Forwarded by Negativland.
>Coop's Scoop
> Thursday, February 1, 2001
>New Gnutella: Why it'll be the music industry's next worst nightmare
>
>Charles Cooper, Senior Executive News Editor
>
>The original incarnation of Gnutella was so terrible that I fully expected
>Napster to remain the preferred online music-exchange system, regardless
>of whether or not the service remained free.
>
>I'm no longer so sure that's going to be the case. Thanks to the arrival
>of new Windows client software--stuff that even normal human beings can
>operate--Gnutella just got a big second wind. In doing so, some sharp
>developers have upset the apple cart, just when the music studios thought
>they finally had things under control.
>
>
>Until now, the honchos of the music establishment have given short shrift
>to Gnutella, which suffered by comparison to Napster as a file-swapping
>alternative.
>
>TRUTH BE TOLD, they really didn't have much to worry about. Gnutella was
>relatively complicated to install and operate. Even worse, it was a
>slowpoke with lead boots. There were complaints aplenty about the amount
>of throughput required when Gnutella was just idling--and this came from
>people with T-1 lines at work. On top of that, Gnutella suffered
>performance hits after host caches became popular and the system became
>clogged.
>
>Still, Gnutella represented the record business's worst nightmare.
>
>Unlike Napster, Gnutella, which was born last March, was not an address or
>a company. You couldn't serve it with legal papers or picket outside its
>office. There was no there, there. In this network of distributed
>intelligence, all you needed to do was connect with a host. At that point,
>you were off to the races, interacting with other nodes on the
>oh-so-decentralized Gnutella universe. It was just so god-awful clunky to
>use that you had to be a real glutton for punishment to suffer through the
>process.
>
>That made it relatively easy for the music moguls to turn their lawyers
>loose on Napster, which had become the Internet's preferred music
>file-exchange service more by default than by virtue of its technology.
>And while Attorney David Boies did his darnedest to keep Napster afloat,
>the company cut a deal with Bertelsmann. My guess is Napster is desperate
>to do the same with the other titans--anything to secure its survival (and
>perhaps IPO payday). The days of free music file-swapping, my friend, are
>coming to an end.
>
>OR ARE THEY? If you were like me and had sworn off using Gnutella forever,
>spend a few minutes with Bearshare, a front-end program that's got me
>singing a new song. There are still kinks to iron out, but the current
>incarnation of Bearshare (version 2.05) constitutes a quantum-leap
>improvement over its predecessors and puts Gnutella back in the thick of
>things. It's easy to use, and has more than enough bells and whistles to
>keep chronic tinkerers content.
>
>Unless I'm dreadfully mistaken, legions of users are going to flock to
>Gnutella the day Napster announces plans for phased-in charge-for-use.
>Even if Napster stands pat, the client improvements represented by
>Bearshare and other front-ends are bound to draw users back to Gnutella.
>
>My guess is that's also going to give Hilary Rosen, the Recording Industry
>Association's hired gun, more than a momentary pause. It's going to make
>for a major conniption.
>
>
>-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
>This is the pho mailing list, managed by Majordomo 1.94.4.
>
>To send a message to the list, email phoATonehouse.com.
>To send a request to majordomo, email majordomoATonehouse.com and put your
>request in the body of the message (use request "help" for help).
>To unsubscribe from the list, email majordomoATonehouse.com and put
>"unsubscribe pho" in the body of the message.
>
----------------------------------------------------
Rumori, the Detritus.net Discussion List
to unsubscribe, send mail to majordomoATdetritus.net
with "unsubscribe rumori" in the message body.
----------------------------------------------------
Rumori list archives & other information are at
http://detritus.net/contact/rumori
----------------------------------------------------
[an error occurred while processing this directive]
N© Detritus.net. Sharerights extended to all.