Napster was supposed to be the killer app – it was easy to use, an instant hit and along with millions of file swappers it grabbed the headlines too.
But it turns out the lawyers are the real killers and now the courts are shutting napster.com down. But the word on the street is that Napster is just the beginning for peer to peer technology, coming down the road is a new generation of p2p apps with strange names like Gnutella, Freenet and Bearshare.
Peer to peer means there’s no central server to serve the injunction to, the lawyers don’t have anybody or anything to rout. In the post-Napster world the courts aren’t the ones writing the code. Peer to peer means people to people, stringing PC’s together with out a center.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)
Guests:
Jonathan Zittrain, Head of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at the Harvard Law School
and Clay Shirky, partner for the Technology Group at the Accelerator Group
Andy Oram, an editor at O’Reilly & Associates.