Anonymous on Sat Apr 21 00:09:11 2001 |
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Vancouver - A 21-year-old Canadian Web entrepreneur is planning to circumvent the imminent demise of Napster Inc.'s controversial Internet song-trading system by setting up a clone of the service on a so-called "data haven" platform off the coast of Britain. "I am sad to see Napster bending to the record labels' will," said Matt Goyer, a computer science student at the University of Waterloo in Waterloo, Ont. "Let's preserve it and we'll move it offshore where the record industry can't touch it." Napster is a wildly popular software program that allows Internet users to swap free music between computers over the Web, much to the chagrin of the recording industry. In about two years, Napster has amassed 64 million users from around the world who are drawn by the allure of free, near-CD-quality music that can be played on digital audio players or on computers. A series of court victories for record labels has all but doomed Napster. On Friday, Napster announced it would take steps during the weekend to block file-sharing of copyrighted music on its service, in an effort to prevent a U.S. federal judge from shutting it down completely. It said it had identified one million unauthorized song files it will block. However, no apparent antipiracy filter was in effect as of early Sunday night. Napster officials offered no explanation, leading company watchers to speculate it may have been having trouble setting up the blocking technology. Napster itself has warned users that blocking the files will be a difficult task. "It is a complex technological solution that is very taxing to the system and will degrade the operation of the service," the company says on its Web site. Many of Napster's users were still freely trading music files via the service with no interference. For instance, on just one of Napster's dozens of computer servers, about 11,000 users were swapping about two million files. Waterloo's Mr. Goyer is eyeing HavenCo Ltd. as a possible site for his cloned Napster computer server. The company rents computing power and Internet data storage space to those seeking to avoid government laws. It operates from an ocean platform called Sealand, which has operated for 30 years as a sovereign territory off the coast of England. He hopes to collect an estimated $15,000 (U.S.) yearly HavenCo rental fee from music fans. If that doesn't work out, he plans to sign up with other renegade services. "There's enough irate people out there I think I can get many to chip in $10 each," Mr. Goyer said. Others have already set up Napster clone servers - computers that help hook up music lovers to swap songs using Napster-like software - in North America. But these are under attack from record labels that are forcing Internet service providers to stop offering Web access to these Napster clones. Mr. Goyer is no newcomer to the Napster debate. Last year, he and partner John Cormie set up Fairtunes.com, a virtual "tip jar" where Internet users swapping free music on Napster could soothe their conscience by sending cash to artists. Fairtunes has collected about $7,000 for artists and Mr. Goyer hopes to use the site to collect donations for the Napster clone service. But Mr. Goyer is only one of many Napster devotees flouting the recording industry's attempt to shut down the service. Some fans began migrating on the weekend to lesser-known and less user-friendly file-swapping alternatives such as Gnutella. Others began renaming song files in an effort to stymie the imminent copyright filter on Napster that is expected to ban music by album and title names. Saturday and Sunday were marathon downloading sessions for millions of Napster users, including Vancouverite Bradley Kalmek, 28, who spent so much time staring at a computer screen that his eyes were strained. "Might as well make hay while the sun shines. It was a bit too good to last forever. So, I'm taking advantage now," he said. --------------------++----- Les faits sont faits. http://www.fis.utoronto.ca/~stalder _______________________________________________ Nettime-bold mailing list Nettime-bold@nettime.org http://www.nettime.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/nettime-bold