Thursday, May 15, 2008
By smashing Napster, the music industry has pushed its customers to seek alternatives that won't be so easy to shut down.
Jul 20, 2001 | It's now nearly three weeks that Napster has been out of commission. The music file-sharing service had already seen some drop-off in usage as it tried to tighten up controls on the trading of song files that record companies had specifically requested be barred. But at the beginning of July, Napster announced that it was going offline for some "technical upgrades." It remained out of commission as the judge presiding over the case brought against it by the RIAA, the recording industry trade association, decreed that it cannot open its doors until it has achieved 100 percent effectiveness at banning copyrighted files. (The company says it can only promise 99 percent and change.) On Wednesday, an appeals court reversed that order, but as I write, the service remains down.
Given the size of Napster, this may well constitute the largest service outage ever in online history. But those millions of Napster users aren't just sitting on their hands: They're spreading out across the Net. They're picking and choosing among the myriad new "peer-to-peer" file-trading offerings that have sprung up in Napster's wake. They may be excited by the new wrinkles the developers of these new services have devised; they may be frustrated by the limitations they encounter. Either way, they're still swapping files.
It's this year's mass Net movement: the Napster diaspora. As predicted, the crackdown on Napster is now leading directly to the widespread adoption of alternatives that are less legally and technically vulnerable to the kind of attack that has hamstrung Napster.
This ought to be keeping the RIAA awake at night.
Napster always had two basic assets: First was the simple idea (one that had been around for a while -- Hotline was a key predecessor) of sharing portions of users' file collections and making those files easily searchable. The power of that idea, and the simplicity with which Napster executed it, allowed Napster to amass its second asset -- a vast base of users, whose sum total of files represented by far the largest widely accessible library of music ever assembled.
In the wake of the legal assault upon Napster, both of those assets are in jeopardy: The idea of sharing music files now belongs to dozens of companies, independent developers and fans, who will carry on with it regardless of the fate of Napster Inc. And no one knows whether Napster's millions of users will return to it when it reopens its doors in its new incarnation -- as a for-pay service allowing the transfer of only those files owned by participating companies, in a new proprietary ".nap" format rather than the popular MP3.
In an e-mail sent to users who volunteered to test the new versions, Napster admitted, "We expect that Napster will start small and grow, just as it did when Shawn [Fanning] first released it 2 years ago." But that new-model Napster will be competing with a long list of alternative services -- a welter of commercial and not-for-profit enterprises, grass-roots technologies and renegade Web sites, all offering Napster-like services in new configurations.
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