Napster on Hotseat
Napster, a company that was unknown by many is now more popular than ever. Thanks to lawsuits, from music groups such as Metallica and Dr. Dre, Napster is getting a great deal of publicity. What is Napster? Napster is a software program that allows users to share music with other Napster music over the internet. So, a user that has Napster connects onto the Napster server and types in Metallica. Then, the program searches to see if anyone has Metallica music and then pops up a list of Metallica songs. Then the user clicks on the songs he/she wants to download and they are downloaded by connecting to the person’s computer that has the song.
What is wrong with this? Under copyright laws, muscians have the right to protect the rights to their music. If music is copied without the muscians permission, that is a copyright violation. Even though Napster isn’t breaking laws, they are creating a system that makes it very easy for people to break copright laws. That is why the lawsuits are occuring.
The lawsuits haven’t stopped at Napster. Groups such as Metallica are also going after universities that allow Napster. Without high speed internet access provided by many major universities, Napster users must wait much longer for songs to be downloaded.
As a result of all of these things, many universities are banning Napster which has caused many users to switch to a Napster competitor, Gnutella. Gnutella was started by Nullsoft, the popular MP3 software maker. Nullsoft is now owned by AOL and recently Gnutella was shut down after seeing a confict of interest between Gnutella and Time Warner. But, before the project was shutdown, it was released for download for a day and approximately 10,000 people downloaded the program.
Now, websites all over the internet are re-distributing the program and programmers are making Gnutella better. The benifit of Gnutella over Napster is that is that Napster relies on a central server wheras Gnutella doesn’t. If Napster gets into trouble, the central server could be shut down. With Gnutella users connect with one another without a central system, making a shut-down virtually impossible.
Napster has not been all negative, though. As a result of Napster, many companies are re-thinking how it can be used for their businesses. Some DNA researchers are even thinking of using it to share research info with research centers around the world. So, in the future it may be possible to search for a certain gene and download its makup over a Napster like service where it can be used to help researchers.
Napster has created a different way of thinking about the internet. Before Napster, users united or communicated over websites or shared files over ftp sites. Now, users can share things with one another using software rather than websites.
Some other potentially more disturbing for many is that a service like Napster will eventually lead to the trading of software. So, users will be able to search for the latest version of Windows and download it free of charge. Others fear that a service like Napster will be a place where child pornagraphy is traded.
No matter what happens, information piracy will be higher than ever thanks to the information revolution which has made it far easier than ever to transfer information.
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