Napster like software

Then a fresh generation of teen programmers came along and decided to give away the software anonymously. At the same time, music lovers felt that record companies were overcharging for CDs and underpaying musicians. By , tens of millions of people were embracing this new software, whose use had been designed to be hard to detect. Without a central company like Napster to sue, it became expensive to track down and prosecute individuals who shared music files.

So more and more people quietly violated the law. Children, in particular, grew up as perpetual lawbreakers. This shouldn't sound far-fetched. It is happening already. CD sales started to increase because technology made it easier for people to discover new music that spoke to them.

The Internet proved itself a better means than radio for getting people excited enough about new music to go out and spend money on it.

But CD sales plummeted when the wireless Internet began to work really well. By , every car radio, pair of headphones, and alarm clock was hooked up to the wireless Internet, and any piece of music could be coaxed out of any gadget anyone owned. The record companies tried to guard their copyrights by putting copy protection codes on music files. But there was always someone who could figure out how to break the code. In fact, if somebody couldn't break the code, he or she could simply rerecord the song through a speaker and microphone, then play it on any music software; the next day thousands of free copies could be flying around the globe.

In desperation, record companies worked with electronics concerns to create what's known as an end-to-end solution so that they could enforce copy protection all the way to the end of the chain of delivery, which in the case of music meant the audio speaker.

By , it was illegal to build speakers that could respond to old-fashioned analog inputs. Instead, manufacturers made speakers that responded to digital inputs so they could play only music authorized to be heard at a given time and place. The music industry is about to unveil an attempt at a complete end-to-end plan for audio called the Secure Digital Music Initiative.

The system isn't implemented in speakers but in the next-to-last stage of the chain, just before a musical signal goes out on a cable to a speaker. The makings of true end-to-end copyright protection technology have already appeared in the visual domain, riding on the coattails of the new flat screens that everyone will soon want. When equipped with encryption technology, the emerging standard for hooking up flat screens, called Digital Visual Interface, could be used to block image streams selectively.

End-to-end strategies for protecting copyright bothered some people because, in a democracy, citizens are supposed to act as partners in enforcing laws. They argued that those forced to follow rules without being trusted even for a moment are, in fact, slaves. Even after people adjusted to them, end-to-end schemes caused problems.

Lots of folks still made their own recordings and wanted to send them to friends. As microphones and editing software got very good and very cheap, amateur musicians bought and used them. What the media companies decided they needed was an audio speaker that could distinguish a homemade song from a pirated dub of valuable copyrighted material.

In lieu of that, they asked for, and got, legislation that forced everyone to copyright, or at least register, every work of art, even those made by amateurs at home. By , every stream of sound had to present the right documentation to a pair of headphones or speakers— or the music couldn't be played. Before long people were hoarding old analog speakers. In , the recording industry persuaded eBay to refuse to list them.

The same story played out visually. By , computer screens had finally gotten both good and cheap. By , people who wanted to e-mail a video of their baby's first birthday— to doting relatives— so they could watch the infant's antics on those excellent screens— were forced to register homemade videos before transmitting them. By , monitoring visual communications became hopelessly complicated because a new generation of Net-videophones, which offered a just-like-being-there experience, spread like wildfire.

In fact, a guy named Jaron Lanier had been pushing an early, primitive form of this technology, calling it "tele-immersion," back in the year , but no one remembered. Then the real trouble started. In , rebellious college students began throwing copyright-breaking "projector parties," in which one kid would pay to see a movie in a theater while he then broadcast it live to a whole gang of revelers, in some cases thousands of them. See more. Sentences for Napster. They reacted by pursuing lawsuits against Napster which was eventually shut down and later sold and against individual users who engaged in file sharing.

MP3 - Wikipedia. Tracing the source of the leak, the band found the file on the Napster peer-to-peer file-sharing network, and also found that the band's entire catalogue was freely available. Metallica - Wikipedia. This in turn encouraged interest in file sharing software on the internet like Napster for single recordings initially which began to seriously undercut the music recording market. Single music - Wikipedia.

Red Hot Chili Peppers - Wikipedia. But that's not the way the Net itself works," Andreessen said. The site itself is barely live, returning results from just a few other Web sites and without any of the organization used by big search engines. It's just meant as a demonstration project, not as a commercial, Web-wide search, the Gnutella programmers said.

Kan and his associates aren't yet trying to sell the technology, Kan said. They don't have a company in place, nor do they have solid plans to commercialize the InfraSearch idea. But they may move in this direction if it prompts interest from the marketplace, Kan said. And they're convinced the interest will be there, whether the technology is developed by them or someone else. Be respectful, keep it civil and stay on topic.

We delete comments that violate our policy , which we encourage you to read. Discussion threads can be closed at any time at our discretion. Napster-like technology takes Web search to new level The loose group of programmers responsible for the controversial Gnutella file-swapping software have turned their technology into what they say is a powerful new Web search tool.

John Borland. First it was the record companies' nightmare. Now Yahoo and AltaVista might be next. Thus was born InfraSearch.