Gene researchers and computer virus engineers alike want their Napster, but not for swapping the latest tracks from Da Brat.
All sorts of people have found ways to use Napster-like technologies, which connect individual computers to one another via a central server in order to share data. But as a copyright infringement case against the company threatens to shut down the exceedingly popular music-swapping site, those dealing in perfectly legal data worry they could be stifled as well.
On Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Marilyn Patel ruled that Napster must stop allowing its users to share copyrighted music. Since the program has no way to distinguish between music that's copyrighted and music that's not, her injunction would have effectively shut down the site.
But Napster's not gone yet. On Friday, 9th U.S. Circuit Court judges granted Napster a stay of the injunction, allowing the file-trading application to remain up and running on the company's site.
Napster's attorneys have until August 18 to file their paperwork regarding the injunction. The trial date has not been set.
Should the trial turn out badly for Napster, some are concerned that it could set a precedent for all Napster-type technologies, even those that are legal.
"I worry very much that certain types of software may be banned because they can be used for illegitimate purposes, without regard for the fact that they have extremely and purely legal functions as well," said Lincoln Stein, associate professor of bioinformatics at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories in New York.
Moreover, Stein said he worries that the judge's decision could have far-reaching implications that would thwart more than just peer-to-peer technologies.
"If we take the judge's ruling to a logical conclusion, we would have to ban the World Wide Web as well," Stein said. "I shudder to think the RIAA might bring suit against the World Wide Web consortium because many people are using the WWW routinely for sharing MP3 files."
When Stein first encountered Napster, he thought scientists might be able to use it for sharing genetic information. He began investigating ways to use Napster-type technology to allow scientists to share their research on the human genome.
"Napster has a similar architecture (to what we use now), but it allows for 'peer-to-peer' data exchange and it dawned on me that it would be marvelous for our annotation system."
Since Stein's first encounter with Napster, he has discovered the program Gnutella, which he found to be even more appropriate for genetic data exchange. Gnutella functions much like Napster, but without a central server.
"Gnutella was designed to distribute files of any format, so it can be used for genomic data," Stein said.
Peer-to-peer technologies have become extremely popular among college students and other music lovers as an easy way to find and download MP3 files from the Internet.
But the possibilities for such technologies have become much broader. A company called MyCIO.com is beta testing a peer-to-peer-style technology called Rumor, which allows technology administrators to create a speedy information flow regarding the latest viruses infecting computers.
Every desktop that subscribes to Rumor can get a virus update from all of the other desktops that subscribe, requiring system administrators to check up on viruses less often.
"Rumor allows us to spread and propagate updates more quickly than ever before," said Zach Nelson, president and CEO of MyCIO.com. "It makes efficient use of the bandwidth and Internet services within an organization."
Nelson said he's not worried that the Rumor technology could be banned because it has a built-in authentication system that will accept only information to which the company already has rights.
"The information that's being shared is effectively only our copyrighted information," Nelson said.
The technology identifies data with the proper "key" as a friendly packet that's been paid for.
Since distinguishing between copyrighted and non-copyrighted data is a sticking point for Napster, Nelson suggested that Rumor could be the answer to Napster's worries.
"Imagine, I could go to an EMI site and pay a one-year license for any EMI-published music," Nelson said. "Now I have the right to share in a Napster-like way."
