I'm not a lawyer, but it looks like the decision affirmed most of what the Recording Industry Association of America was claiming -- that it is against the law, that Napster should be shut down, that it is just a matter of time now. I think that the decision was certainly consistent with the law, but I don't agree with copyright law.

I don't think the decision comes as a surprise to anyone; the fact that Napster the network relies on Napster the company inevitably is a weakness in the system. It offers a clear way that you can attack a system like this, and it has been attacked.

Freenet is specifically designed so that there is no one person or any one thing to be shut down. It doesn't rely on anyone or any person. Even I couldn't shut it down if I wanted to. The RIAA might come after me, but it wouldn't do any good; it would be ridiculous. Even if they put a gun to my head I couldn't shut Freenet down. It wouldn't make any more sense to come after me for Freenet than it would to go after the creators of the Internet.

Gene Kan, CEO of Gonesilent.com, lead developer on Gnutella

The decision seems to be paving the way to make it easier to make complaints similar to that of Dr. Dre and Metallica to be handled, to be acted upon. The whole basis is faster takedown, right?

That's one approach. I'm not sure what the implementation of the takedown policy will be, whether it will be based on names of files or on users who are infringing or in the same way the Metallica and Dre complaints were handled. It's hard to measure the impact of that. If the tool is to be so blunt as to allow the recording industry to effectively remove all users from the Napster system, then I guess that shuts down Napster.

And the more annoying Napster is to use, the more popular alternative systems will become. The Napster music swapping and everything like that are only one segment of P2P technologies. It won't affect this new technology broadly but it might affect the music-swapping segment.

It seems to me that Napster really is the biggest friend of the recording industry in the sense that Napster has a ridiculous majority of the number of music-swapping users on its system, and they didn't leave in droves when it was proposed that Napster would be a subscription model; so it seems it's a gold mine that should be tapped. I guess almost 50 million users think that Napster is the next way to get music, and since that's the case it seems really shortsighted to try to put a stop to it.

Terry McBride, manager of Barenaked Ladies and Sarah McLachlan

I'm actually pleased. My issue with Napster wasn't with the actual software itself or the philosophy behind it. It was the fact that an IPO was being built off the back of copyrighted master recordings that artists did not give permission to be used.

If you want to use an artist's copyrighted work, you should give him or her some kind of fee for it. Napster could take the approach that MP3.com did, if it's so concerned about getting new music out there. But artists who don't want their stuff up on Napster should be afforded that right.

I'm pleased and happy and hopeful that now people can do this inside the rules, which is how it should have been dealt with from Day 1.

A lot of my artists really don't like Napster because it takes away their living. Napster's been out there saying CD sales are up again. Record sales have been up for the last 10 to 15 years, with this year being the slowest. In an industry where one out of a 100 pieces of music we release is actually successful, we need to maximize that one, because the other 99 are released on artistic, not commercial, merit.

Kelly Truelove, CEO of Clip2, which analyzes the Gnutella and P2P services

I think that we'll see an increase in Gnutella usage; we've seen increases in Gnutella usage when Napster was in the news in the past. I'm looking at numbers comparing right now with a day ago, and we're seeing a 17 percent increase compared to yesterday. But the news just came out, and we haven't had much time to see the impact yet. We did not see a substantial surge over the weekend. But Gnutella has been going through a continuous growth phase for some time that continued right through the weekend. Every day for Gnutella is a record day. Over the last 30-day period, the average daily growth has been 7 percent. As of today, we average between 75,000 and 125,000 unique users per day. Napster was seeing something like 8.5 million users per day. Gnutella is quite a ways from that.

But Gnutella does not scale very well, although some of the newer software out there does work better than the old ones. Things have improved relative to where they were last July and August, but some of the fundamental issues remain.

[If a million Napster users switch to Gnutella] users shouldn't expect to be able to access the content on all those 1 million drives, essentially -- they'll only be able to share with some subset of the users who come over. That's kind of the way Gnutella scales -- sublinear scaling. The big alternative is OpenNap, a really huge service and one that's not discussed as much in the media as Gnutella. OpenNap scales more like Napster, by adding more and more servers. And in general it's easier to use and a better experience than Gnutella.

Jack Valenti, president and CEO, Motion Picture Association of America

The biggest beneficiary from today's decision will be the consumer because it will encourage content owners to put their creative works online knowing that the courts have confirmed what everybody knows: You cannot take for free what belongs to someone else. The fruits of this ruling will be seen in the film industry within six months as studios start to put movies online and offer consumers an exciting new high-quality and legal opportunity to choose what they want to watch.

The Free Software Project
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