Napster revolution more than music

The Recording Industry Association of America might have won its battle against Napster, but it has no chance to win against the forces of the Napster Revolution.\nNapster is basically beaten. It signed a deal with Bertelsmann Music Group to charge downloaders an access fee to BMG's stable of artists. Napster has installed a filter to keep users from downloading a list of 135,000 songs sent to it by the music industry. According to yahoo.com, file sharing on Napster has dropped off by 60 percent. Music lovers eventually will no longer be able to download their favorite MP3s for free at Napster.com.\nBut the issue is far from settled. The Internet is still a bastion of individualism, anarchy and mavericks who want to keep it free. The World Wide Web is the last wild frontier where the technology outpaces the rules. The Internet we see today will not be the same one we see tomorrow. These changes alone will make any Napster ruling moot.\nThe Internet company AudioMill, for example, has just released a beta version of the BitBop tuner. With it, a user simply types in the song he or she wants, and BitBop searches the thousands of online radio stations for the requested song. Immediately, BitBop plays the song and sends a permanent copy to the user's hard drive. The big catch is the quality of the streaming-audio dictates the recording's quality -- the worse a user's Internet connection, the worse the audio quality. But technological advances are likely to make streaming-audio sound crystal clear in a few years.\nAudioMill raises tougher legal questions than those of Napster. No laws that restrict people from recording songs off traditional radio broadcasts or restrict people from recording television shows are ever enforced. Is it even feasible to restrict Internet recording?\nAnother example of how technology can circumvent the Napster ruling is that companies have already released programs that can bypass music filters. For example, Napster users can download a program called Wrapster. It masks the real name of the file being posted on Napster, and while the filter can't recognize the deception, Wrapster users can. A second such company, Aimster, also released a free program that uses pig latin in a similar way, but it stopped distributing the software at the request of Napster. But others can still copy the simple code and use it.\nNot only does the RIAA have to worry about this new technology, but the older technology behind Napster has produced a veritable free-MP3 hydra. So many Napster clones exist that the RIAA will have to spend years tracking and closing them down, and that's assuming it is technologically feasible to shut them down.\nFirst of all, the RIAA will have to wade through the Napster clones with central servers (a computer bank of computers that contains the files at an identifiable location). The Internet is dotted with sites like Jnap, Rapster and Macster.\nAnyone can start a Napster clone with OpenNap, the actual Napster code available to everyone with Internet access. To make it easy for people to use these "nap servers," Napigator keeps track of them and allows its users to browse for the songs they like.\nTo make the RIAA's job even tougher, Internet users have come up with file-swapping services that don't depend on a central server. Gnutella is the most popular of these. With Gnutella, individuals provide space on their personal computer at home to store MP3s. It then allows users to search, download and upload from these private computers.\nNo one owns Gnutella. It's just a free program anyone can download, and it's almost impossible to stop. To shut down this type of file swapping, the RIAA would have to target the actual users of the software. It would have to search the hard drives of private individuals and threaten to sue.\nWith all of this changing technology on the Web, along with a group of hardcore enthusiasts trying to keep it free, the RIAA probably will never be able to stop people from downloading free music, one way or another. The best it can hope for is to spend billions of dollars to drive the practice underground, much like child pornography. The problem for the RIAA is that even a small group of sick individuals can keep something alive on the Internet. Just imagine what billions of music lovers can do.