Peter Sinclair : Ghost of Napster free to roam

I seem to have been writing about Napster almost once a month since the music file-sharer opened its door and yelled "Go for it!"

But what can you do when a technology appears that is so seminal in its implications for the way we compute and do business?

In case you thought last week's decision in the American courts meant the death of the Napster phenomenon, think again. Whether or not Napster survives as a separate entity, its ghost will continue to haunt the web.

Peer-to-peer computing - voluntary user exchanges of content they own on a one-to-one basis - is here to stay.

At last week's O'Reilly Associates' first peer-to-peer (P2P) networking conference in San Francisco, it was apparently hard to find anyone slashing their wrists over the imminent fate of Napster.

Sun Microsystems was too busy rolling out Jxta, a P2P infrastructure that can run high-level commercial applications.

Microsoft involuntarily joined the rush when Xdegrees, a tiny P2P start-up, demonstrated a plug-in for Outlook - Xoutlook, a sliver of code that lets users of Microsoft's e-mailer instantly share files with anyone over the net.

There's nothing new about P2P - sharing files over a network has been a feature of PC operating systems since before the net. But Napster revealed its true significance by switching the emphasis from one-to-one to one-to-many sharing.

P2P becomes inevitable when you look at the increase of networking in almost every area of computing.

"Everyone assumed the client was the centre of computing, with servers pumping out data to the clients," said conference convener Tim O'Reilly in a keynote speech.

"Peer-to-peer is just the realisation that the internet is at the centre, not the client, which is the most significant thing about Napster."

He predicts, for instance, that within 10 years the notion of backup will vanish; data will be stored "redundantly" on thousands of computers around the world - "at the edge of the network," in P2P-speak.

Or, as Freenet's Ian Clarke put it, P2P "achieves placeless data," information dissociated from any geographical area - the very dream articulated at the start by Tim Berners-Lee, the "Father of the Net" and the man who devised the hyperlink.

The Ninth Circuit Court has ruled that "the mere existence of the Napster system" is not illegal; and it acknowledges Napster's inability to police its users effectively.

If the music industry announced that California Dreamin' by the Mamas and Papas was suddenly proscribed and had to be de-listed, for example, what does Napster do when it notices that a song called California Dreaming by the Mothers and Fathers has mysteriously become popular? How does it know that this is not, in fact, some soundalikes from the sticks?

And the court's ruling does not apply to Gnutella or siblings Aimster, Napigator, Newtella and Freenet's own brand-new music-swapper, Espra ...

For those of you who came in late, Gnutella, like Napster, is a distributed info-sharing network which - unlike its predecessor - does not rely on a central server.

Like Freenet and the others, it is specifically designed to have no centre - there is no single entity responsible for it, no one to sue. Under the court's ruling, such music-sharing might not even be illegal.

Last week, the Brussels bureaucrats, whipped along by European music tsars, made florid efforts to nab individual offenders - for ancien regimes seldom go quietly or with dignity, or even for an instant consider change as an option.

Here's Hilary Rosen, president and chief executive of the Recording Industry Association of America : "It's time for Napster to stand down and do business the old-fashioned way ... "

They just don't get it.

petersinclair@email.com

BOOKMARKS


MOST DEJA VU: Google's Usenet

Deja News has finally sunk without trace - but her treasure didn't go down with her.

Deja's "Precision Buying Service" flop has been devoured by eBay's Half.com, and Google has acquired significant assets from Deja.com, including its archive of more than 500 million messages - "a terabyte of human conversation dating back to 1995," reads the message on the old Deja site, which began life as a Unix board in 1979.

Google is now working to restore access to these messages, the largest archive of newsgroups on the net.

"Note to Deja users: the current beta service lacks browsing, posting and many other important features ... Now that the Usenet data has been safely archived, we are focusing our efforts on implementing these features. Please bear with us during this transition."

Advisory: and are they? - no, they're whingeing away like mad.

MOST HOPEFUL: $ponsorDomain

"Individuals and organisations often spend great amounts of time and effort trying to find sponsors. Eventually many of them spend thousands of personal dollars financing themselves ... "

Aucklanders Marcus Hawkins and Catherine Schmidt have designed a website to assist these unfortunates by providing a link between those seeking cash and the business community.

Advisory: charity has to begin somewhere.

Links:

Napster

Groove (peer-to-peer computing)

P2P Conference

Sun Microsystems

Xdegrees

Freenet

Gnutella

Aimster

Napigator

Newtella

Espra

Recording Industry Association of America

$ponsorDomain

Google's Usenet

The old Deja site