On July 2, the Napster file sharing network went offline in response to a court ruling issued by U.S. District Judge Marilyn Hall Patel. The ruling stated that the company’s free trading of copyrighted songs was illegal.
Today, Napster is still offline, though the company has plans to introduce a new membership service sometime early next year. However, the file sharing concept begun by Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker in 1999 lives on through numerous new companies such as Limewire and Morphius.
Many of these new programs, called peer to peer computing networks, are used everyday by people around the world. These file sharing networks are not all alike.
According to Gnotella co-founder Jonathan Levinson, there are actually two different types of file sharing networks; a true P2P network and a hybrid P2P network.
“In a pure P2P network, like Gnotella, there is no server. There are only equals connecting to each other. A hybrid, or hosted, P2P network uses a server (such as Audiogalaxy and Napster),” said Levinson.
He added that the hybrid networks have people who monitor and maintain the server, and that it is those people who can be held accountable, under U.S. law, for anything done over their server.
Still, companies using servers have found loopholes for this also. One company, Kaazaa, made use of several servers that were located outside of the U.S.
The courts are still trying to figure out how to deal with U.S. based computer servers, and Kaazaa technically falls outside of this category, even though it is used by people in the U.S.
So far the “pure” P2P networks, like Gnotella, have yet to attract the wrath of the government or the Recording Industry Association of America, because they are a decentralized network of computer users. The software is all that is provided for Levinson’s Gnotella users. There is no server and there is no one in place to monitor what the users do with the software.
“In a pure P2P network there is no way to supervise what is going on,” said Levinson.
“We tell our users not to do anything illegal, and that if they are caught they will lose the privilege of using the software,” said Levinson in regards to the fact that people do still use file sharing networks like his Gnotella to trade copyrighted music.
Levinson believes the P2P networks can, and should, serve many other purposes aside from being a music swapping forum. With a program like Gnotella, which has users in over 130 countries, people can set up their own virtual private networks which can be used to distribute any kind of digital content, such as the mailing of digital photos, or sending out a mass announcement at a work place.
Levinson said that these type of things, not trading music, represent the future for the P2P networks.
College students represent a significant percentage of the people who download copyrighted music through the use of file sharing, more so now because many universities now offer DSL (digital subscriber line) service in resident halls and in computer labs.
Aaron Mendelsohn, a senior majoring in electrical and computer engineering, said he uses P2P networks like Morpheus a couple of times a week to download music.
Mendelsohn, who has been using file sharing networks since his freshman year, said that he uses them to find music which can not be purchased in stores, such as live sets and “b” sides. Even though he gets free music off of the Internet, he usually buys about five CDs a week.
Still some students have taken it to an extreme. An article in The Lantern last May cited one case, which aroused national attention, at Oklahoma State University. A student, using Napster, was found with approximately 10,000 copyrighted songs on his computer. The university, after being contacted by the RIAA, confiscated the student’s computer.
In May 2000, OSU adopted the Policy on Responsible Use of University Computing Resources in an attempt to deal with the problems posed by the new computer networks and what students were doing with them. The policy follows the principle that cyberspace does not occupy a separate legal jurisdiction, and the downloading of copyrighted music off the Internet is a felony.
The university has blocked a few servers from being used through the campus computer network, Resnet, and it has also restricted the amount of space available to other networks. Although, this is not because of the downloading of copyrighted music.
“Peer to peer software sucks up the bandwidth of the system,” said Resnet network manager Fred Elliot. According to Elliot, this year the university purchased an additional 10 megabits of network space for $40,000 and it does not want to give up the large amount of network space that P2P programs would occupy.
The illegal downloading of music is still a problem though, and Elliot said the university has been contacted by record companies about students who have downloaded copyrighted material.
“People think it’s no big deal but most companies monitor things like that,” Elliot said.
Along with eating up the bandwidth space, servers can present many other serious problems, according to Bob Kalal of the Office of Information Technology.
“Servers are a big security hole for the university,” Kalal said.
He cited the recent problems that the Microsoft Internet Information Server had with the Code Red computer virus. Kalal said that through a server someone can create a back door into another person’s computer without them being aware of it.
The future for P2P networks seems cloudy.
With several appeals cases pending, Sheldon Halpern, a law professor who specializes in copyright, trademark, defamation and privacy law, believes that the music industry, not the government, will find a solution to the problem posed by P2P networks.
“I assume the record companies will make the desired songs available to the consumer at a cheaper price,” said Halpern. He believes the price decrease will eliminate the need to use a computer server in order to locate music.
