TechWeb Napster An Indicator Of Online Culture Change
""A culture change is coming," said Esther Dyson, chairman, EDventure Holdings, author, and board chairman of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers the international organization charged with technical administration of the Internet."

"The rise of peer-to-peer technology is going to change how companies do business and how consumers are perceived, she said. "It's a whole new attitude," Dyson said. It will also be a challenge to harmonize it with existing copyright law and business models, she said."

"The vision behind peer-to-peer technology, content, and applications is more idealistic than commercial models. "People become the producers rather than just consumers. It's run by the people and for the people. It gives users world economies of scale. It used to be you'd have to be part of an institution to have that," Dyson said."

redux [05.22.00]
Washington Post e-power to the people
"Both the beauty and danger of Gnutella are that it is a more sophisticated version of Napster, the infamous and popular program that college students have been using to swap music files over the Web. Napster's developers have recently been hit with a flurry of copyright-infringement lawsuits. But unlike users of Napster, Gnutella aficionados can trade files without going through a storage center, making it impossible to shut down the system without unplugging every computer on the network and difficult to control by laws because there's no central authority."

"Marc Andreessen, a co-founder of Netscape Communications and a former chief technology officer for AOL, compares Gnutella to a benevolent virus, a "revolutionary" program that spreads the power of publishing from an elite set of corporations to anyone who has a computer."

ZDNet Linux leaders: Beware of Napster
"Leaders of the "open source" software movement have a message that some of their followers may not want to hear: Beware of Napster."

""Piracy is bad," says Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, when asked about the matter. "Of course you should be able to sue over copyrights. The one good lawsuit in the whole Napster case is the one by Metallica: a suit by the actual authors. While it's probably motivated mostly by money, I can still at least hope that there is a strong feeling of morals there, too."

Larry Wall, developer of the Perl language, has a similar perspective. "Open source should be about giving away things voluntarily," he says. "When you force someone to give you something, it's no longer giving, it's stealing. Persons of leisurely moral growth often confuse giving with taking."

Wired Get Your Music Mojo Working
"A new file-sharing system could best rivals like Napster and Gnutella through more anonymous and efficient transfers.

The service has an innovative feature that rewards users for uploading and distributing files: payment in a form of digital currency called "Mojo." "

""It's a cross between Napster and eBay," says Jim McCoy, the 30-year-old CEO of Autonomous Zone Industries, which created the open-source MojoNation software.

McCoy's goal is nothing if not ambitious: to create the first file-sharing economy of agents, servers, and search engines in which senders and receivers can agree on prices for each transaction and use micropayments to get paid."

redux [05.13.00]
WebReview The Value of Gnutella and Freenet
"Notice how much bad press has fallen recently on the networking technologies Gnutella, Freenet, and Napster? I think some of the public alarm over genetic crop modification has cross-pollenated over to software. Suffering from legitimate fears over far-reaching technologies like genetic modification, the Strategic Defense Initiative, and nuclear waste disposal, the press and the public are ready to listen to anything bad said about anything new—even a clean, open, noninvasive technology like distributed computing.

If you check my biography, you will see that I make my living selling content. I do not extend knee-jerk sympathy to systems publicized as ways to circumvent copyright enforcement. But investigating Gnutella, Freenet, and Napster, I have been pleasantly surprised to find that they're intriguing innovations in the best tradition of the Internet pioneers. While it's important to talk about their potential for the distribution of illegal content, we have to look at their larger goals and the promise they offer."

Freshmeat Client As Server: The New Model
"The RIAA mentality is one and the same as that of the Russians of yesteryear: a desire to stop the flow of information through the network. The answer to the Russians is one and the same as the answer to the RIAA: a completely distributed system. If every client on the network was connected to a handful of other clients, each of which in turn connected to others like some apocalyptically enormous online incarnation of Amway, then every person could have some connection to every other person through a chain of mutual acquaintances. It's Six Degrees of Freedom."

"This is a "virtual Internet" of sorts in which links are not physical (a wire from you to me) but logical (I know you). Data flows through this "web of friendship" in such a way that it looks like you are only talking with your friends, when really you are talking to your friends' friends, and so forth."