“The amazing thing about Napster isn’t the program, it’s the
idea,” Weekly said. “You can’t litigate the idea. You can’t
tell people that they need to stop thinking about the idea. Already
we’ve seen commercial alternatives pop up with Scour Exchange (a
commercial file-trading exchange), so even if Napster is sued out
of existence, there are alternatives popping up everywhere.”
“What most likely will spring up in its place is a series of
open-source programs like Gnutella.”
“People download the Napster program and that connects to a
Napster server owned by Napster, Inc., and then the users can begin
sharing data,” said Weekly, who reverse-engineered the Napster
application and posted the source code on the Web, helping
facilitate the open-source coding of the program. “Once somebody
understands the application’s protocol, they can create a client
that looks like the Napster program or you could create a server
that looks like Napster.”