    How I wish I was on Freenet now
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

    How I wish I was on Freenet now
Then I logged on and began to get
The biggest collection on the net

There were thousands of songs there up for grabs

    How I wish I was on Freenet now
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

    How I wish I was on Freenet now
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.''

    How I wish I was on Freenet now
``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

    How I wish I was on Freenet now
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

    How I wish I was on Freenet now
But they can't take my MP3's away
'Cause I got Gnutella yesterday.



Online:
    http://Steve.Savitzky.net/Songs/napster/lyrics.txt

Automatically generated with flktran from ../Lyrics/napster.flk.