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GROUP 1 - Shaft Project Two - Should Penn State
Napster is not some garage
organization . . . but rather
an incorporated company with
a development team, marketing
team, bizdev team, and an
executive management team.
-- A Napster Developer
Most of the glory behind Napster is accredited to a 19-year-old Northeastern College
dropout, Shawn Fanning.
Napster is currently seeking more capital to fund its business. As a blossoming
technology, Napster has a large consumer base and a large stake in how society will use
networking in the future. In a statement to the United States Congress Senate Judiciary
Committee on October 9, 2000, Shawn Fanning announced that, "Today the Napster community
numbers more than 32 million; for the past four months, it has been growing at a rate of one
million new users each week. There are consistently over 800,000 people using the system
simultaneously, limited only by our network resources. Napster users are in all corners of the
world . . . [and] we received e-mail just last Friday from one 91-year-old man."
At its present stage, Napster is ripe for investment. Penn State has always fostered expansion and growth in new technologies. As a key member of the Internet 2 project, Penn State is attempting to be a leader in the digital economy of the 21st century. Investing in Napster would not only be a wise financial decision for Penn State, but also acts as an attempt to keep up with the current pace of technology. The Pennsylvania State University should invest in Napster because of the potential for growth in peer-to-peer networking. To understand the benefits of Napster, a knowledge of the different types of topologies is
important. Gnutella, another competing file sharing service, operates solely on a peer-to-peer
architecture utilizing a ring topology. A request is sent from one computer to another and the
solicited data is returned directly back to the computer that initiated the request.
The way that files are currently transferred over the Penn State network represents a
client-server model, or star topology. In a star topology, the client machines are all connected to
a central server. Whenever there is a request for data, the server, and not another client, will
supply the information. It is similar to a host-terminal configuration, with the major exception
that a client is able to handle processes, unlike the dumb terminals that are heading toward
obsolescence. A client-server network has complete scalability and is efficient, assuming the
server is stable. However, there is a high cost of the equipment needed to make the topology
functional.
Napster has created the best of both worlds by utilizing a modified peer-to-peer network.
Essentially, a Napster user installs a client program onto his computer. When properly used, the
program will send a query to a central server which will scour other users' computers and then
return a database of potential matches. That alone would represent a client-server architecture.
However, once a user requests to download a specific song, that request never goes to the server,
but instead goes directly to another client PC. The entire swapping process is done independent
of the server, and is purely a peer-to-peer transaction.
Napster is able to organize all the individual songs that users make available by placing
the information into a database, which is a collection of data in related files that can be
systematically searched through by a variety of keyword and fields. SAP R/2 and R/3, which
provide solutions for corporation finances; The Penn State Phone Directory System; AltaVista
and other web search engines; LIAS, the Penn State Library card catalog system; and
even an old-fashioned White Pages phone book are other examples of databases.
Having a database where the data is supplied by the users has placed Napster in controversy. The fact that the users supply the data is not the basis of the controversy, but rather that users can and do post restricted material. That predicament has forced Napster's placement as a defendant in a long running legal battle against the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). The RIAA claims that Napster users are violating copyright laws and infringing on the rights of their artists by duplicating files via the Napster technology. It is understandable that an organization would not want to invest in a company that is currently fighting legal battles. However, there is evidence which shows why Napster should and will be cleared of all charges. David Boies, the lead attorney defending Napster, has created a four-point legal strategy
to clear Napster's name. The first point simply states that Napster users are doing nothing
wrong. What Napster does falls under fair use and therefore does not violate any copyrights.
The second point in Napster's argument involves the 1984 Sony Betamax case, in which
the courts ruled that Sony could produce Betamax tape-recording decks because they had a
legitimate legal use.
The third point refers back to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998. Napster
insists that they are only publishing a listing of material that is available on the Internet. They
claim to be in that regard no different than Yahoo!, AltaVista, or any other Internet Service
Provider.
Napster's defense also links back to a study done by Peter Fader at the University of
Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business. He proved that 70 percent of Napster users
purchased the CD after sampling tracks online.
To appease the RIAA and end copyright violations, Napster has considered charging
users a small monthly fee for unlimited downloads, which would go toward paying the RIAA
license fees. Also, ads could be placed on the Napster service to provide revenue. Both are
reasonable solutions which show hope that the lawsuit will be settled. It is technologically
possible to regulate the types of material that is transferred over a Napster system. In fact, two of
Napster's original investors, Bill Bales and Adrean Scott, have begun work on a Napster-like
protocol called Flycode that can track copyrighted material.
The outcome of the Napster lawsuit will affect 32 million people.
Most universities are now under pressure to decide how Napster will be utilized at their
schools. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology set a good example for many other
universities to follow when they announced, "MIT has had a long history of providing its faculty,
staff, and students with uncensored access to the Internet and its vast array of resources. This
policy is consistent with MIT's educational mission and our deeply held values of academic
freedom."
Furthermore, an overwhelming majority of people believe that there is nothing wrong
with using Napster. In fact, 78% of people surveyed by the Pew Internet and American Life
Project have no ethical qualms with using Napster software.
An investment by Penn State would provide adequate funding for these new
advancements. One advancement in peer-to-peer technology that Napster could develop would
be a second version of its software that can scour a diverse array of file types, not just MP3's.
The system would be implemented behind a firewall on a company's intranet, not over the public
Internet If Penn State invested in the minds behind Napster, Napster could develop this kind of system and then package and sell it to large corporations. The return on Penn State's investment would be astronomical. The time to invest in Napster's software is now. Companies and organizations are all
jumping on the peer-to-peer investment bandwagon because they see it as the future of
networking. The head of Universal, the world's largest music company, has already envisioned
that "[Very soon] a few clicks of your mouse will make it possible for you to summon every
book ever written in any language, every movie ever made, every television show ever produced,
and every piece of music ever recorded."
Penn State has always been innovative and now they need to plan for the future. Imagine
how Xerox felt when they abandoned the mouse, GUI
I believe that the peer-to-peer technology
on which Napster is based has the potential to
be adopted for many different uses. People
generally speak about the ability to share other
kinds of files in addition to music, and indeed,
Napster has been contacted by entities such as
the Human Genome Project that are interested in
sharing information among specific communities of
interest. But peer-to-peer, or distributed
computing, also has tremendous opportunity for
sharing resources or computing power, lowering
information and transaction costs. Peer-to-peer
could be used to create a pool of resources in
aggregate to solve a range of complex storage,
processing and bandwidth problems.
Peer-to-peer also has the potential to change
today's understanding of the relationship between
source and site. Think how much faster and more
efficient the Internet could be if instead of
always connecting you to a central server every
time you click on to a website, your computer
would find the source that housed that information
nearest to you - if it's already on the computer
of the kid down the hall, why travel halfway
around the world to retrieve it? . . .
[Peer-to-peer] will be not just a better use
of computing resources, but also the development
of a myriad of communities and super-communities
fulfilling the promise of the Internet that its
founders envisioned.
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