A number of new technologies such as the MP3 music compression format and the Napster file sharing network are creating new opportunities for consumers’ activities with music media. In this paper we explore current practice with both conventional and new forms of media in order to better understand what the future may hold for music consumers. We interviewed 36 music enthusiasts: 12 teenaged an...

In the past, copyright law was of interest only to legal scholars and Hollywood film types. Today, however, copyright law is on the front page of local newspapers, argued about in conversations at the water cooler, and discussed by teenagers looking to find free music on the Web. Intellectual property intimidates those who don't understand the underlying principles or those that don't speak the...

“Peer-to-peer” systems like Napster and Gnutella have recently become popular for sharing information. In this paper, we study the relevant issues and tradeoffs in designing a scalable P2P system. We focus on a subset of P2P systems, known as “hybrid” P2P, where some functionality is still centralized. (In Napster, for example, indexing is centralized, and file exchange is distributed.) We mode...

The popularity of peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing systems such as Napster, Gnutella and Freenet, has inspired a whole new breed of P2P storage systems, which aims to harness the rapid growth of network bandwidth and storage capacity to provide inexpensive, scalable, fault-tolerant, and highly-available storage without centralized servers. Many P2P storage systems have been proposed and describe...

A number of educational institutions were taken by surprise when an easy to use MP3 file sharing application called Napster quickly arose to make use of all available Internet capacity. Many institutions have been using various techniques to manage their Internet capacity more pro-actively since the first file sharing applications became available. Some institutions simply banned the use of suc...

P2P le-sharing tools such as Napster or KaZaA allow the easy distribution of les, mostly music in the form of MP3s, much to the dismay of the record industry as well as of individual artists who fear massive losses of their revenues. With the enforcement of copyright infringement laws, which has alread lead to the temporary shut down of Napster, signs are that the future of P2P le-sharing tools...