by Marko Peric

File sharing is dead — long live file sharing. The music sharing service that a year ago was touted as the death of the music industry is offline, quite possibly permanently. The big players in the music biz basically formed a circle around Napster and beat it into the dust. Going head to head with big business had made the demise of Napster every bit as inevitable as the slow melty death of a snowman, only with lots of lawyers.

But file sharing has become the preferred on-line drug of the new millennium. When you can log on and download almost any song you can think of, it's not easy to surrender access to an inexhaustible library of music without a whimper. Napster may be cooling in the morgue, but file sharing is expanding like never before. There are now a wide variety of new services that let users share files, and more of these would-be successors to the throne crop up ever day. Many of these operate without the need for central servers such as Napster employed, so shutting them down might prove all but impossible. Even if a way to stop some of these new file sharers is developed, new ones will continue to pop up like dandelions after a June rain. The music industry is playing a game much akin to a carnival whack-a-mole, only with more moles joining the game all the time.

I should take a moment to point out that none of these services is as good as Napster was at its apex, at least none that I have tried. Napster's success at bringing file sharing to the masses is perhaps what caused its demise. When you set up a service that has more than 50 million people sign up in less than a year, it attracts a lot of attention.

At the moment stopping file sharing looks to be a futile goal. There are too many people sharing too much stuff on too many different services now to really stomp it out. It's moved beyond music now to include full versions of programs and games, television shows, and full length movies. While sharing of software has been around almost as long as software itself, and making copies of movies for friends is nothing new, this has gone far beyond that. I have sitting on my hard drive at this moment entire copies of Charlie's Angels and Shrek. Do I feel guilty about this? Nope, afraid not. Will I stop sharing music and movies any time soon? Not likely. File sharing has made eager copyright violators of millions, and most of us don't feel we are doing anything wrong. After all, the Recording Industry Association of America can't possibly prosecute all of us, particularly those living outside of the USA.

So what will become of on-line file sharing? This isn't something that's going to go away. The copying and sharing of music has been going on since the advent of the cassette tape, which I should add, certainly didn't kill the record industry. I suspect the best move that the big media business could make would be to stand back and let the controversy over Napster die down. Making a huge fuss over illegal file sharing is like a concerned citizen's brigade protesting an obscene art exhibition, it merely attracts more attention, and any publicity is good publicity.

So everyone, go about your file sharing as usual. Perhaps on Limewire. Or BearShare. Maybe Direct Connect. Or Kazaa. Or AudioGalaxy. Even Audio Gnome. Or through IRC. Or on any number of FTP servers. . .