Week 8

This week’s topic: New Generations of Publishing: Blogs, p2p, iPods and more. This lecture we talked most about weblog and file sharing. The pioneer on file sharing was Napster, it became enormously popular in a very short amount of time. Within the first year of operating Napster had 60 million visitors a month, and when it was shut down due to breach of copyright, they had 100 million users. What that made Napster unique was the concept of peer-to-peer file sharing, which make users share files between themselves with help from Napster software. The reason for doing it this way was that Napster grew so big so there is no way a single server could have had enough disk space to hold all the files, or enough bandwidth to handle all the requests. It made each user function as a mini server, however Napster’s achillies heel was that it was relying on its central server to operate, which made it easy for the courts to shut it down.

This is what separates Napster and the new file sharing networks such as Gnutella. Gnutella don’t have a central server or database, all the computers in the network tell each other about available files etc. Because of this it will be much harder for a court to shut the new networks down.

Many people do not have any moral barriers of downloading copyright protected materials from the internet. The people I have spoken to sees it as a modern day Robin Hood, were the rich are the record and movie companies, the file sharing networks as Robin and themselves as the poor. So I guess the adds the government are running with comparing downloading of film and music to stealing in a store are not working that well.