Napster

Are you sitting down?  For those readers who are not currently attending college, here is the Internet technology that will blow you away – Napster.  Before details, a little techno-background follows.

Sound files (music and a host of recorded audio information) have been cumbersome to handle on the Internet because of large file size. Large files crawl on the Information Superhighway.  Until recently, the .wav (pronounced wave) format was a standard file type used to generate sound (like music) on the multitude of computers populating the nodes of the web-universe.  Recently, a new highly efficient (read: produces small music files) compression scheme called MP3 has emerged.  Almost immediately, computer savvy music lovers took their CDs, “ripped” copies of the songs off the silvery disks and encoded the music into the economical MP3 format.  The song files, now stored on the hard drives in digitized MP3 form, were played back through headphones and speakers.  Executives in the music industry viewed these events with horror bordering on panic.

Web site Distribution

Following true Internet tradition, almost immediately, the smallish MP3 song files were posted on Web sites for everyone in the web-community to visit and download.  Roadmaps indicating the often secret location of these sites were posted in Usenet newsgroups - the wild, wild west of cyberspace.  Almost all music is copyrighted.  In less time than one could say “intellectual piracy,” music industry agents uncovered offending sites and threatened the operators with punishing lawsuits.  Offenders shut down or changed the offerings to non-copyrighted music.  Essentially, a snow fence had been cobbled together ahead of an Alpine avalanche.

Enter Shawn Fanning

In Boston, a 19-year-old Northeastern University freshman computer science major, named Shawn Fanning liked music.  In a stroke of pure cyber-insight, he developed a program that allows users to share the music files rather than retrieve them from a centralized “serving” location.  That program is Napster.  It works this way.  A music lover goes to the Napster Web site and downloads a software program that allows him or her to become a citizen of a special cyber-world – the Napster Community (NC).  Armed with NC citizenship software, each member of the clan agrees to turn a part of his computer into a device that dishes up or retrieves music from other Napster-ettes.  Napster central (where one lands once the NC software is launched) provides a dynamic database containing song titles within the community available for transfer to other citizens. When a Napster-ette turns off his or her computer thereby leaving Napster-land, the database recognizes the departure and removes the titles from the database.  Simple.

The Search Function

The Napster Community (NC) is the fastest growing segment of the net community.  Everyone who has used the Web for more than a day knows how to use a search engine.  Building on this methodology, finding a song within NC is intuitively simple.  For example, enter the key word “Sinatra” (no quotes) in the “artist field.”  Napster then generates a hotlist of every member of the NC community that has a Frank (or Nancy) Sinatra song available for transfer to other members.  A click on the hotlinked title and the MP3 file (like “New York, New York”) starts its journey across the net to the computer requesting it.  The process is nothing short of magical.  At its core, Napster disperses the song file distribution function across hundreds of thousands of clan members making copyright enforcement a nightmare if not impossible.

From Panic to Apoplexy

The music industry transitioned from horror to abject fear and loathing with the emergence of Napster.  Fanning, now in Silicon Valley, enjoys a horse choking wad of venture capitol money, professional management, and tons of publicity.  He hangs on for the ride of a lifetime.  Broad mega-lane information routes connect many colleges and universities to the Internet backbone.  College students across the land have access to these resources.  Starting at Hofstra University on Long Island, growing numbers (over a dozen so far) colleges and universities are banning Napster on campus networks.  Overloaded networks have slowed to a crawl burdened by MP3 packets.  Under a student the banner of “free Napster,” a movement (Students Against University Censorship - SAUC) originating at Indiana University has students fighting back.

Next week, I will give you a first hand, step-by-step tour of the Napster experience.  Stay tuned.

URLs (Uniform Resource Locators) of interest:

http://www.napster.com

http://www.savenapster.com/

http://www.mp3now.com/html/glossary.html

(This is the 196th of a series of elementary articles designed for surfing the Internet.  Next, Napster - The Experience is the subject on tap.  Stay Tuned.  Until next week, happy travels through cyberspace.  Previous issues of Internet Info for Real People can be found: http://www.thebee.com.  Please e-mail comments and suggestions: rbrand@JUNO.com or editor@thebee.com.)