One of the biggest stories in today’s headlines is the fact that U.S. District Judge Marilyn Hall Patel has issued an injunction against Napster, a program that allows people to download MP3s off of each other’s computers at no cost.

The reason for her decision against the founder of Napster, 19-year-old Shawn Fanning and Napster CEO Hank Barry – is because she feels that Napster – and I’m quoting here – “created a monster” with regard to being able to download music free of charge. “Piracy be dammed,” is what she claims, “the guts of Napster is all about.”

I have been downloading MP3s for a while and I think it’s a great tool for music lovers like myself. I like a variety of music – from Frank Sinatra to Snoop Doggy Dogg – so carrying around countless CD’s to play in my laptop every day would be a real annoyance – thanks to MP3s, I don’t have to. Now, I can store my favorite songs in my computer and play the ones I want, when I want – and leave the CDs at home.

Downloading MP3s can be a real pain. I would say that for every ten songs I would try to download, I would get one successfully – then came Napster. With Napster, you’re going right to a person’s computer – not a website that hasn’t been updated in months and has a bunch of broken links, so for an avid MP3-er like myself – it was a Cyber-God send.

And now, Napster has 48 hours to shut down. And now, a “community” which brought together thousands of people – including myself – to share each other’s music has to stop because a Judge says we are a bunch of “pirates”.

I think the judge’s decision is wrong. Let me tell you why.

Let’s start with the obvious. If the technology is there, people are going to use it. This dates back to the earliest days of “pirating” as she put it. When personal camcorders were invented, people came up with the idea of sneaking them into movie theaters to record new movies and sell them on video tape for five bucks while they were still in the theatre. So why should people who now have the technology to record music into a file that could be played on the computer stop?

Reason number two – why target only Napster? If you do a Yahoo! search for “MP3” – there are over 500,000 websites that feature MP3s, the exact same type of files that are available on Napster – so does Judge Patel plan to shut them all down too?

Reason number three is a really obvious one. One that doesn’t even need to been stated, but I will say it anyway. If Judge Patel shuts down Napster – won’t someone else release an almost identical program that does practically the same thing? Of course they will – and then what?

Granted, the record companies are losing money from the invention of the MP3, because now, instead of buying the album containing the song you like, all you have to do is download it off of the Web. But this brings me to reason number four as to why Napster should not be shut down – and it’s the most important reason of all. Before there were MP3s, there was a similar “program” that did basically the same thing as Napster. It allowed for people to listen to music and copy it for their own personal use free of charge instead of purchasing the album that the song was on – and it was a lot more readily available then Napster – it was called radio.

So before you go ahead and agree with Judge Patel for shutting down Napster for doing what radio has done for decades, just at a faster speed – think about the reasons that I mentioned – and realize that if Napster didn’t do it, someone else would have…

…and probably will again.