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NAPSTER SCRAMBLE FRANTIC MUSIC FANS LOOK FOR OTHER FREE SOURCES.


Byline: Jesse Hiestand Staff Writer

No Napster - no problem.

Users of the popular song-swapping service are on the prowl for a ``new'' Napster after the original was ordered Monday to stop sharing copyrighted material.

The field of contenders is vast, fractured, competitive and ultimately lacking in the one thing that made Napster such a hit - ease of use.

Non-Napster options from Aimster to Napigator, FreeNet to Angry Coffee, offer free, often anonymous file sharing Copying files from one computer to another. See peer-to-peer network, file sharing protocol and file and printer sharing.  at a price of searches that, if possible at all, can be cryptic, slow and severely limited.

Even front-runner Gnutella was reported last week to leave users vulnerable to identity and data theft when they log on to its cyberspace swap meet swap meet
n.
An informal gathering for the barter or sale of used articles or handicrafts.
.

``The most casual users will quit until something easy comes along,'' said Heath Terry, an analyst with Credit Suisse First Boston Credit Suisse First Boston was originally the trading name of the Financière Crédit Suisse-First Boston, a London-based 50-50 investment banking joint venture formed in 1978 between the First Boston Corporation and Credit Suisse.  in San Francisco San Francisco (săn frănsĭs`kō), city (1990 pop. 723,959), coextensive with San Francisco co., W Calif., on the tip of a peninsula between the Pacific Ocean and San Francisco Bay, which are connected by the strait known as the Golden . ``The hard-core users - the college students who made Napster popular to begin with - will immediately download Gnutella or some other option. The smartest ones will start to create their own.''

Omar Viloria, a 19-year-old freshman at California State University, Northridge CSUN offers a variety of programs leading to bachelor's degrees in 61 fields and master's degrees in 42 fields. The university has over 150,000 alumni. It's also home to a summer musical theater/theater program known as TADW (TeenAge Drama Workshop) that leads teenagers through an , said he was among the users who deluged Napster over the weekend for a final frenzied swap of some 250 million songs, according to according to
prep.
1. As stated or indicated by; on the authority of: according to historians.

2. In keeping with: according to instructions.

3.
 digital research firm Webnoize.com.

``I'll probably look for other ones or wait to see what's going on What's Going On is a record by American soul singer Marvin Gaye. Released on May 21, 1971 (see 1971 in music), What's Going On reflected the beginning of a new trend in soul music.  with Napster,'' Viloria said. ``Wouldn't all the other ones be forced to shut down, too?''

Not necessarily. Many of the alternatives are open-source software that connect users' song libraries without using a server - the central computer that made Napster both a quick search and an easy target for the recording industry's lawyers.

``When you sign on to Gnutella, you have to enter an IP address and people get freaked out because they don't know Don't know (DK, DKed)

"Don't know the trade." A Street expression used whenever one party lacks knowledge of a trade or receives conflicting instructions from the other party.
 how to use that,'' said Webnoize researcher Greg Rohda.

Gnutella users are also limited to the first 10,000 hosts their computer contacts like a giant ``telephone tree.''

While Internet piracy will always be around, the precedents set in the Napster case will guide the Recording Industry Association of America in its approach to these other services, said general counsel Cary Sherman Cary H. Sherman is currently the President of the Recording Industry Association of America.

He graduated from Cornell University in 1968, and Harvard Law School in 1971.[1] References

1. ^ [1]
.

``In the end, we have to offer a service that is more attractive to consumers to make then want to use it legitimately,'' Sherman said.

Some services, like iMesh, are easy for newcomers and allow people to share video, software and pictures, in addition to MP3-encoded music files.

Aimster allows users to access Gnutella and other sites through an instant messaging Exchanging text messages in real time between two or more people logged into a particular instant messaging (IM) service. Instant messaging is more interactive than e-mail because messages are sent immediately, whereas e-mail messages can be queued up in a mail server for seconds or  interface modeled after America Online's popular messenger service Messenger Service is a network-based system notification service included in some versions of Microsoft Windows. This service, although it has a similar name, is not related in any way to the . .

Some free services (O.Eng. Law) such feudal services as were not unbecoming the character of a soldier or a freemen to perform; as, to serve under his lord in war, to pay a sum of money, etc.

See also: Free
 hope to stay that way by staying abroad, like iMesh in Israel and Filetopia in Spain.

FreeNet, from England, offers the ultimate in anonymity but no search engine. Users must have a ``key'' to find a file and access a file that is encrypted and stored on another person's computer.

Monday's ruling could also affect the Napster clones like MyNapster and OpenNap, which link people to third-party servers but still require Napster's software to handle the downloads.

``What (Monday's ruling) does more than anything is create a vacuum,'' Terry said. ``Should Napster go away, obviously there's a huge motivation to create a more simple version of Gnutella or FreeNet or Aimster.''

HOW NAPSTER WORKS

Napster was created by former Northeastern University Northeastern University, at Boston, Mass.; coeducational; founded 1898 as a program within the Boston YMCA, inc. 1916, university status 1922, fully independent of the YMCA 1948.  student Shawn Fanning in 1999 as he tried to find a way to share music online with a friend in Virginia from his dorm room in Boston.

The software allows anyone with a computer connected to the Internet to download free copies of music converted into the MP3 format, a popular digital compression technology.

The program creates a directory of songs available on the hard drives of other Napster users, then creates a computer-to-computer link via the Internet to transfer the chosen song or songs.

Millions have created digitized music collections using the Redwood City, Calif.-based company's MP3 file-compression format and shared them.

At any given time, thousands of people are logged into the system, making hundreds of thousands of songs - many of them copyrighted - available for easy download.

The Napster site has been popular on college campuses, so much so that at least 100 have banned it because students' downloads were clogging up the schools' computer networks with MP3 transfers.

- Associated Press

CAPTION(S):

2 photos, box

Photo:

(1 -- color) Napster founder Shawn Fanning listens during a news conference in San Francisco on Monday after the court's ruling.

(2) Fanning looks unhappy after a court ruled that the Internet-based service can't allow downloading copyrighted material.

Paul Sakuma/Associated Press

Box: HOW NAPSTER WORKS (See text)
COPYRIGHT 2001 Daily News
No portion of this article can be reproduced without the express written permission from the copyright holder.
Copyright 2001, Gale Group. All rights reserved. Gale Group is a Thomson Corporation Company.

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Article Details
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Title Annotation:Business
Publication:Daily News (Los Angeles, CA)
Date:Feb 13, 2001
Words:768
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