Has Napster's Replacement Finally Arrived?

If and when rogue music-sharing Napster is
reincarnated by its new corporate benefactor Bertelsmann AG as a
tamed service that is fee-based and limited in its musical
selection, will a successor be ready to leap into the void? Up to
now, the prevailing wisdom has said no - nothing on the market is as
simple and reliable to use as Napster.

However, a new product called BearShare, introduced in early
December and now undergoing improvements, just might change the
prevailing wisdom.

"If there's no Napster, then this will probably be the best thing
that I've seen as an alternative," says Ric Dube, a senior analyst
and editor at Internet-music intelligence firm Webnoize. "If it's
something that you can sort of install and run and start getting
things right away, then that's going to make all the difference in
adoption."

BearShare, by all appearances, is exactly that kind of program,
though the program - which really is just an interface providing
simple access to the Gnutella network - is not without a few bugs.

Gnutella is the peer-to-peer file-sharing candidate often deemed
most likely to succeed Napster. It is an open-source program that,
if successful, has potential for proving the music industry's worst
nightmare because, unlike Napster, Gnutella does not rely on servers
to connect users' computers together.

Instead, computers link directly and anonymously to each other, with
no intermediary server between them, when users dial up direct
Internet protocol (IP) addresses. While that makes Gnutella
threatening from the music industry's perspective (who are they
supposed to sue?) it also has been Gnutella's biggest headache.
Programmers and developers get it, but the average computer user
typically finds it too frustrating and perplexing, a problem that
has helped limit Gnutella's user base to a fraction of Napster's
estimated 55 million users.

While there are lists of Gnutella-enabled IP addresses available on
various Web sites, finding a computer that is powered up and sharing
files from amid the tens of thousands of individual IP addresses on
the Gnutella network has been a bit like finding a lost spectacle
lens on the ocean's floor. And Gnutella users employing software
like Gnusoft have had to manually cut-and-paste each IP address they
wish to try into the client, with no idea if a connection will be
made. Worse, even successful connections have not guaranteed
successful file-swapping.

It is these problems that BearShare begins to solve. BearShare,
which really is just an interface for entry into the Gnutella
network, has a function that automatically seeks out active IP
addresses and connects the user to others on the Gnutella network
who are sharing files. Dube calls that function unprecedented.

"That's definitely a major development," he said.

A test of the program Thursday night by Newsbytes allowed a user to
download and install the program, and obtain a song file, in the
span of five minutes. Within two hours, the user had downloaded 16
songs, enough to make a full jazz compilation CD. The same user had
maintained a Gnutella-link icon on the computer desktop for nearly a
year without ever successfully downloading any file using Gnutella.

Vinnie Falco, 28, of West Palm Beach, is the founder and sole
employee of Free Peers Inc., the company that created BearShare. He
told Newsbytes today that BearShare is only the first of what he
hopes will become a number of peer-to-peer programs his company will
create and market. He said he developed BearShare over four months
beginning last September.

"I'm new to this whole peer-to-peer thing," Falco said. "I only
discovered Napster and Gnutella in September. I tried the clients
that are out there and I did see some problems. But because I am a
developer, I recognized that the Gnutella protocol is actually very
good. There are a lot of things that can be done with it.

"The problem with Gnutella," he said, "was that it was new, and the
software that came out originally for it wasn't up to par."

Falco said when he launched into BearShare's development, he could
see on the horizon the day when Napster would be co-opted by the
major labels and lose its status as the instrument of choice for
free file sharing.

"I'm looking to get a good share of those users who are going to be
disenchanted with the idea of a subscription," he said. "(BearShare)
will support a good fraction of the existing users in the near
future. We're doing some things in the next two months that are
really going to help."

And it will need the help. There are things about BearShare that
make it much less efficient than Napster. On a message board
contained on the BearShare Web site, a number of those problems are
openly discussed.

One BearShare user who identified himself on the bulletin board as
"Psychadelicdave," complained that, while BearShare does open up
access to IP addresses automatically, it also tends to indicate that
some IP addresses and many music files are available when they
really are not.

"If a server is busy," Psychadelicdave writes, "why does it still
show all the files that the user has? It is like a big tease, all
these files and no one can send them. ... I did a search for a
particular type of file, found hundreds, and couldn't even get ONE
to download. That is bogus."

Newsbytes' own test of the software revealed much the same thing. In
a two-hour period attempts were made to download about 100 song
files using BearShare. Only 16 songs were successfully obtained.

Still, compared to the way Gnutella has worked up to now, Webnoize's
Dube said, BearShare's success rate represents extreme proficiency.
And if Napster disappears as a free file-sharing service, users may
be more than happy to leap to something like BearShare as a
substitute, Dube said, even if it isn't quite as easy or efficient
to use as Napster.

"If this thing solves that major (Gnutella) problem of finding
active IP addresses, then that's good enough for a lot of people,"
the analyst said. "That's hot."

Success has proved Napster's legal bane. When fans began flocking to
it to swap music files for free, the major record labels leaped on
the service's back, bearing writs, nearly driving it out of
business. BearShare creator Falco adopts a fatalistic attitude about
possibly finding himself also in the industry's crosshairs.

"They can come after me regardless of whether or not BearShare is
legitimate. That's been proven," he said.

Does he think they will? "Well," Falco said, "Gnutella's pretty low
on the totem pole in its attractiveness for litigation, simply
because there are so few users. At the beginning there were anywhere
from 10,000 to 30,000 using it, with 2,000 to 4,000 running it at a
given time. Now that's changed, there's anywhere from 30,000 to
50,000 users a day, with 3,000 to 5,000 at any time."

By contrast, he said, the average open-source Napster server has
about 8,000 simultaneous users. "That's more than the entire
Gnutella network," Falco said.

Some legal protection is provided by the fact that there is no
central BearShare server, and that all IP connections made are
completely random, Falco said.

"That's very important," he said. "It's like a box of chocolates.
You don't know what you're going to get. That's part of the strength
of the network. You have these random connections, you have
absolutely no control over it, and it gives it a certain level of
protection from attack."

If everything goes right, Falco said, BearShare - and the other
programs that inevitably will follow in its wake - will keep
peer-to-peer file-sharing free and alive, the way he thinks many
Internet users want it kept.

"Pretty much the idea of BearShare is to keep it a free product and
keep it independent of any central server," he said. "I think that's
very important if it's going to be a good alternative and something
that can persist despite the legal brouhaha."

BearShare can be found and downloaded at http://www.bearshare.com.