As Time Runs Out for Napster,
Angry Users Seek Alternatives
By FRANK BAJAK
Associated Press
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With Napster Inc. (www.napster.com) facing a deadline for shutting down the heart of its online music-swapping service, tens of thousands of outraged users pledged Friday to boycott the recording industry in retaliation for its lawsuit -- and looked for alternatives.
"The recording industry is a mafia," said Christian Viveros, a 37-year-old amateur musician from Russells Point, Ohio, encountered in a Napster chat room. "Too much greed in the world."
On one Web site, more than 60,000 people signed an electronic petition vowing not to buy music unless the Recording Industry of America drops its lawsuit against Napster. That would cost the industry nearly $1 million if each of those people refused to buy just one CD priced at $15.
The recording industry, meanwhile, responded to Napster's legal attempt to stay what the San Mateo, Calif., company has characterized as a death sentence.
In a brief filed with the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco, the industry said that giving Napster an 11th-hour reprieve would "increase dramatically" the harm it has suffered by allowing continued "massive copyright infringement."
Napster officials did not return telephone calls on Friday seeking to determine if and when they would pull the plug on the service. But their Web site did advertise a "Buy-Cott," urging users to purchase the CDs this weekend of artists who have embraced the file-sharing phenomenon, including Limp Bizkit, Chuck D. and Marianne Faithful.
As users world-wide held Napster download marathons, developers of alternatives to Napster's Net-distribution system worked feverishly to provide their software to people hooked on Internet music trading.
"We're trying to give the people what they've been looking for," said Dale "Diego" Hayes, a developer of AudioGnome, a Napster clone originally scheduled to be released in a few weeks.
After a federal judge, ruling Wednesday, set the Napster shutdown deadline of midnight Pacific daylight time, AudioGnome programmers accelerated their work.
Their program, promised for release sometime Friday, is designed to do everything Napster does and more, said Mr. Hayes, a 34-year-old Californian who runs a United Kingdom-based Web site called Naphoria.
But here's the trick: Instead of relying on a centrally located batch of computer servers like Napster, AudioGnome will rely on some 70 independent servers running a free program called OpenNap. Those servers are located mostly in the U.S., but are also found in Britain, Canada, Italy and other countries.
Mr. Hayes said the numbers of servers has doubled in the past few weeks and added that he expects them to keep multiplying in a post-Napster world.
"The reason Napster is being attacked is because it has servers," Mr. Hayes said. "We don't have any, so I'm not worried about legal complications."
Adam Mead, a 24-year-old systems manager, has an OpenNap server he's been running for more than three months in Albuquerque, N.M. He expects traffic to skyrocket on Saturday.
"If they serve me with legal documents requesting me to shut down or they're going to sue me, I'll shut it down," he said. "I don't have a million dollars." |
