INTERNET WORLD NEWS, May 15, 2000

What the Courts Will Face After Napster

By Brian Caulfield

Record executives worried about the Napster
( http://www.napster.com ) music-swapping service
haven't seen anything yet. 

Everyone from the Recording Industry Association of America
to Metallica and Dr. Dre is trying to use the legal system to 
restrict Napster -- which a federal judge ruled this month
must stand trial for copyright infringement -- but two
emerging utilities for content distribution may be much more
difficult for a court to control. 

Gnutella, an unauthorized project put together by a group of 
AOL employees, has shown in more ways than one how the
Internet makes it tough to control the distribution of
digital content. Gnutella was quickly shut down as AOL
distanced itself from the project, but the software and the
ideas behind it have escaped into the wild where programmers
continue to develop it on their own. Gnutella, unlike
Napster, or pages hosted on a Web server, doesn't rely on a
single server or index. Instead, users string together their
own ad hoc networks, more like the news groups that existed
on the Internet long before the arrival of the Web. 

Perhaps even more intriguing is Freenet
( http://www.freenet.sourceforge.net ), a project
that makes content available through a distributed network of 
servers. The project, put together by Irish programmer Ian
Clarke, originally as part of his research at the University
of Edinburgh, has gotten widespread media attention as a
technology that may allow users to circumvent intellectual
property laws. Freenet uses encryption; no one knows who on
the network is hosting what. On his personal Web site
( http://www.sanity.uklinux.net ), Clarke states
that the goal of the project is "to provide a means by
which information can be shared without fear of censorship of 
any kind." 

Despite the hype over the intellectual property implications 
of Freenet, Don Marti, publicity director for the Silicon
Valley Linux Users Group, said what intrigues him most is the 
ability for Freenet to automatically duplicate the most
popular content. "For the first time, you don't have to
pay for huge amounts of bandwidth just because you have lots
of people interested in your content," Marti said.
"Freenet servers automatically become mirrors if users
of those servers are interested in your content." 

The implications of Freenet and technology like it are
impossible to predict. But beyond altering the way we think
about intellectual property, such projects may weaken the
network effects at the heart of the valuations of companies
like eBay and AOL as more decentralized mechanisms for
enabling everything from commerce to political speech begin
to emerge.