It looks like the end is near: Napster to Begin Blocking Copyrighted Songs

[T]he wildly popular online song swap service would begin blocking access to some one million copyrighted songs this weekend as part of its effort to conform with an injunction expected at any time[…]

That doesn’t appear to have happened yet. I, and 11,104 other users, are currently connected and sharing 2,125,697 files (9,034 gigs.) And yes, I’m downloading just as fast as my DSL line can pull stuff in.

My feeling is that music sharing will temporarily devolve into a feudal model, with “guilds” of people who have similar tastes in music, banding together in a less-public venue. These guilds will continue to exist, adding and changing members, until some unifying event occurs that makes the “servent” [server-client] technology work as well as Napster does/did.

Currently it looks like that unifying event will be based on the Gnutella protocol. So far today, two different friends have sent me two different programs that both operate on the Gnutella model. One of them, Bearshare, I’ve been playing with for a while, but I haven’t tried the new beta. The other is called iMesh, and I’d never even heard of it before.

All of these programs are quirky (and let’s face it: Napster is too) but if every computer is a servent, it’s going to be darn near impossible to shut down.

The end of Napster (as we know it) is probably imminent. But if the RIAA thinks they can shut down music sharing, they need to take a lesson from King Canute: the incoming tide will not obey you when you demand that it stop.