Much ado about Napster Analysis/Commentary While the giants of business and industry clamber aboard the Internet with all the lumbering grace of behemoths, a clamorous sideshow pitches its tent in California. Napster, a file-swapping network, has introduced the fear that small animals, such as college kids, might enjoy a free lunch at the expense of big business. The legal problem as defined by the courts consists of the infringement of copyright. In short, kids are using the Net to trade copyrighted music files. The technology used by the defendants in the case, the Napster Website, implements peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing and renders useless the vast banks of servers maintained by the music companies. With P2P, computers communicate directly with other computers over the Net, and through the magic of high-speed access can transfer large music files recorded by artists under contract with the music moguls. "No fair! Where's my exorbitant cut?" the music mavens plead. Napster was the brainchild of 19-year old Shawn Fenning, who wrote the essential file-swapping program at eighteen. His Website has grown phenomenally in the past few months, so much so that the music industry has sought an injunction, a court order to close it down. In her preliminary response approving the injunction, Federal Judge Marilyn Patel described the activities pursued by the site as going beyond fair use, and likely to cost CD producers anticipated profits. The lawyers in the case see it as a watershed, or optimistically, as a finger stuck in the leaky dike of music distribution. The Internet poses problems to all media if content begins to lose its "closed" source identity, its attribution to this or that author or originator. There may even come a time, they seem to be suggesting, when the art and literary brokers of the world will have to turn to materially productive labor. Perhaps Napster will be nipped at the bud, but the question remains for all to see: who owns knowledge? September 27, 2000