Well, since Napster has been effectively bludgeoned to death and they’ve now instituted a lame filtering procedure to keep people from lifting the ‘intellectual property’ of the RIAA, it’s now time to bid a fond farewell and pursue other means of acquiring our music and video. The decomodification of art, science, and knowledge shouldn’t be stopped and I think it has a good chance of continuing on. I have a feeling that the so-called new economy will be one based not on charging money and exchanging money for art, but an economy based on sharing freely with one another; a common ownership of the products of human civilization. Civilization flourishes when knowledge is freely available and not guarded by those who would own it.
I’ve seen some nice napster alternatives:
BearShare uses the gnutella network but has ads and spyware.
LimeWire also uses the gnutella network and seems to be much better than bearshare. I like the way it looks too and it has some extra features.
Aimster Another interesting program. Uses AIM to trade files. May stand up to legal challenges because it’s software is protected by the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. Haha!