With the shutdown of Napster Inc.'s online music bazaar appearing imminent, users of the song-swapping service scrambled to the Internet on Thursday to discuss alternate means for trading free bootleg recordings.
Unlike Napster's clearinghouse model, those alternatives enable decentralized file-sharing - a technology no court or law enforcement agency can stop.
Lawyers for Napster asked the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Thursday to stay a judge's order, in suit brought by the recording industry, that Napster shut down its file-swapping service at midnight Friday.
Chief U.S. District Judge Marilyn Hall Patel's decision Wednesday will bring down the company, forcing Napster to lay off its 40 Napster employees within days, they argued.
"This would essentially destroy Napster as a business, and deprive the more than 20 million Napster users of their service," Napster said in its motion.
Napster's motion said Patel had erred by attempting to "adapt existing copyright provisions to the new realities of Internet technology."
If a stay is denied, Napster has until midnight to shut down access to copyrighted music.
On Thursday, Web sites providing information on alternative song-swapping software were heavy with traffic.
By midday, more than 31,000 people had used a lesser-known Internet service called Scour Exchange to share more than two million songs.
Scour works like Napster, but in addition to providing audio in the popular MP3 compressed format, Scour also offers constantly updated directories of video and picture files available for free trading online.
Other programs, the best known of them Gnutella, work on a distributed network system. Instead of having central servers maintain a list of available files, each user's computer is in effect a server.
"I have Gnutella and it's supposed to be RIAA proof," wrote "embrya120" in a Yahoo chat room Thursday, referring to the Recording Industry Association of America, the plaintiff in the Napster case.
"So do I. It's good because you can get movies too," replied "S-mooth-86", another chatter.
In the Napster chat rooms, revolt was on the minds of many.
"Hey hey... did everyone sign the boycott against the RIAA?" wrote "XsexyserialkillaX" in another chat room.
Organizers of one Web site started an online petition for people who pledge to abstain from buying CDs while Napster is shut down.
Gnutella was created by programmers working for America Online, which discontinued its development this year, but not after the program was downloaded and spread over the Internet, where dozens of its clones thrive.
Going by names such as Gnotella, Furi, MyGnut and many others, the programs are available for the Windows, Linux, BeOS and Macintosh operating systems.
A few mouseclicks after launching the program, the user is soon connected to everyone logged on to the system.
