REEBEE GAROFALO, Saturday September 30:

35. Here's my take on Janelle Brown. Her argument–which she calls the Gnutella Paradox–hangs on the notion that file-swapping programs like Napster are not effective until they reach critical mass, but at critical mass they are large enough to attract the ire of the recording companies which at present seem to have the legal muscle to shut them down.
    
    
36. First a word about critical mass. On Sept. 8, Brown estimated the Napster community at 20 million. On Sept 29, she tagged it at 30 million. So we have considerable Napster use inflation on the part of journalists who play fast and loose with numbers they may know little about. A study by Media Matrix logged 4.9 million unique Napster users in July and labeled that a 345% increase.

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    "If all it takes is a couple of million users to bring down the wrath of the music industry, then why hasn't Aimster—AOL's Napster-like file-sharing program—attracted similar attention?"

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37. So, my first question is: What is critical mass? If all it takes is a couple of million users to bring down the wrath of the music industry, then why hasn't Aimster—AOL's Napster-like file-sharing program—attracted similar attention? Given AOL's subscriber base, I would expect Aimster to grow to critical mass in no time flat. And Aimster is based on Gnutella, a Napster-like application that is well-known to the music industry, and was actually developed by AOL's Nullsoft subsidiary before they dumped the company in the Time-Warner merger.
    
    
38. All of this has to do with the way the sides are lining up in the Napster War. The federal government has filed an amicus brief supporting the shutdown of Napster, because they are quite beholden to the entertainment industry (even as they demonize it in the press) as one of their most effective fundraising mechanisms. The major players in the computer industry, on the other hand, have sided with Napster. They realize that peer-to-peer technology is going to change the very architecture of the internet and save them billions of dollars through the increased efficiency of not having to rely on central servers. And they do not want anything standing in the way of its development.
    
    
39. This places the music business squarely at odds with the industry they will have to rely on to make downloadable music a reality. A recent challenge by SDMI—the music industry's two-year old attempt to create a secure format—to the hacker community to try and crack its code and win $10,000 was flatly refused.
    
    
40. Ultimately, I think Casper was correct that the music industry is using their current legal victories to buy time, to slow the process of developing downloadable solutions until they can figure out how to enter and control that business themselves. And they may well be able to pull it off. If they don't someone else will. And the biggest victim in all this upheaval will be not artists, not recording companies, not even consumers, but rather the only players who do not have the means to adapt to the new world—mom and pop record stores.

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