Napster Versus Metallica

Napster: Launched in 1999, was started by Shawn Fanning as a way to help people find and download music for free in the popular MP3 format.

But was it really all that simple? No, unfortunately it wasn't. The fatal flaw with Napster was it's design. Instead of having a backbone like BitTorrent, Napster had central servers so that when you submitted a request for a song, it would contact the Napster servers, which would then search other people's computers on the Napster network for the song, thus facilitating that song's transfer.

This was fatal for Napster because in early 2000, Metallica filled a lawsuit against Napster for allowing users to distribute their music online without paying royalties.

It's hard to copyright intellectual property which is what Marc over at P2P-Weblog was discussing in his most recent blog. It's relatively easy to copyright something tangible because you can hold it, examine it, take it apart. But who's to say that a song, which expresses certain emotions, feelings, and words, can be copyrighted? How does the creator know that the combination of chords he is using to create a chorus has never been used before?

Napster today is a mere shadow of what it used to be. Today it offers a service just like Apple's iTunes Music Store. You have to pay for every song you want to download. This,unfortunately, was the only legal way for Napster as a company to survive.

Personally, I don't think P2P Networks have anything to worry about. Whenever a corporation or group of lobbyists find some way to shut down a P2P network, like Napster, another one usually pops up to fill the void.

Media & The Internet

The birth of the internet is traditionally traced back to January 1st, 1983 when the National Science Foundation linked several different science department computers together over large distances. This network was called NSFNet which is an ancestor of the internet.

In the beginning, the internet was created by ARPA, later renamed DARPA, which stands for the Advanced Research Projects Agency. It was, and still is, a department within the United States Department of Defense that is aimed at developing new technologies that will benefit the United States Military and Government. But ARPA soon gave control of the internet away to the NSF when the NSF pledged to only use it for scientific purposes.

It's been over twenty years since the internet was created and only a small majority of the work being done on the internet is for scientific purposes. Bittorrent, for example, is estimated at using an incredible one-third of internet traffic today. That means one-third of all traffic on the internet is not people clicking around, reading the news, reading e-books, writing e-mail, or doing research. Instead, most of the traffic is going to people that are downloading movies, games, music, and more. Some of these downloads are legal, but almost all of them are "illegal".

Most bloggers agree that the Net should remain neutral. The folks over at PodTech agree that it should remain neutral and even did several interviews with new companies to try and see how companies like Apple will use new and innovative approaches to distribute media to us in the new 'internet-age'.

Whether media on the internet is restricted or left wide open for Bittorrent users to download and distribute, the legislation currently being debated will change the internet and the world forever.