Online music-traders consider Napster alternatives
While the world waits for a panel of appellate judges to decide Napster's fate, dedicated music lovers and file traders already have their eyes on other swapping technologies.
Programs such as Gnutella, Freenet and OpenNap are already attracting thousands of people, helping spur the evolution of peer-to-peer 
technology, or systems that allow people to search for and retrieve files from individual computers around the world. Many of these have been touted by file-swapping advocates as potential safe havens for Napster's millions of music traders if the popular service is shut down in the courts.
But for all the burgeoning optimism that surrounds these programs, experts say the other options may prove to be poor alternatives for Napster's millions of members if that company's business is deemed illegal.
Certainly file trading on a smaller scale will be a part of the Internet's fabric, as it long has been through Napster predecessors such as Hotline or even online chat rooms. But increasingly experts are saying that if Napster goes down, the record industry will be able to target high-volume music traders on most other systems, too, preventing any large-scale trading floor from rising to take its place.
Napster, however, isn't dead yet and could possibly survive its court ordeal. It is being sued by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), which contends the company is contributing to massive levels of copyright infringement with its service.
A district court has ordered Napster to bar any major-label songs from being traded using its service, but that order was temporarily put on hold by an appeals court.
Napster has argued that it is not doing anything illegal--and that its members aren't doing anything legally untoward by freely uploading and downloading songs though the service. A final ruling hasn't been made on that point, but many legal observers have said it is one of the longest shots in Napster's arguments.
But Napster's not alone. Net denizens using other technologies such as Internet Relay Chat or File Transfer Protocol (FTP) servers have been routinely targeted by past RIAA-led enforcement actions.
Gnutella, the open-source, wholly decentralized network invented by an America Online programmer, is often viewed as the most likely inheritor of Napster's file-trading crown.
The network functions by connecting each individual computer to others, which are in turn connected to several others, and so on. By connecting to the shared network, it is a simple task to find the Net address of a computer providing songs online.
But those who see Gnutella as a Napster alternative beyond the reach of the courts received a wake-up call when researchers reported that only a fraction of Gnutella users supply the bulk of the content available over the network. That could make it easier for the RIAA to gut Gnutella through a few well-placed lawsuits.
A recent study by researchers at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) found that about 70 percent of people on Gnutella are "free riders," sharing no files. About 50 percent of the files shared come from just 1 percent of the people on the network, the researchers said.
"If you have a few people doing this, you can in fact target them pretty easily," said Bernardo Huberman, one of the study's authors.
Security experts agree. "Gnutella users are easily traceable," says Travis Hill, author of a Media Enforcer software program that records information about people using programs such as Napster or Gnutella. "It's really easy to grab the (Internet Protocol) address of anyone who's offering anything."
This is the traditional way that the record industry tracks operators of FTP servers and other pirate sites. Copyright law allows the industry to get an expedited warrant, much faster than ordinary search warrant procedure, that lets investigators ask Internet service providers (ISPs) specifically what subscribers are associated with a given computer, connection or Web site.
The RIAA has said it hasn't turned its enforcement resources onto the 
peer-to-peer world--but only because it is waiting for the legal issues surrounding the Napster case to be settled. Once the trial is over, enforcement officers have said in previous interviews, they are likely to target individuals offering large amounts of content over these networks
just as they now focus on "pirate" Web sites and FTP sites.
In theory, this would have little effect on Gnutella. But the Xerox PARC study suggests that a targeted enforcement effort could pull much of the content off Gnutella simply by targeting that 1 percent of its users who provide half the network's content.
Gnutella developer Gene Kan warns that this view could be a simplistic interpretation of the study. The network is a constantly changing beast with different people online at any given time. Cutting off today's top 1 percent doesn't necessarily block tomorrow's file traders from sharing, he says.
"Even if there is a relatively small number of people sharing on the network, it would be rather difficult to track them," Kan said. "And those people are changing over time."
Other Napster alternatives have already become the targets of legal attacks. Scour, which allows swaps of video
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