Word: napster
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...Greenleaf's commentary regarding Napster (The Yap of Nap, Feb. 20) ignores the fact that musicians have always had a way to make money independently of the major record labels: It's called the stage...
Many music fans support Napster because they believe that the quickest way to rid the airwaves and the world of the studio-created trash that now dominates is to destroy the commercial viability of recorded music. Force everyone back onto the stage, and then we'll see who the real artists...
Though it ruled out what had been most of Napster's case, the Feb. 12 decision by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals was not a mortal blow to the peer-to-peer model. But the next round of Napster-inspired lawsuits, some of which are already on the horizon, will soon reveal whether the decision was a one-time strike against a poster child for music piracy--or the beginning of a long crusade against promising technological advances...
...best alternatives could be the most legally vulnerable. Take Aimster, the Napster clone that relies on AOL's ever popular instant-messaging software. Download it (from Aimster.com) and you'll get an unseen extra layer to your buddy list, called a Buddyizer. This means that theoretically you can trade your MP3s with some 60 million "buddies." Hey, presto: an instant Napster-size network. As a bonus, Aimster currently searches Napster as well. "People already have thousands of MP3 files on AOL. All we did was add a search function," says Johnny Deep (his real name), 43, a software engineer...
Ultimately, users will migrate to the services offering the most ease of use. So step forward, WinMX (at WinMX.com and FileShare (at MusicCity.com) the only sons of Napster who remembered to copy one of its essential components: the ability to write the name of the band and the name of the song you are looking for in separate search fields. When you're downloading tunes by the dozen, such things matter more than a cute logo. Then again, this is such an arbitrary decision that it could come down to which animal looks best in headphones...