It is a music-lover’s dream come true. Type into your computer the name of an artist and the title of a song, and within a few seconds a list of matches pops up. Each entry in the list provides a link to the song in question, stored somewhere on the internet. A couple more clicks, and a few minutes later the song has been downloaded and is blaring from your computer’s loudspeakers. Hundreds of thousands of tracks by thousands of artists can be accessed from this global jukebox, called Napster, which is available around the clock, and free. No wonder 20m people are using it-and no wonder the record industry is trying to shut it down.

The case came to court in San Francisco in July. Napster lost. But the service is still operating, pending an appeal, which will be heard in early October. However, in many cases, the verdict is already irrelevant. Whatever happens, Napster, or at least the principle it represents, has won. Even if the plug is pulled on Napster, there are dozens of similar services waiting to replace it, most of which have been deliberately designed to be far more difficult to shut down. The genie is out of the bottle: file-swapping is here to stay. This is bad news for all those trying to protect intellectual property, be it music, software, movies or books. Napster and its like will increase the pressure on record companies, software firms and publishers to switch to new ways of doing business. They will also make it harder than ever to control or censor internet content.

Napster is significant for other reasons, too. It is the best illustration to date of the way in which the internet can overturn long-established business practices practically overnight (it was launched just over a year ago). It is also part of a broad trend towards a less centralised internet, as users and programmers discover what can be done by linking together thousands of ordinary PCs. Pooling the storage, communication and processing capacity of machines distributed around the network makes it possible to assemble virtual supercomputers capable of extraordinary things. To some extent, the result is a return to the internet’s original communitarian spirit. As recently as ten years ago, most machines on the internet talked to each other as equals; scientists and academics used the system to exchange information and download files from each other. But since the commercialisation of the internet started in earnest, in about 1994, the trend has been towards growing domination by an ever-smaller number of important sites. According to a 1999 Media Metrix study, one fifth of all online time is spent visiting the ten most popular sites. In 1998, the figure was one sixth. Such is the dominance of the most popular sites that, by one estimate, Yahoo! accounts for five minutes of every hour spent by a typical user on the web.

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