s, where the owner already installed the software, and it is willing to share the data. It links the user who is searching for the song with the user who is willing to share it. Once they found each other, a communications is established between both of them, without any interaction of the server. This communication between two computers is a fairly new type of technology known as peer-to-peer communication. and is exactly the same principle used in the well known "chat rooms" Depending on the speed of the internet connection that the user is accessing, the operation of downloading a song would take five minutes at the most. Once the user closes his/her connection to the Internet, there is not trace of the transaction and the song is already shared between the two users involved. If the one who just downloaded the song chooses to keep it in his hard drive, the song becomes available in two hard drives, widening the possibilities for the next Napster user of logging and finding somebody willing to share that specific song. It provides a multiplicative effect that makes the availability of songs to increase geometrically (2,4,8,16,32, etc.)Napster has acquired an unsuspected popularity. The company claims that currently there are about 38 million of people all over the world who are connecting to the service in regular bases. The problem:Obviously the ones with the biggest trouble are the record labels. In December of 1999 the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), which unifies the industry trade group, sued Napster alleging that the file-sharing program facilitates massive copyright violations (1). It is based in articles of the mentioned Digital Millennium Copyright Act (2) as well as some of the Copy Right Law of America (3). Under this lawsuit this last July, the U.S. District Judge Marilyn Hall Patel granted an injunction to have the Napster server shutdown. With the server (the computer where the music information is loc...
