The day free music died

By MICHAEL FOREMAN

Regular users of the Napster music file sharing service who have not logged on for a few days should prepare themselves for a shock.

Since Thursday anyone wanting to download MP3 music files from the network must install a new version of the Napster software, as all existing versions have been disabled.

When I dutifully downloaded and installed the new (version 2 beta 10.3) software, not only did the licence require me to agree to future automatic upgrades, but my existing Napster software was deleted without so much as a by your leave.

According to Napster's website, this enforced upgrade, amounting to an online confiscation, was necessary to comply with a United States court ruling that Napster must block the sharing of copyrighted material over its system.

As previous attempts to identify such tracks based on their file names have been too easily thwarted by users making alterations to song descriptions, a new system of "acoustic fingerprinting" has been implemented that requires the new software.

Unfortunately, the system, which supposedly identifies tracks by sampling their content, doesn't work too well yet.

Napster admitted last week that teething problems with the new software had led to a "temporary but dramatic" drop in the number of songs available.

Late last week the total number of songs, which early this year could be counted in millions, had dropped to the low thousands. Furthermore, some searches yielded some strange results. For example, quite a few users seemed to be sharing five or six identical copies of the same track.

However, even if legal action is threatening to cripple or even kill Napster, other file-sharing networks are ready to take its place.

According to United States-based research firm Webnoize, disgruntled Napster users have already begun migrating to other "peer to peer" (P2P) networks such as LimeWire, Bearshare and WinMX, and file sharing website Zeropaid lists about 40 alternatives.

While such a diversity of options might be expected to split the ex-Napster universe into small insignificant pieces, in fact many of these P2P systems share the same networks.

For example, WinMX is one of several programs based on the Napster-like OpenNap network, while Bearshare and Limewire provide access to the open source Gnutella network. This means that while individual access programs may come and go, the underlying network will always maintain a critical mass of users and content.

The original Gnutella program earned a reputation as being difficult to use, but after trying a few programs listed on zeropaid, I soon discovered that Bearshare, for example, is not just an alternative to Napster but is actually an improvement on it.

A search for tracks by a well-known artist delivered more than 764 possibilities within minutes,

Naturally, the big record companies, which are expected to launch their own (paid-for) digital music platforms before the end of the year, cannot be expected to take such copyright infringement lying down.

But because the open source networks are not owned by anyone, they are not subject to the same legal sanctions as Napster, and their distributed architecture means they cannot be filtered or switched off.

That leaves direct legal action against users as the only option, which alarmingly is a course the Recording Industry Association of America has indicated it is prepared to take.

Links:


Napster

Zeropaid

Bearshare

Limewire

WinMX

RIAA