Napster An Indicator Of Online Culture Change

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July 31, 2000 (4:09 AM EDT)

Napster An Indicator Of Online Culture Change

By Mary Mosquera,

The struggle to rein in music-sharing site Napster is a portent of things to come as a movement fueled by young people challenges online business as usual, an Internet expert said Friday.

"A culture change is coming," said Esther Dyson, chairman, EDventure Holdings, author, and board chairman of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the international organization charged with technical administration of the Internet.

The rise of peer-to-peer technology is going to change how companies do business and how consumers are perceived, she said. "It's a whole new attitude," Dyson said. It will also be a challenge to harmonize it with existing copyright law and business models, she said.

The technology is not new but has become an anthem with sites such as Napster and Gnutella software.

A federal judge in San Francisco ruled Wednesday that Napster must stop swapping songs by midnight Friday. The Recording Industry Association of America, which has charged Napster with music piracy and copyright infringement, sought the preliminary injunction. An appeals court stayed the order Friday afternoon, pending a final ruling.

Like the 1960s youth revolution, teenagers and twenty-somethings have fueled Napster and other file-sharing sites. A summer student intern at the State Department in Washington, D.C. said networked colleges and universities have been incubators for this movement, nurturing resourceful students like Napster's founder, then-college freshman Shawn Fanning. Students have just taken what they do offline, sharing with a group what they like, and taken it to the Internet, she said.

"College students are used to sharing all their files, and as long as colleges are networked they'll share their music," the student intern said.

"Young people now are much less nave," Dyson said. "They're much more cynical than we were. And they want non-commercial transactions," she said.

The vision behind peer-to-peer technology, content, and applications is more idealistic than commercial models. "People become the producers rather than just consumers. It's run by the people and for the people. It gives users world economies of scale. It used to be you'd have to be part of an institution to have that," Dyson said.

It's closer to the original notion of the Internet, she said.

"It's ironic that communists once talked about putting the tools of production in the hands of the people. Now the Internet is," Dyson said.

It will be a different world for businesses. "You used to know who your competition was. Now you may not," she said.

Peer-to-peer transactions will affect how companies do business and deal with their employees, she said. "Employees will feel empowered. They want to be the cells of the company, not something at the end of the line," Dyson said.

The new attitude will also require businesses to have a certain lightness, a sense of humor, she said. "It's tough to be a large organization. They're accountable for everything they do," Dyson said. Peer-to-peer activities are not. Large companies are still trying to reach individual consumers, and individual consumers' attitudes are changing.