“It was around 8 p.m. on Wednesday when Joe Frost heard that a
federal judge had issued an order that effectively shut down
Napster. By 11 p.m., he had linked his computer to one of several
underground networks that allow users to do the same thing as the
popular Internet music-swapping service does, only without
providing a central target.”
“Like many of Napster’s millions of users, Mr. Frost, a
23-year-old systems administrator in San Francisco, did not see the
court’s ruling as a victory for copyright law or a defeat for a
particular company. He saw it as a call to arms. “I wanted to get
more involved in keeping free music distribution alive,” Mr. Frost
said….”
“But the cultural phenomenon of widespread copying of music
shows no signs of abating, as Internet users swarmed to other
services that are not designed to make money.“