Earlier this week a Californian court ruled that online music sharing service Napster must stop trading in copyright material. Despite the company’s claim that most of the songs copied are not the copyrighted ones this ruling has put a bit of a dampener on there efforts.

However the people from Napster have come up with a solution now instead of downloading MP3s user will be able to download beer.

People who belong to the Napster ‘community’ will be able to access beer that is held on other hard drives and download it to there own computers.

Napster chief executive Hank Berry told us that this could be the dawn of a new era of drinking. “This could be the dawn of a new era of drinking” Hank Berry told us. “From now on you will never find yourself stuck in on a Friday night with nothing to drink, they will just be able to log on to the internet and download some.”

As with all good ideas various large corporations and busybodies have already set out to try to ruin everyone else’s fun.

Brewers Whitbreads are already threatening legal action. They claim that as people will now be able to download beer for free this could have an impact on the sale of beer in pubs and off-licences and force price increases. However users of the new service claim that downloading beer will not affect there drinking habits. DFTFC editor Chillibear who is a long time Napster user and renowned alcoholic explained to us why he uses the service. “I only use Napster to sample new beer”, he slurred, “For example last Saturday I downloaded five pints of Stella just to see what it tasted like and then when I decided I liked it I went down the pub and drank another six pints. Then I was sick.”

Various busy-body groups have made comments that this might encourage underage drinking and alcoholism, but quite frankly who cares?