Don't shed tears for Napster

Lisa Vaas AnchorDesk

Published: 21 Feb 2001 16:12 GMT

And I'm sure as heck not concerned, as are the likes of Senator Orrin Hatch, that the recent decision by the San Francisco Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals is "pyretic and short-sighted from a policy perspective," as the senator so fancily put it. Network administrators -- now, there's a group to feel sorry for in all this P2P hubbub, and unfortunately, the ruling won't do much to ease their pain.

Napster's new inability to disseminate copyrighted material is not going to put a damper on P2P innovation, as Hatch seems to fear, along with many other pontificators who should know better. As Groove's Ray Ozzie has been stressing for some time, to any and all who would listen, Napster is not P2P.

Peer to peer, as far as enterprise applications are concerned, will be a much more tractable animal than the long-haired creature that is Napster. It's being tweaked and prodded in development shops at this very moment by developers who are acutely aware of network administrators' concerns over tight-as-a-drum security as well as control over shared material.

After all, P2P is a two-way street. It entails more than copyrighted material such as Metallica licks coming into a corporate or academic environment and clogging the pipes. It also holds the possibility of traffic going the other way -- in other words, sensitive enterprise intelligence leaking out into the world.

With that much at stake, enterprises are holding out for robust security and administrator control in their P2P products -- a situation that hasn't eluded the developers. The Napster decision isn't going to even come close to slowing down the MP3 addicts, either -- after all, it's not as if Napster were the only application out there to get the deed done.

There's Audiogalaxy and iMesh, for starters. I'm not bothering to list Gnutella, as Hatch himself did in his speech last Wednesday on the Senate floor (noting ominously that shutting down Napster would send the music pirates into even scarier and less controllable waters) since it's a well-known fact that Gnutella has long been a crippled player in the lineup, scorned for its inability to scale.