Today's society is an evolved one. For several decades, perhaps centuries, any creative individual knew that should they develop something new they would be rewarded with money, fame, respect, or perhaps all three. Naturally the easier innovations would, for the most part, be developed first. As time went on for a person to enjoy these rewards their accomplishments had to become more and more complex. To be at the cutting edge has always been a goal for me, and I knew in order to reach this goal that some time in experimentation and even more time in education would have to be sacrificed. This however is not always the case. It seems a combination of factors were able to contribute to a new development that did not require the work of a doctorate. New developments in other fields and the chance happening of the right person having a need and the confidence to go about satisfying the need for himself gave rise to a new development that is so simple, yet so powerful, Napster. Those fields and the unconventional thinking of a man under 21 years old, Shawn Fanning all came together at the same time. He personally developed Napster, and with it came a new way of doing things on the Internet, but unfortunately the rewards of Mr. Fanning did not come without a price, thus the current legal situation.
First what is Napster and what can it do for us? Napster is an example of peer-to-peer technology. The web site http://www.techweb.com defines peer-to-peer networking as: A communications network that allows all workstations and computers in the network to act as servers to all other users on the network. Dedicated file servers may be used, but are not required as in a client/server network. Peer-to-peer puts the power of information sharing back into the users' hands, rather than the giant entities like Yahoo, Lycos, etc. When the World Wide Web started it was my page linked to your page, and that's how a user got around. Today we have these huge portals, which bombard us with advertisements and control the routes we take on the information superhighway. In a pure peer-to-peer network you enter into a network with equal rights as everybody else. Nobody is in control. With this network you share anything you want. If you wanted to (and I would not suggest it) you could share your entire hard drive with the rest of the world. Anybody else who is on the network would do the same. This gives you pure information with no censorship and no bias. You get exactly what your asked for, no 10,000 companies pushing 10,000 pop up windows. With this technology the domain of information is no longer limited to Web pages.
While peer-to-peer may sound unfamiliar, those who have already begun to implement the idea are not in the shadows. Napster is an example of peer-to-peer networking. It does use a central server. However none of the information being shared, the music, ever stays on the server. The server only acts as a median, directing the searches and keeping everybody talking to each other. If you are logged onto Napster, you have a directory on your computer called "MyMusic." Other people on Napster can only see files in this directory and the same is true for you and what you can see on their computer. It all works very simply, there are no adds nor any companies trying to push their new band on you. The fact of how large a database Napster has on it, from personal experience I have seen it range in the single digit terabytes (1 terabyte = 1,024 gigabytes), should indicate its popularity and the domain of songs it contains at any given moment. I have seen artists from Tzchovsky to N'Sync.
For something that is causing such a stir, it really is not a complicated process. To get started all that needs to be done is download Napster v2.0 and run the install file. When you start up Napster you do login to a server, this is where Napster strays from the true ideal of peer to peer; not all peer to peer systems use one, I will explain those systems shortly. Currently there are about four servers run by Napster. However with a program called Napagator you can login into any number of other servers that serve the same purpose, these servers are not under Napster control. They were established by some avid Napster users. While Napster does use a central server, its role is very limited. At login time the server checks your machine and makes a list of what you have on your computer, it looks in your "MyMusic" folder and counts the number of mp3 files. Therefore you can only see the people's computers that are connected to your server, so the terabytes of available music for you to choose from comes from only one of the four servers. When a user is finally connected to a server they may begin the queries. You can search by artist or song title. When you finally have chosen one you like, is where the fun stuff begins to happen. Traditionally, the song would have to reside on the server, but this is where peep-to-peer takes place. The song resides on another's hard drive, and you then get an instant direct connection to them and begin your download, the server never keeps the information being transferred, this is the only reason Napster has lasted as long as it has. I will comment more on this later as it deals with Napster's legal issues. At the same time all this is going on another user may also be downloading from your machine, for this reason people with modems will spend some time to get music. With a 56K modem it can take up to 45 minutes to get a single song depending on how busy things are on the Napster server you are connected to. However you can start multiple downloads and let them be. This is due to the fact that parts of Napster still rely on the server, which may become bogged down with large amounts of traffic. Napster has also added some bells and whistles to refine your searches. As well as let you control how many songs you can be receiving and sending at any given time. Napster however cannot do everything. It cannot control the information that is passed along from user to user, not can it categorize the songs being transferred, i.e. it cannot say this song may be downloaded because it is not copyrighted, and that song may not be downloaded because it is copyrighted. This is what free uncensored information is, the nature of the network is to not care about the content of the material being transferred. In fact it is impossible.
While Napster is the most talked about example of P2P, it is not the only working example. Gnutella may not be as famous, but it is gaining popularity and already has a large fan base to work off of. Gnutella is a true example of a P2P network; there is no central server, no single entity to focus on. Nor does Gnutella only cater to the mp3 pirates, although if you type, say Diablo on Napster, a popular computer game, you may get some hits. On Gnutella if you want to find a great recipe for Lebanese Meat Balls in a Garlic Yogurt Sauce, then chances are you will find it. It is not limited nor intended to favor one kind of information or another. It is similar to Napster in that you choose which directories you want to share and you see the others' directories that they wanted to share with you. Gnutella can be very handy, when you do a search, you are almost guaranteed that it is there. No more stale links or new windows opening up every five seconds. Gnutella also give you anonymity. Because it does not use a centralized server, there are no logs of what is going on or being done when conducting searches.
Have you ever wondered how many people could be listed if you listed everybody you know, and in turn all those people did the same. Well that is what Gnutella does. When a user starts a query, it asks everybody you can see, and then everybody that they can see and so on. Now a search cannot search everybody connected at the time, that would take too long. Instead groups called horizons are made, but each horizon may still contain 10,000 other servers. So it can be a game of chance. If you are looking for a remote piece of information, perhaps it is not in your horizon and it is in others. More still, while all this is occurring nobody knows who initially generated the search. So if an NHL hockey player wants to do some research on pink bathroom wallpaper he can do so with out any fear of being discovered. This does not however apply when downloading. The biggest advantage Gnutella has over Napster is in the legal domain. While Napster is under heavy fire, which will be discussed later, Gnutella will not go through the same scrutiny. Since Gnutella is not specifically designed to spread music, it will attract less attention. Most importantly though, Gnutella is simply a protocol, or a way of trading information. The content of the information is left to the users. Even if somebody though that Gnutella was getting out of hand, trying to land a lawsuit on it would be very difficult. Gnutella is not a single identity like Napster. It does not use a central point, the four or so Napster servers. There is no single entity that can be grasped. This does leave Gnutella at a certain disadvantage; there is no technical support. Even still, if you want to know what kind of stock tire came on a '56 Cadillac, Gnutella is your only chance.
Napster and Gnutella are not the only users of this new technology. Gnutella does have some problems, namely its network can get bogged down and you are only allowed to be in contact with about 1% of all the current users, even though that 1% may equal more than 10,000 users. Two other companies claim to have fixed this set back. Free Network Project is an idea very similar to Gnutella, however it claims to be faster than Gnutella by using intelligent routing and caching. Another company called Centrata is beginning to capitalize on this new technology. They will pay you for you computer use during its down time. With this network they boast, "petabytes of storage, gigaflops of processing power, and a geographic reach the world round." There are many more places we are seeing this new technology popping up, however to discuss each one is beyond the scope of this paper.
P2P technology is today's new buzzword and it looks like it is here to stay. The already weak and crumbling walls preventing the spread of information are almost gone. Hard drive A in Alaska can see B in Japan, and A can even see all the things B can see. Because of the format of the system it is impossible to control where our searches lead us, no misdirection from greedy companies, and no censorship from any source. P2P is pure and free information at its best. It is also a new way of looking at the Internet. Instead of relying on servers to do the work, which will no doubt be bogged down, spread the workload over its users. P2P brings light to a myriad of possibilities, many of which are totally legal.
If Napster is such a simple idea and so easily implemented why was it not done sooner? MP3's are the answer. To start MP3's are a part of MPEG's, or Moving Picture Experts Group, and all they do is compress video and movie data into smaller pieces. These pieces are used in DVD's and HDTV. Along with the MPEG format is the part that handle the audio form videos and film. This particular part of the whole compression process is called MPEG audio layer 3, or MP3 for short. Before the MP3 format had been introduced, the common format for music on a computer was a wav. A wav is the format used in audio CD's like the ones you buy at the store and play at home or in your car. Currently audio CD's hold 74 minutes of music. The audio CD holds a straight version of the digital form of the music. There is a fixed amount of time that corresponds to a certain amount of one's or zero's. This is why there is a fixed ratio between the length of the song and the size of its file. This is where MP3's come into the picture. An MP3 is a wav that has been compressed, so it does not take up as much space. Typically an MP3 will compress an audio CD by a factor of 10-14 and it does all this without hurting the quality of the music. That means on a CD containing only MP3's you can have at least 74*10=740 minutes or 12 hours and 30 minutes of music. Most MP3 files, or one song encoded in the MP3 format, are about three megabytes in size. A CD holds 650 megabytes. That means one just one CD of MP3's a person can have more than 200 songs on it! Unfortunately that does not mean you can play that CD anywhere. Since an MP3 is encoded, to play it you have to decode it, such a task is no problem for the fast computer most people have at home. The CD player in your car and at home are different, they were not produced to do this. However steadily there are players being introduced into the market that play both types of CD's. They have also spawned new types of portable music players. In today's computer society memory is relatively cheap. To build a portable item with some memory is not an expensive process, thus the portable jukebox was born. It is a hand-held device with some amount of storage, anywhere from 32 megabytes to 1 gigabyte that will play MP3's. There is even a watch that holds 32 megabytes of storage, and all this at relatively low prices. I have seen CD players for cars that play normal and MP3 CD's. A friend of mine just bought a portable CD player that plays both kinds for only $125. If you have a CD case that holds 48 CD's, and all of them are MP3 CD's you are set. No more lugging around three or four cases and trying to keep track of hundreds of CD's.
The next question is what kind of magic is happening to allow a wav file to be compressed so much? How are we able to compress so much without loss of data or music quality? There is no magic in how an MP3 works; its main principle is using a compression technique called perceptual noise shaping. This is nothing fancy though; all this technique or algorithm is doing is capitalizing on the fact that human ears cannot pick up on everything. This technique simply cuts out the part of the song we cannot hear or pick up, after that is done other well-known compression algorithms that work on data in general go to work. These use some relations between binary numbers, which is how a MP3 file ultimately breaks down to. The finished product is near CD quality and up to fourteen times smaller.
How this benefited Napster is simple. Today there is simply not enough bandwidth or storage to do it any other way. For the purposes of this paper, bandwidth can basically be considered how fast a download can occur. Since wavs are so large and take up so much space, although getting extra space is getting cheaper and cheaper, it is not economical to store several of them, I am talking in the thousands, on a hard drive. Furthermore trying to download an averaged sized wav file with a 56k modem operating at peak speeds would take about two hours, and when does the crowded Internet ever operate at peak speeds. The smaller MP3 is small enough to store on a hard drive and small enough to be downloaded. Prior to MP3's the ends did not match the means. Between the space on your hard drive and the time it took to get the wavs, too much time and resources were consumed for just a song. This was all changed with the advent of Napster. There has always been a demand to trade songs, MP3 made it economical and Napster made it possible and easy to use.
Intuitively it would seem that a program like Napster, which gets so much attention and brings to view a new technology would have to be made by a large corporation using team of programmers. This is not the case with Napster. Responsibility for Napster can fall on the shoulders of one man, twenty year old Shawn Fanning. Mr. Fanning started work on Napster as a freshman at Northeastern University studying computer sciences. As a naturally curious student who felt his entry-level classes were not scratching his academic itch, he turned to his own programming. He purchased a book from Amazom.com to learn how to program in a Windows environment, and relied on Internet Relay Chat (IRC) to ask experienced programmers and developers about the Internet. He soon however discovered a problem; he and many of his friends liked to trade music over the Internet. While MP3's existed at the time, and many MP3 sites were also in operation, their implementation was not ideal. Links often led to dead ends, and were rarely updated. Finding a particular song was a game of luck. Mr. Fanning was a person with a problem and he felt he had the capabilities to fix it. In his own mind his task was well defined, combine the features of existing programs to work together to enable him to sample large amounts of music. Mr. Fanning spent more and more time researching and asking experienced programmers about the intricate workings of the Internet. He used several newsgroups, using Napster as his nickname or handle to all those who knew him via the Internet. He needed the instant messaging systems of IRC, the file sharing capabilities of Windows, and the searching abilities of popular search engines. Once he started there was no turning back, he committed more and more time to his project, until finally he had no time for school, friends, or the rest of his life. Much to the dismay of his parents he dropped out of school to pursue his idea. He worked feverishly because he knew that with an idea so simple, some company or individual would beat him to the punch. Then the idea would no longer belong to him. Inevitably Mr. Fanning obtained his first prototype. He sent this to friends, who in turn sent it to other friends. They ironed out many of the bugs and he and his uncle incorporated the company in May of 1999. In the ensuing summer he released a beta version, which quickly took off. Since then the Napster momentum has not stopped. "Today the Napster community numbers over thirty two million; for the past four months, it has been growing at the rate of one million new users each week," as said by Mr. Fanning himself at his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee on October 9, 2000.
Unfortunately anything as easy and popular as Napster will come at a cost. This cost is the raging legal situation Napster and the rest of the Internet, for that matter is involved in. The Internet is so new the laws have not been able to catch up. There are currently several legal debates and recent laws passed over things that were impossible before the Internet. The question that is brought up with Napster is its possible infringement of copyright laws. The U.S. Copyright Office defines it as "a form of protection provided by the laws of the United States (title 17, U.S. Code) to the authors of 'original works or authorship,' including literary, dramatic, musical, artistic, and certain other intellectual works." It has also been interpreted to cover source code, or computer software, as well.
However it's just not that simple, as if anything ever is. Law students spend entire classes on this subject matter to fully understand it. Some things though, can be said with certainty. Things that are illegal are the usage of copyrighted material for commercial gain. That is an absolute. Think about it, how many times do you witness this law being broken? Every time you are in public and hear a song being played, unless explicit permission was given, you are in a potentially infringing environment. To legally play a song the proprietor of an establishment must obtain authorization to do so. This holds for any public performance of a copyrighted song. Most places, a nightclub, funeral home, grocery store, or the songs played on a boom box at an aerobic class pay a licensing fee. This usually happens by a blanket fee paid to any number of major performing rights organizations. That does not mean that every mom and pop store is going to be sued by the record industry giants. "Legal action is our last step - we don't want to market our member's music through litigation," said Phil Crosland, senior vice president of marketing for ASCAP. ASCAP is one of the major performing rights organizations. It currently represents 95,000 composer, lyricists, and music publishers making sure they are aware of the options concerning their copyrights and gives permission to commercial establishments to play copyrighted material for a small fee.
Fair is fair, and it is through these laws that enable a songwriter to earn his living. Most of the songwriters make their living off the royalties, the payment that the writer gets every time their song is played on the radio. It may be the case that just pennies are paid per song play, but those pennies add up. The icon of Bob Marley earns millions each year. Even one hit wonder bands can make up to $100,000 dollars a year. "Just One Look (That's All It Took)," by Gregory Carroll and Doris Troy can tell you all about this. There is no glamour here, but it is the nuts and bolts of how people get paid. This is what the bulk of the songwriters hope for, just one song that makes it to the big time, and from that years of royalty checks will be yielded.
To oversimplify things, which is needed to keep this paper within a certain scope, there are things you can do to avoid litigation, or any breaking of the law. If you purchase a CD, you have the right to listen to it anywhere you want to. You can lend it out to fiends and even make copy of it for friends. Having a party? Put that favorite song on without hesitation, however if you are charging admission for this party then chances are you are infringing on copyright law. Also if you charge anything for the copies given to friends then you are in the same state of violation. Even still it is not always that simple, according to Eugene Volokh, a UCLA law professor, the legality of your usage depends on your intentions, are you sharing a great song with your friends to make them happy or trying to make a pocket full of dollars?
This, although it does not seem to, brings us to Napster. Why you may ask does Napster have any legal problems. Napster is not selling the songs; they are not using any of the songs for commercial use? Furthermore at no point did Napster ever have possession of the copyrighted material. This is where MP3.com suffered its downfall. Originally they only housed mp3 files that they had the permission to, but eventually they began to spread several copyrighted songs without explicit permission. The RIAA, Recording Industry Association of America, sued MP3.com for this. MP3.com was forced to pay Universal $118 million dollars for this infraction of the law. The RIAA and others still feels strongly that Napster is in violation of the law, but which law. The others include popular recording artists such as Metallica and Dr. Dre. Their feeling is that while Napster is not in direct involvement of copyright infringement, they are guilty of tributary infringement, which is also the same reason the RIAA has filed suit against Napster. Their suit came first. Basically while Napster is not doing the harm itself, it is enabling others to do so, and in a very large scale. So this pushes the issues to the legality of Napster's users. If it can be proven that Napster users are not breaking copyright laws then it appears as though Napster will be home free, otherwise it will see its demise. However even if you have twenty gigs of pirated software you most likely do not need to worry about a similar lawsuit filed against yourself. If the record industry wanted to go after the millions of Napster users they would have to file individual complaints against each user. Napster has hired David Boies, the attorney defining Microsoft in its recent legal battle. Mr. Boies points out that under noncommercial usage, copying music is "perfectly legal." Congress, through the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992, said that it was legal to make copies and lend them out to people, under the stipulation that it is not for commercial purposes, and that law makes no stipulation regarding the scale of the lending. This gives Napster some chance in this legal battle. Mr. Boises believes it to be "fifty-fifty."
Unfortunately the actual legal battle has not even started. Those who are eagerly waiting the outcome of this, for personal gain (the music) or those that are just curious about the law and its interpretations, must wait on the slow moving wheels of justice. However some action has already taken place. The RIAA is also aware of how long this trial may take, and has sought to file an injunction on Napster. In other words to shutdown Napster untill at least the end of the trial. The initial verdict was in favor of the RIAA, and according to U.S. District Judge Marilyn Patel Napster had to shutdown by twelve midnight on Friday July 28, 2000. She said Napster "is enjoyed from causing, assisting, facilitating, copying, or otherwise distributing all copyrighted songs or musical compositions." This had some very predictable effects on Napster users. Immediately after the injunction was passed Napster users rushed to their computer and instantly began to download, in fear of never being able to do it again. Gnutella's traffic jumped so much that the service went down for a period of time. However all this was done in vain. Two federal appeal judges granted Napster a stay, allowing it to continue in operation for the time being. Even if Napster was or will be shut down, that will by no means eliminate the problem for the RIAA. Apart from the already running peer-to-peer networks already running, there are enough spin offs of Napster to ensure a peer-to-peer network specializing in MP3's. This is the nature of the Internet, huge and very hard to regulate. Not to mention the later versions will be smarter. Other law suites are still pending. The lawsuit filed by Metallica has just been assigned the same judge that granted the injunction filed by the RIAA. It appears the hill Napster has to climb is a steep one indeed.
Napster has earned its spot in Internet history regardless of the outcome of its legal situation. It can rank up there with e-mail and instant messaging. No other site can claim to have grown as fast as Napster did; it passed the 25 million mark in less than six months of operation. It is the textbook definition for a Web application. "It builds community, it breaks down barriers, it is viral, it is scalable, it disintermediates-and, oh, yeah, it may be illegal," as said by Karl Taro Greenfeld writer for Time magazine. Fellow programmers marvel at what Shawn Fanning was able to accomplish with the limited tools and information he knew. I do too, being a senior computer science student. I know more than he did and still question how he arrived to his final product. Who knows what it was? Perhaps it was that Napster was not a possibility five years ago. The time was right. New advancements in other fields, MP3's and faster Internet connections would allow them to be used togather for something new. It just took a confident youthful mind with a need to piece the parts togather. Or perhaps it was just luck, although I doubt it. Now any admirer can only wait and hope for the best regarding Napster's fate, and allow Mr. Fanning to enjoy his success without any major costs.