LATimes Napster Forcing Music Industry to Change Its Money-Making Tune
"Napster Inc., the Internet service that helps individuals trade music files, encourages stealing by making it too easy. For that, it is likely to be shut down by the U.S. courts, despite a recent reprieve. It will probably reemerge as a copyright-friendly service operating with licenses from copyright holders. Napster is already doing what the music industry itself should be doing--making music enjoyable and easy to find.

Meanwhile, the music industry encourages stealing by making people feel justified in doing so. For that, the industry in its present form will also be shut down--not by the courts, but by the laws of economics and the market.

The technology of the Internet has fundamentally changed the economics of the music business. One rule: Being greedy is not illegal, but it doesn’t pay in the long run. That’s the real lesson the Napster case will teach the music industry. Yes, it’s wrong to steal, and yes, the music companies have legally binding copyrights. But the reality is that it’s not good business to annoy both your customers and your suppliers--especially if you’re an intermediary whose added value is questionable."

redux [05.02.00]
Infoworld Napster sends a message to music industry: 'Your customers aren't happy'
"The Recording Industry Association of America wants to educate consumers with the message, "Artists deserve to be compensated -- artists won't make music if they can't make money." I can only imagine the public service announcements with multimillionaire artists pleading for their right to a seventh Porsche in the driveway. There's no rationalization for piracy; it is what it is. However, rampant music piracy online indicates that the music industry's distribution and pricing model is out of whack with what people want. The problem isn't the piracy; the problem is unhappy customers. And the music industry had better do something about it. This is a dinosaur moment -- with the big rock looming overhead -- where the music industry needs to ask itself how it will adapt."

redux [07.31.00]
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."

Inside Human Nature 1, New Paradigm 0: On Gnutella, There Are Plenty of Files but not Enough Sharing
"Napster and other file-exchange services love to tout the virtues of sharing. But a digital world where most people are selfish and don't share files isn't just impolite, it could threaten the future viability of such peer-to-peer networks.

Raising profound issues, two researchers at the prominent Xerox Palo Alto Research Center published a paper on Gnutella last week. Their main discovery: 70 percent of users don't share any files and 76 percent share less than 10. According to research scientists Eytan Adar and Bernardo Huberman, this can lead to system blockages as the relatively few sharers are overwhelmed by file requests from freeloaders. With a few downloaders hogging the available bandwidth, it effectively blocks the majority of users from accessing the tiny pool of file providers.

More importantly, the study implies that copyright interests may have an easier time than suspected chasing down pirates."

The New York Times More Taking Than Giving on the Web
[requires 'free' registration]
"Software programs like Napster and Gnutella have achieved a reputation for fostering a communal spirit of sharing among millions of music-loving computer users.

The reality may be more selfish.

Two scientists at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center have surveyed the behavior of anonymous music downloaders on the Internet and have found that, rather than demonstrating a "from each, to each" ethos, most Internet users are only taking files and not giving any back to their electronic community."

Xerox Palo Alto Research Center: Internet Ecologies Area Free Riding on Gnutella
"An extensive analysis of user traffic on Gnutella shows a significant amount of free riding in the system. By sampling messages on the Gnutella network over a 24-hour period, we established that 70% of Gnutella users share no files, and 90% of the users answer no queries. Furthermore, we found out that free riding is distributed evenly between domains, so that no one group contributes significantly more than others, and that peers that volunteer to share files are not necessarily those who have desirable ones. We argue that free riding leads to degradation of the system performance and adds vulnerability to the system. If this trend continues copyright issues might become moot compared to the possible collapse of such systems."