Word: napster
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There are many reasons Napster has spread like dandelions, not the least of which is that it's very easy to use. Then there's also the matter of scoring free music downloads encoded in the MP3 file format, but let's focus on Napster's simplicity. Download the software, install it, press Connect and you're ready to start searching. If you want to share the MP3 files on your hard drive with others, you can. But if you don't, that...
...Napster software connects you with a virtual community where you can trade MP3 files with other users transferring files directly from their hard drive to yours. And you don't have to worry about security because Napster recognizes only MP3 files. As far as we know, there's no way for other Napster users to look inside your computer and grab other types of files...
...recording industry, Napster provided another chilling glimpse into the dark void of a postcopyright economy. After spending months hunting down pirates, working on SDMI (the Secure Digital Music Initiative) and investing millions in litigation, battling companies like MP3.com and Scour, the industry may have thought it had begun to stuff the digital genie back into its shrink-wrap. Despite the initial hype about MP3s, the format turned out to be downloadable music for geeks only. The rest of us couldn't be bothered spending hours wandering through dead-end links searching for a particular Phish bootleg. With Napster, however...
...Napster is the greatest example of aiding and abetting a theft that I have ever seen," says Ron Stone, manager of Bonnie Raitt and Tracy Chapman, among other artists. "Ninety-nine percent of their content is illegal." What really bothers Stone and the rest of the biz is the fact that 100% of their content is free--no money for the labels, artists or managers. "Napster is the nail in the coffin if you're in the business of selling digits on a disc," says music-industry consultant Jim Griffin...
...Napster destroys option value, letting you listen for free to whatever you want right now. That's one reason the RIAA filed suit last December, charging that Napster "is operating a haven for music piracy on an unprecedented scale." Yet no pirated files ever sit on the Napster server--Fanning considered legal liability when he wrote the software--so those charges may not stick. Meanwhile, college campuses, claiming that Napster is sucking up too much bandwidth, have begun blocking access to the site. Gnutella, which doesn't require a centralized server, will be harder to shut down. But even...