Word: freenet
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...Former Napster devotees - 60 million of my closest filesharing friends - have been glumly awaiting The One from the moment Shawn Fanning's brainchild felt the back of the music label's legal hand. BearShare, LimeWire, Aimster, FreeNet - all of these alternative MP3 swapping services have had their moment in the media spotlight. Plenty of pundits, yours truly included, were eager to anoint at least one of them as Napster's successor . All had their own get-out-of-jail-free cards, in that they had no central server (unlike Napster) and therefore no way of knowing you were deliberately seeking...
...Thomas Dolby sang (and you'd have little chance of finding that track, for one). Aimster had the neat idea of piggybacking on AOL's instant messenger service, but it turned out to be plagued by bugs. And if anyone without a computer science degree has managed to master FreeNet's baffling interface, I'd like to hear from them...
...poky vinyl-enthusiast stores that have no way of communicating with one another. Even though Gnutella clones (like Gnotella and Gnucleus) share the same networks, the technology still segregates users into temporary 10,000-person groups. And those users can forget about sharing with the geeks over on Freenet, which is highly specialized and built on a different technology altogether. Napster-ites need to shift en masse to a single alternative service if they want the same levels of choice. But which one: Splooge? Tripnosis? Filetopia? SongSpy? It's hard to make a decision when you are an anonymous, headless...
...that the free-music revolution is over just yet. Gnutella, iMesh, Aimster and FreeNet are all Napster-style music-trading facilitators, and unaffected by the ruling. Some believe that subtle differences in method will help them beat litigation, although the term "vicarious copyright infringement" tends to sum up the reason for, say, Gnutella's existence just as well as Napster's. But until those services get fat enough on Napster's users to catch the eye of the Big Five music labels (Sony, Warner, BMG, EMI and Universal) and their lawyers, there is such a thing as a free lunch...
...Free peer-to-peer systems (e.g. Gnutella and Freenet) are multiplying and becoming more user-friendly," writes Fisher, who is also a member of the Berkman Center. "If a chastened Scour began charging for its services (as Napster/Bertlemann suggests it will), then many of its 7 million users would likely flee to free alternatives...