How Napster worked!
Peer to peer (P2P) filesharing has hit the news in the past recent months
with the increase of "Napster Users". Napster, a software
sharing client is a free program that allows for people to share Mp3
music files over the Internet with ease. When you download a song
with napster your are actually downloading it off another persons
machine and not off a web server. This person could be your next door
neighbour or be halfway around the world.
Here is what happens when you decide to look for a song:
- You open the Napster utility.
- Napster checks for an Internet connection.
- If it finds a connection, Napster logs you onto the central
server. The main purpose of this central server is to keep an
index of all the Napster users currently online and connect them
to each other. It does not contain any of the MP3 files itself.
- You type in the title or artist of the song you are looking
for.
- The Napster utility on your computer queries the index
server for other Napster computers online that have the song you
have requested.
- Whenever a match is found, the Napster server informs your computer
where to find the requested file.
- When the server replies, Napster builds a list of these systems
in the results window.
- You click on the file(s) that interest you and then choose Download.
- Your copy of Napster attempts to establish a connection with
the system hosting the file you have selected.
- If a connection is successfully made, the file begins downloading.
- Once the file is downloaded, the host computer breaks the connection
with your system.
- You open up your MP3 player software and listen to the song.
The Napster network
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Why all the trouble with napster?
Well this was because Napster's setup had a central server (shown
above) and this meant that users data (ie: copyrighted songs) had to actually travel through Napster's
own private servers to get the song, so even though Napster's servers
didn't host the songs it did actually transfer the mp3 files through
it's central index server.
But what about all the other programs Like Morpheus and CureMX
These Programs work in the exact same way as Napster did apart
from one minor detail! They don't have a central indexing server
which users have to connect to. Instead users directly connect to
each others computer via a direct P2P (Peer too Peer) connection
and this is why these services have yet to be shutdown.
Piracy Issues
The problem that the music industry has with Napster is that it
is a big, automated way to copy copyrighted material. It is a fact
that thousands of people are making thousands of copies of copyrighted
songs, and neither the music industry nor the artists get any money
in return for those copies. This is why there is so much emotion
around it right now. Many people love Napster because they can get
music for free instead of paying £15 for a CD. Napster's defense
is that the files are personal files that people maintain on their
own machines, and therefore Napster is not responsible. Individuals
tend to be less concerned about copyright laws than businesses have
to be, so individuals make all sorts of copyrighted songs available
to the world from their personal machines. This means that anyone
can download, for free, any song that someone has taken the time
to encode in the MP3 format. Even though Napster has been banned
from about 40 percent of colleges and universities, some of the
biggest users of Napster are college students.
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