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If you haven't already, you should go to www.napster.com, signup, and download and install their software. Then begin to use their service to fetch songs that you'd like to hear.
Regardless of the outcome of the legal battles regarding rights to and payments for music, the rapid, phenomenal success of Napster changes the Internet business environment. Yes, anybody could set up a Web server to make it easy for people to download music or any other kind of digital file. But what Napster did was to make it easy for Internet users anywhere to connect directly to one another and share files. The music doesn't reside at the Napster site. It sits on your PC and the PCs of millions of other Napster members. That's what makes such a service so impossible to police.
Napster uses a central site to manage the users, but has no control over what they put on their PCs and what they decide to share with one another. Napster just makes it easy for someone in Peking to find out that you have a particular file that he or she wants and to make a copy of it on his or her own PC. Individuals can name their files however they want. So you can foil automated efforts to block the sharing of particular copyrighted material by just changing the spelling of names or adding a letter or number here and there.
What works so well for music could work just as well for any other kinds of digital files -- text or graphics or video or animation. And while Napster is set up as a global system connecting tens of millions of people, the same technology can be used to link together much smaller, more focused communities of users.
Another approach to P2P sharing known as Gnutella does the same thing without any central management of users. Gnutella client software is basically a mini search engine and a file serving system in one. You search a Gnutella Network and get the files that you want -- any files at all: music, pictures, video, text, software -- anonymously. To learn more and to download the software, go to http://gnutella.wego.com That's pioneer-style sharing, like the early days of the Internet, with free and open software. It's easy to sense that there's great potential in that direction, but hard to come up with a viable, profit-making business model.
Up until today, if you wanted to use P2P for business -- setting up a community of employees, partners, and customers for file sharing and search, you had to build it all from scratch, using Gnutella-style tools. Now you have an interesting new alternative -- Yaga.com
Go to their site, download their software, and give their P2P network
a try. Click on Advanced Search near the top of the home page and you can
search not just by title, but also by file type -- image, music, sound,
video, text, html, Word, Excel, pdf, zip, or exe. You can make files of
your own available to the community as well as download files made public
by others like you. If you have software you wrote that you'd like to make
available to the world and you don't have your own ftp site, you could
make it available here. Whatever kind of file you want to share, you can
share it here, today, for free.
More important from a business standpoint, Yaga will help you
set up your own private branded P2P network that you can use to publish
audio, video, images, software, or any other kinds of files -- for free
or for a price, depending on your business model. Their technology makes
it easy to reliably transfer files as large as a gigabyte -- which is becoming
increasingly important for distributing demos and software and videos.
On the one hand, this is an alternative to distributing files by email
or ftp or by browser-based download. On the other hand, it's a new infrastructure
that supports collaboration and community -- with all members able to quickly
and easily share files of all kinds with one another.
Basically, Yaga seems to have found a way to harness the power of P2P, while curbing the anarchic tendencies. They have built in security, and support for digital rights management. Everything is managed centrally, with files given unique signatures based on their size. Files are scanned for viruses before being made available. As soon as a file is made available, it is included in the search index, supporting full-text search (every word, not just the title and description). All the basic elements are here to let content producers use this as a mechanism for selling content. Yaga is in a good position to be an ally of the movie, music, publishing, and software industries, rather than an antagonist. Please give it a try and let me know how you think you could use it in your business.
This site is Published by B&R Samizdat Express, 33 Gould St., West Roxbury, MA 02132. (617) 469-2269. seltzer@samizdat.com
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