From: "geert lovink" <geert@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thu, 26 Apr 2001 23:08:38 +1000
Subject: [mediafest] Napster Was Just the Start of the Bandwidth Invasion

              http://chronicle.com/free/v47/i33/33a04301.htm

  From the issue dated April 27, 2001


Napster Was Just the Start of the Bandwidth Invasion

Colleges try to stay one step ahead of students 
who use the latest file-sharing services

By SCOTT CARLSON


 Santa Cruz, Calif.

 You could call Kirstin Lindsey a Napster true believer. Unlike most other
 freshmen on the redwood-shaded University of California campus here, Ms.
 Lindsey
 can rattle off details about the file-sharing company's legal battle,
 where it stands in the courts, and what a recent appeals-court decision
 might mean for the future of file sharing. For her, Napster is more than
 just a way to get hot songs for free. It's a way of life.

 "No matter how many court orders go through, we'll still find a way to
 use Napster," she declares, sitting with her friends in a sunny spot on
 the grass. "It sounds corny, but it's totally a community of people."

 That's quite a statement from someone who had never used Napster before
 she came to college last fall. Now her hard drive is stuffed with MP3's,
 the condensed music files often swapped online.

 Even a brief conversation with Ms. Lindsey and other freshmen at the
 university's Kresge College illustrates the problems that their network
 administrators, nervously watching the climbing bandwidth load, are
 worrying so much about.

 The court decision in February against Napster, which ordered it to block
 copyrighted song titles, did not kill the music-swapping company or deter
 its adherents. Many students are still using Napster to get and
 distribute free songs, while others have migrated to new, expanded, and
 improved Napster clones. Many of the services offer not only music but
 also pictures and bandwidth-hogging video files -- any network manager's
 nightmare.

 Greg Scott, Jim Warner, and John Rocchio, managers of Santa Cruz's
 computer systems, are weighing the pros and cons of new ways to deal with
 the file-sharing software: bandwidth "shaping," billing students for
 excessive network use, and active policing of the network. But each of
 those solutions comes with its own set of challenges. Meanwhile, freshmen
 are arriving more computer literate than ever before, jacking up the
 bandwidth load earlier in the year. The system managers estimate that
 residential-network traffic cost the university about $65,000 last school
 year; this year, the bill could be as high as $97,000.

 "The fact is, Napster or no Napster, we are doubling our traffic every
 year," says Mr. Scott, Santa Cruz's director of network services.
 "Napster is just the latest in a long series of applications. There is
 going to be another bandwidth hog down the road."

 Both the growing use of file-sharing software at Santa Cruz and some of
 the solutions considered by the university's network administrators are
 mirrored at hundreds of other colleges and universities across the
 country.

 Contrary to what some people think, a much-publicized decision by the
 U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in San Francisco, did not
 shut down Napster. Rather, it upheld a lower court's order forcing
 Napster to block all copyright-protected files on the file-sharing
 service.

 Napster works like a library's card catalog, except that the "library"
 comprises the music files on the hard drives of hundreds of thousands of
 Napster's users. The court ordered Napster to pull certain cards out of
 that catalog, and Napster has done so by blocking access to files
 according to artist or song name. Files titled, say, "Over the Rainbow,"
 for the Judy Garland song from The Wizard of Oz, would be blocked.

 However, many Napster users adapted quickly. They realized early on that
 they could simply rename files -- "Over the Rainbow" could become
 "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" or "Over Rainbow" or "Garland's Rainbow."
 Some songs by Dr. Dre, the rap star who sued Napster last year, can be
 found under the name "Dr. Dray." A cat-and-mouse game continues between
 Napster and its users, who have used pig Latin to disguise files.

 The Recording Industry Association of America, the plaintiff in the court
 case against Napster, complains that 80 percent of the 5,000 songs it
 asked the company to block are still available.

 Users like Ms. Lindsey say they can still download freely. "I've had no
 trouble since the court order," she says. "You just mess around with the
 title until you find what you're looking for."

 But not everyone is a die-hard Napster user like Ms. Lindsey. Students
 everywhere are branching out and finding other options, some of which
 have been provided unintentionally by their own institutions. "Eric," a
 freshman at Kresge who was reluctant to give his real name, said his
 neighbors have been using Gnutella. "I know that one of the girls next
 door used audioGnome, but I haven't tried it yet," he says.

 Eric points out that some Santa Cruz students have figured out ways to
 trade files with others at the college using the local network. With a
 little poking around, a Santa Cruz student can find almost any song he or
 she might want, along with some video files, too. Although this swapping
 within the network might raise legal questions, it is much easier and
 much cheaper for colleges than sharing files through the entire Internet,
 and the network managers at Santa Cruz don't monitor it as much as they
 do the use of Napster, its clones, and other file-sharing applications.

 "There are probably thousands of files shared in this little college
 right here," Eric says, standing near his Gateway computer, which glows
 in the corner of a cluttered room. He pulls up the network directory and
 shows some of the music available: Johnny Cash, Jeff Buckley, Minor
 Threat, to name a few. He clicks on a song by Canned Heat, and it
 downloads within a few seconds. Eric says that students regularly swap
 episodes of The Simpsons.

 "The computer is basically like our house radio, because Gateway gives
 you a phat sound system," says Eric's roommate, "Michael," who is
 catnapping on a couch. As a screensaver featuring scantily clad models
 pops up on the monitor, Michael adds dryly: "With the lack of a TV, our
 entertainment needs are pretty much fulfilled by Eric's computer."

 Network administrators at Santa Cruz and other institutions have long
 maintained that bandwidth demands would not be stopped by any court
 order, nor would they stop at Napster. So administrators are coming up
 with a number of strategies to deal with Napster and similar
 applications.

 Bandwidth-shaping, in which installed hardware limits network use, has
 been one of the more popular strategies at many universities, and Mr.
 Warner and Mr. Scott are testing a bandwidth-shaping device called the
 NetEnforcer, manufactured by Allot Communications, on about half of the
 campus's residential network. (Packeteer and Lucent Technologies sell
 similar hardware.) NetEnforcer works like a traffic cop to control
 transmissions going back and forth between the Internet and the local
 network.

 Network managers can tell the device to slow music downloads to a crawl,
 but allow other Web surfing and e-mail to shoot through unhindered.
 NetEnforcer can also, for instance, give priority to transmissions from
 certain academic departments. And it can dump some kinds of transmissions
 if the network gets overloaded.

 Mr. Warner says the Santa Cruz network managers have decided to give
 priority to network uses that depend on open bandwidth, such as streaming
 media. Everything else gets a lower priority, and gets slowed down when
 the network is busy. Mr. Warner says they have decided not to single out
 recreational file transfers because that might encourage students to find
 more ways of subverting NetEnforcer. Some students are already
 circumventing the device by routing their traffic through unhindered
 computers, he adds.

 "The Holy Grail would be to have a limit per student, instead of having
 an aggregate limit on all of the residential networks," he says.

 Such a system might work this way: Through the port in the dorm room, the
 network tracks the bandwidth use of individual students and provides a
 Web page where they can see how much they've used. Once students get
 close to using up, say, their three-gigabyte allotment for the week, they
 would get e-mail warnings that their Internet use could be cut off. The
 university might even let students pay for additional bandwidth, up to a
 certain limit.

 But such a strategy comes with challenges, Mr. Warner notes. For one, he
 calculates that it would take six months' work by the technology staff to
 create such a system. And if the university decides to bill students, it
 might incur even more expenses. "Of the cost of a long-distance telephone
 call, more than half is billing," Mr. Warner says. "That is the danger of
 letting accounting take over -- we'll end up paying more for the
 accounting than we do for the service."

 So far, one of Santa Cruz's most effective deterrents to the
 overconsumption of bandwidth has been the manager of the residential
 networks, Mr. Rocchio. Every day, even on weekends, he looks for the top
 bandwidth hogs -- anyone who transfers more than a gigabyte in 24 
 hours -- and fires off stern warnings about computing rules, which
 explicitly prohibit the excessive use of bandwidth and the unauthorized
 transmission of copyrighted material. If he sees that the students are
 sharing within the network, he'll mention that in his message, too. After
 three strikes, he turns off the student's network access, typically for a
 week.

 Usually a student gets caught after he or she accidentally leaves Napster
 on and outsiders come into the network to download files off the machine.
 "Since we have such a fat connection, they get a gig sucked down in no
 time," Mr. Rocchio says.

 Mr. Warner is waiting for the Next Big Thing after Napster. "There are
 100 Napster wannabes in the wings, waiting for Napster to fall," Mr.
 Warner says. "A lot of those are going to be very hard to track down. At
 least with Napster, you know the name of the enemy."

 Enemy territory, as it happens, lies on the far side of the sheltering
 mountains just north of Santa Cruz, in the Silicon Valley and San
 Francisco.

 In the valley, Napster makes its home in suburban Redwood City. In San
 Francisco, the headquarters of Flycode, a new file-sharing company, sits
 in a still-down-at-the-heels corner of the gentrifying Mission District,
 about a block away from one of the busiest open-air drug markets in San
 Francisco. Flycode's nondescript white storefront shares the block with
 an Asian bakery, a store that sells cheap lingerie in plastic bags, and
 the Smoke Shop, which stocks an ample assortment of bongs and
 pornography.

 Michel Floyd, Flycode's vice president of engineering, is optimistic
 about the company's prospects. Despite the market's current hostility
 toward dot-coms, Flycode is trying to create Napster's kind of buzz.
 Flycode looks and operates much like Napster, but with two main
 differences: Flycode wants to offer the first "copyright-friendly"
 file-sharing application, using more effective technologies to block
 unauthorized file transfers; and, for now, it shares only images and
 video, which require much more bandwidth than do MP3's. A good deal of
 the material on the system seems to be short amateur films, pictures of
 celebrities, amusing advertisements, movie trailers, Japanese animation,
 and pornography.

 Flycode's designers understand that Napster's adherents -- the Kirstin
 Lindseys of the world -- are what makes that company strong. So Flycode
 encourages its users to offer their own video creations and collections.
 For now, Flycode has about 14,000 users -- a minuscule number by Internet
 standards.

 Mr. Floyd says that file-sharing companies have fallen into two
 categories: companies that strive for legitimacy, and rogue companies
 that flout copyright laws. "Both will exist on university networks for
 the foreseeable future," he says. The rogue creators "are doing it for
 the glory," he says. Meanwhile, most law-abiding start-ups are lying low
 and waiting to see what happens to Napster.

 Going legit sometimes means going down for a while, as was the case with
 CuteMX, a file-sharing service that recently went offline. "They had
 users, but they had no way to deal with the copyrighted material," Mr.
 Floyd says. "I'm sure they got a cease-and-desist letter from somewhere,
 because the day after Hannibal came out you could get Hannibal from
 there."

 Vincent Falco, the 28-year-old head of a Florida company called Free
 Peers, prefers to think of himself as a creator of simple file-sharing
 software rather than of a device that aids copyright violators seeking to
 download protected music. He points out that his product, BearShare, is
 useful for non-infringing activity. Some campus-network administrators
 have taken note of him, although not because of his creative 
 tendencies -- they're worried about bandwidth.

 BearShare uses Gnutella, a decentralized, open-source program that can
 transfer all types of files and is difficult to block. Unlike Napster,
 Gnutella offers no central card catalog. Instead, it works more like a
 chain letter, with users asking other users where to find files. For
 file-sharing aficionados, the appeal of a system like Gnutella is that it
 has no central servers that a court could shut down, or that network
 administrators could block access to.

 BearShare makes Gnutella easier to use, giving the program a Napsterlike
 look. But the program comes with drawbacks. Compared with the ease of
 Napster, using BearShare to download a file can be a hair-pulling
 experience for novices. Downloading with BearShare is "definitely a
 skill" that comes with practice, Mr. Falco says.

 BearShare is also less efficient than a centralized service. Mr. Falco
 explains that each time a user connects to a "host," another user, the
 bandwidth use expands exponentially. "It has a voracious appetite for
 bandwidth," he says, adding that Gnutella's most devoted supporters are
 trying to craft a more efficient system.

 How Mr. Falco will make money off of his creation is a secret. "I could
 tell you, but then I'd have to kill you," he says, adding that Napster
 was "definitely a competitive model." On the phone from an office in West
 Palm Beach, Fla., he notes that BearShare T-shirts will soon go on sale
 on the Web site. He says the company recently added its millionth user.

 Whether any of these companies, or others like them, will attract a
 sustaining mass of users remains to be seen. Clifford W. Frost, the chief
 information officer at the University of California at Berkeley, has
 already seen BearShare's popularity grow on his campus. But he doubts
 that video will become a popular item to swap because the files are too
 big for impatient students, and video is not the kind of thing that
 students will collect and watch over and over again.

 Frank M. Creighton, who directs antipiracy efforts for the Recording
 Industry Association of America, doesn't seem concerned about Gnutella or
 other open-source file-sharing programs. Although about one million
 people downloaded Gnutella after the Napster court decision in February,
 he thinks the program is too difficult and disorganized for the average
 user.

 Aside from the bandwidth issue, universities have kept a watchful eye on
 the recording industry for fear of being sued -- a fear inspired by
 Metallica's lawsuits last year against Indiana University, the University
 of Southern California, and Yale University.

 Mr. Warner, at Santa Cruz, says that while his office enforces bandwidth
 rules, it has made a conscious effort not to examine the content of
 transmissions. "We believe that the worst thing that you can do is set
 yourself up as the content police and do a bad job of it," he says,
 adding that such patrolling might compromise the university's safe harbor
 under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The law says that, because of
 the massive amount of traffic on their systems, Internet-service
 providers cannot be held accountable for the activities of individual
 users.

 Such aspects of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act have been a
 "roadblock to more productive and cooperative relationships between the
 university and the content industry," Mr. Creighton says.

 "I think, in general, everyone is trying to achieve the same result," he
 says. "It's just that when you get lawyers involved, there tends to be a
 lot of posturing." Although Mr. Creighton "applauds" the band Metallica
 for its suits against universities to get them to block Napster, he adds,
 "Putting the legal nuances aside, I could tell you that our industry is
 not in the practice of suing organizations that are implementing tools
 that are designed to assist us."

 "I liken this to the early days of roads and highways, when there were no
 rules," Mr. Creighton says. "This notion that the Internet should be
 ruleless is going to go away as the Internet becomes more and more
 commercial."

 That's the kind of sentiment that worries Ms. Lindsey, here at Santa
 Cruz.

 She pulls two heavy, used psychology books out of her bag, plunks them
 down on the grass, and complains that she just blew $70 on them -- used,
 yet -- at the university bookstore. "See, we need Napster," she laments
 to her friends, Magic Follett and Erin Miller, both occasional Napster
 users. "It's the only thing that's free anymore!"

 But if Napster disappears, Ms. Lindsey seems willing to move on to
 something else. The three women ask a visitor what other file-sharing
 applications are out there.

 Have they heard of Flycode? A lot like Napster, but it shares video
 instead of music.

 The three women look at each other with eyes wide, as if to suggest that
 they've found a new pastime.

 "Wow," Ms. Follett says with a grin, "that's cool."


===========================================================================



 ALTERNATIVES TO NAPSTER

 Even if Napster shuts down tomorrow, students could still get their
 file-sharing fix. Here is a selection of the better-known file-sharing
 programs and Napster clones. Some of the following use OpenNap, an
 open-source version of the Napster program, run on more than 100 servers
 located around the world. For information about other Napster clones or
 file sharing in general, visit http://www.zeropaid.com, a file-sharing
 portal.


 Aimster

 Aimster links AOL Instant Messenger and Gnutella, allowing users to share
 files of any type with a select group of trusted "buddies" who can help
 each other look out for viruses and bad files. The buddy system also
 limits the number of people who have access to a user's hard drive.

 
 Audiogalaxy

 Audiogalaxy offers its own universe of music files. Its Web site says the
 program will automatically find the closest users, which could ease
 bandwidth loads.


 audioGnome

 AudioGnome users can trade music through this stripped-down OpenNap
 client, which works on Microsoft Windows.


 KaZaA

 A European application, KaZaA allows users to trade audio, video, image,
 and document files. KaZaA's home page says that the company is
 negotiating with "copyright organizations" to hammer out a subscription
 service, which will be introduced later this year. KaZaA also lets a user
 download a file from four different sources simultaneously, which speeds
 up downloads. English and German versions of the program are available;
 Swedish and Dutch versions are reportedly on the way.


 Napigator

 A tool for users of OpenNap-compatible programs, Napigator helps users
 find OpenNap servers that have the most content or are not overloaded,
 and connect to them. Napigator has been valuable for Napster regulars
 whom Napster has banned from its server because they have downloaded
 copyrighted material.


 Rapigator and WinMX

 How they work: Both programs rely on OpenNap servers. Rapigator and WinMX
 allow users to swap all types of files and control the amount of
 bandwidth they consume.

 


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