Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Confused about Napster

Author:Don Arbow
Posted:7/27/2000; 10:10:21 AM
Topic:Confused about Napster
Msg #:19196
Prev/Next:19195 / 19197

I'm not necessarily in agreement with people trading in music that may violate copyrights. But that's what I'm writing about, I'm more interested in the nuts and bolts of this. But this snippet from today's Seattle Times has me confused:

"Napster provided a clear target for the lawsuit because the song files in question actually reside on the company's computer servers. The injunction will likely have no effect on Gnutella and other decentralized "freeware" technologies spawned by Napster. With Gnutella, there is no center; the song files are traded directly between a constantly changing collection of computer users."

Is the article correct? The music is located on Napster's servers? I was under the impression that Napster is kind of like a realtime search engine that links users together for the purpose of sharing music. I thought Napster was just a more focused and polished version of Gnutella.

Here is the link to the article (it has an Associated Press byline so this must have gone out to other papers):

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/news/business/html98/naps27_20000727.html

Don

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