Napster: Asking for Trouble. Getting It.
By Lincoln D. Stein
I first heard about Napster in an "All Things Considered" segment broadcast on National Public Radio (see "
Online"). In a sequence of events that might be considered emblematic of "convergence," I first misheard the name of the service as "nabster." Unable to locate nabster on the Net, I turned to NPR's Web site, downloaded the digitized version of the original audio broadcast, and replayed it a few times to get the name right.
Napster, which bears the nickname of the founder's teenage son, is billed as an "online music community." About a half-year old, it's a service that combines Internet chat, file search facilities, and file transfer. Using a client that runs on Windows systems, users can join any one of about 50 different chat channels devoted to various music genres, or search an online library of MP3 sound clips. When users find songs they like, they can download the MP3s to their own machines or play them live across the Internet. Users can also contribute their own MP3 files to the collection.
So far, no great shakes, but here's what's interesting and different about Napster. Unlike a conventional Web site, the music collection is entirely decentralized. Whenever a Napster client connects to a server, it scans a designated shared directory on the user's disk for MP3s and registers them with the Napster server. Information on the song's title, artist, length, and bit rate are all sent to the server, but the actual song data remains on the user's local disk.
