Napster/Napster-like Programs Not Music to All Ears

Napster's program for downloading/distributing music online concerns some universities

Napster, a popular program designed to facilitate searching, downloading, and distributing music online in CD-quality MP3 format, has recently become a cause for concern at some universities.

The program is available at http://www.napster.com/ for Windows 95/98/NT; and alternative implementations of "Napster-compatible" programs are also available, including "open source" Napster-compatible clients for Amiga, BeOS, Java, Linus, and MacOSX (see http://opennap.source-forge.net/ )

Why the Concern?

Most student residence halls at major universities now have student-controlled systems with direct network access. In addition, most major universities have high-bandwidth Internet access circuits, which make them desirable to those seeking a well-connected server from which to download music of interest.

Napster is a cause of concern for some universities because of two considerations:

1. Students logged in on their university network accounts may use Napster to search for, and download, music. Because multimedia files are comparatively large, Napster activity can add a significant amount of traffic to a university's inbound Internet load.

2. Students may use Napster to distribute MP3-format music that they've stored on their personal computers--without regard to copyright law. Distributing copyrighted material without the consent of the copyright holder is of course illegal.

University Responses

Some universities have reacted to Napster by attempting to block it in a variety of ways, such as

• educating their students about the problem and asking them to voluntarily refrain from using Napster--an appeal that is often ignored
• reconfiguring local name servers to disassociate napster.com from its usual server address (easily overridden when users change the name server they rely upon)
• blocking access to TCP/IP ports traditionally used by Napster (not foolproof, since Napster is designed to search for an alternative open/unfiltered port if the default Napster is blocked, and OpenNapster clients can be configured to use virtually any arbitrary port)
• blocking access to the network address blocks assigned to napster.com at the university's border routers or institutional firewall (also not foolproof because external proxy servers can circumvent these blocks, and OpenNapster servers can be pointed arbitrarily at servers anywhere on the Internet)

None of these ploys is adequate to resolve the problems Napster poses for the university community. Moreover, Napster is only one of a growing number of similar file sharing applications, and there is no one-size-fits-all solution for dealing with them. For example, the Napster-like program iMesh (http://www.imesh.com) operates on entirely different software, using entirely different network addresses and network ports. Even if Napster were disabled, programs like iMesh would continue to operate without interruption.

Why are These Programs So Difficult to Limit?

Napster and related programs are difficult to control for a number of reasons:

1. Popularity. These programs facilitate easy access to music--and music has extremely broad appeal.

2. The stigma of "censorship." Any effort to restrict access to online resources is customarily denounced as "censorship," with concomitant negative media attention. It's difficult to succinctly explain complicated technical issues in the brief "sound-byte"-length opportunities provided for rebuttals.

3. Increasingly sophisticated anti-filtering technology. These programs often include effective mechanisms for circumventing filters that are deployed to stop them.

4. Contact between the party requesting a particular file (the client) and the party providing access to that particular file (the server) is brokered rather than being arranged directly. However, the central brokering server doesn't actually participate in the file transfer--thereby avoiding problems of network congestion at a single central point, and eliminating any possibility that the central server can be accused of copyright violations itself.

What's the UO Doing About Napster?

The UO continues to closely monitor Napster usage and will continue to cooperate fully with law enforcement authorities when copyright infringements are reported.