Rupert Goodwins' Diary

Rupert Goodwins AnchorDesk

Published: 25 May 2001 16:50 BST

Monday
21/05/2001

If music is the food of love, will the Hari Krishnas set up a Napster tent at the next Glastonbury festival? (For those who haven't been, the orange-robed slapheads are noted for dishing out free vegetable curry to one and all, keeping more than one terminally confused festival goer alive). If they do, they'll be one of the few remaining independent MP3 distribution organisations now that mp3.com has been bought by Vivendi.

The case is full of irony. Mp3.com was sued by everyone last year for various copyright capers, but settled with everyone -- apart from Vivendi (who owns the Universal stable of films and records). So along with the company, Vivendi's presumably getting online rights for all its competitors products ready for its Duet distribution system. Its competitors are setting up their own online music distribution system, and everyone's hoping to leap into the Napster-shaped hole left by that company's legal execution by a thousand filters. Nobody seems to have sorted out security or revenue models yet, but I'm sure that they'll get there eventually.

Meanwhile, Gnutella system clients such as Limewire and Bearshare are quietly getting rather good. Too good -- one pal experimentally loaded one of the above onto his system, but didn't notice that it had automatically found and published his entire store of 'alternative' video files. His router's data transmit light went on in seconds, and stayed on...