Last week a Californian judge granted the Blue Meanies of the Recording Industry Association of America an injunction shutting down the Napster site for the time being. This decision will no doubt come as a great relief to the moguls running the organised racket known as the music industry. After months of defensive warfare they have plugged the hole in the dyke. Trebles all round?
Er, no. To see why, you have to understand the technology. Napster turns your computer into a specialised kind of server. If you had MP3 music files that you were willing to share, you registered them with Napster's database. Thousands of others have done the same with the result that if you wanted a particular track by, say, Elton John, the database would tell you which computers had it. If any of them happened to be connected to the net at the time, then your Napster program requested a copy and the holding machine dispatched it to you.
It's called 'peer-to-peer' networking and it has spread like wildfire, much to the fury of the record industry, which sued Napster on the grounds that most MP3 files are pirated and that the company encourages copyright violation by pointing to the locations of bootleg audio. Napster mounted a vigorous defence but has lost the first skirmish of the legal war.
Nobody knows how the case will pan out in the end but, in a sense, it doesn't matter because the peer- to-peer genie (like the MP3 genie) is out of the bottle. The Achilles' heel of Napster was that it needed a central database, which presented the RIAA with a fixed target at which to aim. But already there are other distributed storage systems like Gnutella and Freenet which file stuff all over the net and yet can still retrieve it at will. Not even the record companies are up to the challenge of these fiendish new schemes.
Peer-to-peer networking is significant for several reasons. The first is that the files that are being shared don't have to be bootleg audio recordings - or even MP3 files. They can be any kind of file - including ones that Jack Straw & Co don't want you to see.
Second, the precipitous spread of the technology refutes the general assumptions of the media industry about their customers - that they are essentially passive zombies who are only interested in consuming the pap that Time Warner & Co want to push at them. What Napster shows is that if you give people technology for sharing and communicating then they will use it.
But perhaps the most important aspect of the Napster phenomenon is what it reveals about the future of broadband technology. The film, television and music industries believe that the huge increases in bandwidth that are in the offing will mainly benefit content providers - by which they mean them. What, after all, would Joe Public want with a fat pipe to the net, other than to consume video on demand?
Actually, Joe Public quite fancies broadband technology because he is already generating quite a lot of content himself which he wishes to share but is prevented by the prohibitive upload times imposed by ye olde telephone line.
Where is this home-grown content coming from? The multimedia lip curls in contempt at the thought of ordinary people originating anything worth transmitting. The answer, however, lies in your local Dixons, Comet or John Lewis store, where people are buying digital still and video cameras and minidisc recorders in very large numbers. These devices produce huge files - a 2.4 mega pixel portrait of baby Johnny, say, or a 50 megabyte video of the kids inhaling jelly at the school fair - which, in an ideal world, one would like to send to Grandma as an email attachment. For ideal, read broadband.
