from: http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,37831-2,00.html Click Here: <A HREF="http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,37831,00.html">W hy Music Trading Won't Die</A> ----- Why Music Trading Won't Die by Michelle Delio 11:30 a.m. Jul. 27, 2000 PDT Amid the howls of protest and shouts of glee over Wednesday's court order forcing Napster to shut down its file-sharing application, some members of the open-source software community are quietly discussing the possibility that Napster's loss in court may not be such a bad thing. "Shutting Napster down won't stop file exchanges," said Joseph Valliente, an open-source software developer. "But what it may do is drive people to the many open-source alternatives that are out there. "And maybe, just maybe, they'll take a closer look at what open-source standards offer to all of us while they're downloading their tunes." Two of the programs that most MP3-seeking surfers will now turn to, Gnutella and Freenet, are both based on open-source or free-software standards which stipulate sharing of information and decentralized control over that information. Both allow users to send and receive all kinds of files without going through a central, single server. Once a file is "set free" onto open servers, it is nearly impossible for anyone to stop anyone else from downloading it. "You'd have to shut down the Internet to stop Gnutella or Freenet," said "Pheron," a Linux developer. "There's no main artery for the suits to tie off that can stop the flow of information in a truly open system." Scour, the other likely alternative to Napster, is "closed source" and already faces its own day in court. Many advocates of Gnutella and other open-source file-transfer programs believe that these applications haven't been widely adopted because people find them hard to use. Freenet, for example, isn't searchable in the same way that Napster is. "And that's a feature, not a bug," said "Swine1," a Freenet user. "It keeps people from easily finding where something is stored on the network, so they can't tell you to remove it. Instead, you have to find things by using 'keys.' You do this by telling someone what key you're using, making an educated guess, or checking out key indexes. Pheron and Valliente believe that Napster's transfer shutdown will force people to "educate themselves" to use the open-source alternatives. They suggest that people start off by using Napigator to access one of the open-source Napster servers like "Insomniac," "Nakednap," "OpenNap," "PhrozenNap," or "ProcrastinatorNap." With the large amount of open servers available on the Internet, some open-source supporters think that Napster's troubles started when the company "violated" the idea behind the grassroots, open-source transfer systems that they copied by making their program a closed system. Angry Coffee launched Percolator, a Web-based MP3 search engine that CEO Adam Powell says improved upon Napster's "speed, music vault and cavalier attitude towards musicians". Percolator launched on June 24 and was blocked from searching Napster's server two days later. "No cease-and-desist letter, phone call, or anything. They just said we were a bot and locked us out," Powell said. Napster bans bots, which are small automated applications that comb the Net looking for information. Some owners of music search sites, like Powell, believe that Napster's bot restriction is just a devious way to keep Napster's service closed. Napster may have had another reason for banning Percolator. Unlike most of the open-source options for downloading MP3s, Percolator is easy to use. "It's just like using any other Web search engine," said Powell, who believes the future of digital music downloads will be Web-based. He doesn't think that many of the open-source solutions are quite ready for prime time use. "In another year or so, they will be ready for wide use. Now the code is still flaky and the interfaces are very clunky. The programmers still need some time to think their code out," Powell said. He said that his site had a definite traffic surge Thursday, and he believes people are looking for alternatives to Napster. That makes him happy, because he thinks Napster's ethics are debatable. "Percolator is really a big subversive prank. All of us here at Angry Coffee are working musicians, and we are all very ethically unsure about what we're doing with Percolator," Powell said. "We do know we're definitely promoting our political agenda to break down the old system of record label companies, but we'd also like to break down Napster too while we're at it. There's got to be a way to take care of the artists and their fans." Powell said his company will continue to focus on ways to get artists paid for their music while providing people with easy ways to download the music that they want. Elliot Prado, a computer programmer and musician, agrees with Powell that Napster didn't care about the programs' users or the musicians whose songs they made available. He also can't believe that Napster's executives didn't see this coming when they released their "silly, closed-source, centralized program." Prado wonders if the company may have also thought that it would be selling the Napster application by now, and have "cushy contracts" with the recording industry. "They were getting ready to sell out," Prado said. "I think they wanted to set up a system where they would track what people were downloading and sell that information to the record companies. That's where their profit would have been made," he said. "But they underestimated the rage of the music industry." Copyright � 2000 Wired Digital Inc., a Lycos Network site. All rights reserved. <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance�not soap-boxing�please! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'�with its many half-truths, mis- directions and outright frauds�is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRLgives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply. 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