Word: napstering
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Gnutella follows in Napster’s footsteps as a file-sharing service through which one computer can access files on another—a system often used with copyrighted material. While Napster involves the transfer of music files, Gnutella allows the transfer of videos...
...beginning was the word, and the word was Napster. Sixty million Internet users around the world downloaded this software gratis, used it to swap their MP3 collections and saw that it was good. But the forces of the recording industry feared for their bottom line, and they did smite Napster with every legal means at their disposal. This was easy, since all Napster users had to pass through a central server and could be blocked on the way. Thus were 60 million sinners cast out of the garden of free music...
After that came a list of "begats." Napster begat Gnutella, which begat LimeWire and so on, until the world had (at last count) 176 brands of file-sharing software. But none quite caught the imagination as did their progenitor. They were too slow, or too hard to understand, or couldn't reach more than 40,000 users at the same time without using the same kind of centralized server that got Napster into so much fire and brimstone. One that came very close was BearShare, built in a couple of months by Florida programmer Vincent Falco. "It offers a little...
...first time since Napster, a program had enough users that it could enable them to find just about any piece of popular music they sought, and enough power to locate and download it from their peers in a matter of heartbeats. Yet Morpheus is more than just the second coming of Napster--it is as indestructible as the Internet itself. "It can't be turned off, ever," says MusicCity CEO Michael Weiss. "Someone could walk into our data center in downtown L.A., shut down every server we have, and the network would continue...
...publishers are terrified of any software that makes e-books as free and easy to copy as digital music was with Napster. And there is some justification for this. Consider companies like FileOpen Systems, a tiny New York firm that sells extra e-book security for scientific journals and financial newsletters--small publishers that really need paying customers. Last year ElcomSoft produced a piece of software that cracked FileOpen's code--potentially driving it out of business. CEO Sanford Bingham spent hours on the phone to Moscow in vain. "If they were doing this with credit cards, nobody would have...