Napster's termination of its "free-for-all" approach to online music by doing a deal with media giant Bertelsmann looks like David selling his soul to Goliath for a quiet life. But it does not mean the end of swapping music (or films, or books or anything else that can be digitised) on the internet. Napster, headed by Shawn Fanning, a 18-year-old college drop-out, started life as an "us versus them" move to swap songs without charge on the internet. In two years, it has become the most spectacularly successful phenomenon in the brief history of the world wide web. More than 38m people around the world have downloaded the software enabling them to swap music files from their hard disks without paying.

Not without reason, the music industry has been apoplectic. The big corporations, fearing their royalties would disappear down a web plughole, ganged together to sue Napster (even though sales of CDs continued to rise during Napster's ascent). Now, one of them, Bertelsmann, has broken ranks to a buy a stake in Napster and to negotiate royalty payments through a membership system. The trouble (for them) is that Napster has already spawned dozens of similar "peer-to-peer" (P2P) services, which avoid legal pitfalls by dispatching their files direct from computer to computer instead of shunting them through a central server.

No matter what happens to Napster, napsterisation will march on. If music can cut out the computer in the middle, then so can films, books, audio and electronic commerce - a warning to all the business-to-business electronic market places now being constructed. Millions of Napster's devotees may now migrate to other P2P sites with the feeling that the pioneer has sold his soul. They have no objection to artists being rewarded for their copyrights. But many will feel that this is just another way for corporate middlemen to cream off a disproportionate share of artists' income. This war is only just beginning.