Napster's Ripple Effect
July 29 -- There’s proof in Napster numbers.
As the possibility of a court-ordered shut down of the online music-sharing service enteredthe realm of probability this week, millions of people scrambled to Napster.com for that one last download. And that, if nothing else, is a sign ofthe times.
Napster is an Internet file-sharing company that exploded onto the college scene last August. By early this year, network administrators from Boston University to Edinburgh University were up in arms, caught in a web of download congestion.
And although some schools banned access tothe site because of online traffic jams, and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) sued Napster last December for copyright infringement, Napster’spopularity did not wane. Its user numbers are estimated inthe millions, and even though their beloved venue faced a shutdown, there are plenty of alternatives should Napster lose its case against the RIAA.
“If you shut down Napster, there are so many peer-to-peer groups in the wings or underground,” says James Isbester, an intellectual property attorney.
Share and Share Alike
Napster works through what is referred to as ahub-and-spoke distribution environment. If you picture itsnamesake wheel, Napster’s Web server is the central hubthat contains a vast inventory of available MP3 files andconnects to spoke-like users who have those media ontheir own computers.
Peer-to-peer environments don’t need a central place like Napster, however. One such program is Gnutella, a free, open-source method of sharing programs.Once you have the Gnutella program on your hard drive,you connect to a fellow Gnutella user through his IPaddress and can exchange media with anyone attached tothat cluster. If you don’t see what you need on that firstaddress, you can switch to a different address to see adifferent set of users/media.
Programmers at Nullsoft, a subsidiary of America Online, briefly loosed Gnutella on the Webback in March for only several hours, but it spreadlike wildfire. And it has been cloned and distributed across theNet by millions of users.
