| The New Napster The Record Industry Has Met its Match Hal Plotkin, Special to SF Gate Tuesday, July 10, 2001 If the recording industry thought Napster was a headache, it's going to get a genuine migraine from the latest version of Gnucleus, a free Windows-based open source software program released last month for the Gnutella file-sharing network. The recently improved Gnucleus software is one of several clients such as LimeWire and BearShare that run on the Internet's self-organizing Gnutella network. The software programs combine the shared contents of constantly shifting clusters of about 10,000 or so linked personal computers into searchable interactive archives. Like the now-defunct Napster, the Gnutella clients make sharing songs over the Internet simple and easy. But some of them are owned by private companies, which could conceivably be shut down should the courts eventually conclude they are facilitating illegal file sharing. But not Gnucleus. It can't be put out of business by the record industry or the government, because it's not a business, it's just a piece of free software. The programmer behind Gnucleus has no commercial aspirations. Instead, he says that all he has done is create a new tool for sharing files, one that works without its author exerting any control over it and without him having any knowledge about which files are being shared. Ironically, the recording industry's own lawyers have done the most to help push users toward the legally invulnerable Gnutella network, for which the snazzy new Gnucleus software was written. Last year, the Gnutella file-sharing network was a distant threat and a poor substitute for Napster, mostly because it didn't have enough users, which in turn made it hard to find many popular songs. But shutting Napster down was like squeezing on one end of a digital sausage. The recording industry simply (and entirely predictably) pushed users toward Gnutella. Even an entry-level programmer could have told the record execs that file-sharing through a centralized Napster-like service would have been far easier to control than will ever be the case with Gnutella. As of today, there are already hundreds of thousands of music files available for free on the burgeoning Gnutella network along with all sorts of other media files, including full-length episodes of TV shows such as Seinfeld and The Simpsons, and even one 15-part file purporting to be the latest Star Wars movie. |