Napster is not some garage
	            organization . . . but rather
	            an incorporated company with
	            a development team, marketing
	            team, bizdev team, and an
	            executive management team.
			       -- A Napster Developer 

Most of the glory behind Napster is accredited to a 19-year-old Northeastern College dropout, Shawn Fanning. As a freshman in January 1999 he created what would become one of the most controversial pieces of software in the Information Age: A program to assist in the swapping of music files. After the release of the beta version, Fanning's creation, Napster, was rated "Download of the Week" by ZDNet and Fanning became known as one of the new young Internet prodigies. But Napster, as one developer summarized, is no longer a child's game, but a multi-million dollar incorporated business. "Napster's hard-nosed approach to protecting its assets may stem from the fact that its real owners aren't a group of young, tech-savvy music fans, but rather a network of seasoned investors whose goal is turning the company into a profitable business." The company is being funded by high risk venture capitalists who not only expect but demand that Napster will turn a profit. The most recent wave of venture capital funding came in May when Hummer Winblad Venture Partners and Angel Investors LP contributed $15 million of Series C venture capital.

Napster is currently seeking more capital to fund its business. As a blossoming technology, Napster has a large consumer base and a large stake in how society will use networking in the future. In a statement to the United States Congress Senate Judiciary Committee on October 9, 2000, Shawn Fanning announced that, "Today the Napster community numbers more than 32 million; for the past four months, it has been growing at a rate of one million new users each week. There are consistently over 800,000 people using the system simultaneously, limited only by our network resources. Napster users are in all corners of the world . . . [and] we received e-mail just last Friday from one 91-year-old man." Clearly Napster's population is spreading across national, world, and even age boundaries.

At its present stage, Napster is ripe for investment. Penn State has always fostered expansion and growth in new technologies. As a key member of the Internet 2 project, Penn State is attempting to be a leader in the digital economy of the 21^st century. Investing in Napster would not only be a wise financial decision for Penn State, but also acts as an attempt to keep up with the current pace of technology. The Pennsylvania State University should invest in Napster because of the potential for growth in peer-to-peer networking.

To understand the benefits of Napster, a knowledge of the different types of topologies is important. Gnutella, another competing file sharing service, operates solely on a peer-to-peer architecture utilizing a ring topology. A request is sent from one computer to another and the solicited data is returned directly back to the computer that initiated the request. No server is involved in the transaction and the personal computers rely directly on each other. However, Gnutella is not scalable because there is no central server, meaning the number of users connected at one time is not controllable. It lacks efficiency and stability.

The way that files are currently transferred over the Penn State network represents a client-server model, or star topology. In a star topology, the client machines are all connected to a central server. Whenever there is a request for data, the server, and not another client, will supply the information. It is similar to a host-terminal configuration, with the major exception that a client is able to handle processes, unlike the dumb terminals that are heading toward obsolescence. A client-server network has complete scalability and is efficient, assuming the server is stable. However, there is a high cost of the equipment needed to make the topology functional. Furthermore, if the server is slow, so is the service, as was experienced by all Penn State students and faculty earlier in the semester.

Napster has created the best of both worlds by utilizing a modified peer-to-peer network. Essentially, a Napster user installs a client program onto his computer. When properly used, the program will send a query to a central server which will scour other users' computers and then return a database of potential matches. That alone would represent a client-server architecture. However, once a user requests to download a specific song, that request never goes to the server, but instead goes directly to another client PC. The entire swapping process is done independent of the server, and is purely a peer-to-peer transaction.

Napster is able to organize all the individual songs that users make available by placing the information into a database, which is a collection of data in related files that can be systematically searched through by a variety of keyword and fields. SAP R/2 and R/3, which provide solutions for corporation finances; The Penn State Phone Directory System; AltaVista and other web search engines; LIAS, the Penn State Library card catalog system; and even an old-fashioned White Pages phone book are other examples of databases. Napster is an example of a relational database. Data is stored in a collection of tables linked by common fields, specifically by user names. The primary search key used in Napster is the name of the music file. Other types of databases include hierarchical, network, and object-oriented, which provide similar ends but show different types of cardinality. Napster's database is maintained by the programmers at the company - the data is supplied by the individual users, but the lists are compiled by the Napster employees.

Having a database where the data is supplied by the users has placed Napster in controversy. The fact that the users supply the data is not the basis of the controversy, but rather that users can and do post restricted material. That predicament has forced Napster's placement as a defendant in a long running legal battle against the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). The RIAA claims that Napster users are violating copyright laws and infringing on the rights of their artists by duplicating files via the Napster technology. It is understandable that an organization would not want to invest in a company that is currently fighting legal battles. However, there is evidence which shows why Napster should and will be cleared of all charges.

David Boies, the lead attorney defending Napster, has created a four-point legal strategy to clear Napster's name. The first point simply states that Napster users are doing nothing wrong. What Napster does falls under fair use and therefore does not violate any copyrights. In effect, "society shouldn't be deprived of a potentially useful new technology just because of a few bad apples." To support that case, Boise will refer to the 1992 Audio Home Recording Act, which states that consumers can make copies of music for themselves or one another as long as they make no profit from the transactions.

The second point in Napster's argument involves the 1984 Sony Betamax case, in which the courts ruled that Sony could produce Betamax tape-recording decks because they had a legitimate legal use. Jonathan Schiller, who is also representing Napster, states, "If a new technology has a single present or potential legal use that is of social or commercial importance than there cannot be a bar against the use of that technology." Essentially, had Sony lost its lawsuit, an entire new technology would have been stolen from the public. Napster insists that winning this lawsuit is paramount to the survival of the new peer-to-peer style of networking.

The third point refers back to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998. Napster insists that they are only publishing a listing of material that is available on the Internet. They claim to be in that regard no different than Yahoo!, AltaVista, or any other Internet Service Provider. The final point in Napster's defense is based on Microsoft and antitrust defenses. The RIAA represents five companies that hold 85% of the recorded music sales in the United States. "Peer-to-peer technologies, such as Gnutella, ICQ, AIM, Napster, etc., make individuals as valuable as large corporations in providing knowledge. They fill the void left by the web." Napster is simply trying to prove that the lawsuit the RIAA has filed is based on the RIAA's fear of losing their grasp on the music industry.

Napster's defense also links back to a study done by Peter Fader at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business. He proved that 70 percent of Napster users purchased the CD after sampling tracks online. In addition, the record industry has hit sales records since the introduction of Napster. In 1999 alone, the record industry shipped 90 million more CD's (10.8%) than the previous year, and they sold each of those CD's at 12.3% higher prices than the year before, leading to a record $1,400,000,000 in earnings in 1999.

To appease the RIAA and end copyright violations, Napster has considered charging users a small monthly fee for unlimited downloads, which would go toward paying the RIAA license fees. Also, ads could be placed on the Napster service to provide revenue. Both are reasonable solutions which show hope that the lawsuit will be settled. It is technologically possible to regulate the types of material that is transferred over a Napster system. In fact, two of Napster's original investors, Bill Bales and Adrean Scott, have begun work on a Napster-like protocol called Flycode that can track copyrighted material. "Flycode offers entertainment media companies and content owners a next generation P2P peer-to-peer distribution network with value-added services to control, track, and monetize their media assets."

The outcome of the Napster lawsuit will affect 32 million people. Of those affected, only 15% are between the ages of 18 and 24. Another 35% of Napster users are categorized between the ages of 35 and 54. An investment in Napster would definitely reach a target audience that Penn State has been unable to attract in the past. With the emergence of Penn State's World Campus combined with a resurgence in Napster, Penn State will be able to successfully reach middle-aged society worldwide.

Most universities are now under pressure to decide how Napster will be utilized at their schools. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology set a good example for many other universities to follow when they announced, "MIT has had a long history of providing its faculty, staff, and students with uncensored access to the Internet and its vast array of resources. This policy is consistent with MIT's educational mission and our deeply held values of academic freedom." Many other universities, including: Stanford University, Georgia Institute of Technology, Princeton University, and UNC Chapel Hill, also announced that they will continue to give students and faculty full uncensored access to the resources of the Internet. It would be hypocritical for a university like Penn State to go against MIT's recommendation and reverse a 150-year tradition of academic excellence. A university is supposed to harbor and foster learning - not concern itself with political and legal issues.

Furthermore, an overwhelming majority of people believe that there is nothing wrong with using Napster. In fact, 78% of people surveyed by the Pew Internet and American Life Project have no ethical qualms with using Napster software. An MSNBC poll found that of 103,614 responses, 89% agreed that Napster should not be shut down and a majority of Penn State students want to see Napster protected. But without ample funding, the service is likely to be shut down, ending any possibilities of advancement in peer-to-peer technology.

An investment by Penn State would provide adequate funding for these new advancements. One advancement in peer-to-peer technology that Napster could develop would be a second version of its software that can scour a diverse array of file types, not just MP3's. The system would be implemented behind a firewall on a company's intranet, not over the public Internet . Productivity and efficiency would increase if employees could look for Word Documents and Excel Spreadsheets on other employee's hard disks. They would save time by not having to retype files that have already been produced and shared by the other branches of the company. Costs would also decrease because the files would be searchable on a peer-to-peer network, thereby avoiding the costs of building a large client-server network. Since this new version of Napster would run entirely within a company's LAN or WAN , copyright policies and intellectual property rights would not be an issue. All of the material is already owned by the company, so there would be no rights to infringe upon.

If Penn State invested in the minds behind Napster, Napster could develop this kind of system and then package and sell it to large corporations. The return on Penn State's investment would be astronomical.

The time to invest in Napster's software is now. Companies and organizations are all jumping on the peer-to-peer investment bandwagon because they see it as the future of networking. The head of Universal, the world's largest music company, has already envisioned that "[Very soon] a few clicks of your mouse will make it possible for you to summon every book ever written in any language, every movie ever made, every television show ever produced, and every piece of music ever recorded."

Penn State has always been innovative and now they need to plan for the future. Imagine how Xerox felt when they abandoned the mouse, GUI , and the origins of networking because they did not understand its potential and did not foresee the benefits it provided thereby allowing Apple to take the technology and make millions. Would Penn State want to pass over this investment and lose a great opportunity? Napster and other peer-to-peer technologies have and will continue to revolutionize interaction on the Internet. In his deposition to Congress, Napster's founder, Shawn Fanning, said:

           I believe that the peer-to-peer technology
      on which Napster is based has the potential to
      be adopted for many different uses. People
      generally speak about the ability to share other
      kinds of files in addition to music, and indeed,
      Napster has been contacted by entities such as
      the Human Genome Project that are interested in
      sharing information among specific communities of
      interest. But peer-to-peer, or distributed
      computing, also has tremendous opportunity for
      sharing resources or computing power, lowering
      information and transaction costs. Peer-to-peer
      could be used to create a pool of resources in
      aggregate to solve a range of complex storage,
      processing and bandwidth problems. 
          Peer-to-peer also has the potential to change
      today's understanding of the relationship between
      source and site. Think how much faster and more
      efficient the Internet could be if instead of
      always connecting you to a central server every
      time you click on to a website, your computer
      would find the source that housed that information
      nearest to you - if it's already on the computer
      of the kid down the hall, why travel halfway
      around the world to retrieve it? . . .
      [Peer-to-peer] will be not just a better use
      of computing resources, but also the development
      of a myriad of communities and super-communities
      fulfilling the promise of the Internet that its
      founders envisioned.