Category: The Internet
by Dennis Faas, infopackets editor
http://www.infopackets.com
Millions of Internet users got a big shock this week when a popular, free
MP3-sharing client, Morpheus Music City, went offline.Before Morpheus
became all the rage, Napster was known to the world as the premier music
swapping program. What set Napster ahead of its competition was its
ease of use, and most importantly -- its reliability and transfer speeds.
Napster allowed millions of Internet users to locate and share music files
through Napster's central computers (also known as "servers"). The
Napster servers kept track of who signed in and out of Napster, who had what
MP3, and therefore provided the pathway to any MP3 desired at lightening
speed. In computer lingo, this is referred to as a Centralized Network
Topology.
Ultimately, Napster was sued by the Recording Industry Association of
America (RIAA) because of its methods used to locate and distribute
copyrighted music through its centralized network. Since Napster was a single entity -- a "business
responsible for distributing copyrighted music" -- rather than millions of
users, the RIAA was able to follow through with its lawsuit and shut down
the free MP3-sharing service that Napster once offered. Now, Napster
is working with the RIAA and provides a monthly fee-based service to share
its music.
Soon after the demise of Napster, Morpheus stepped into the picture.
Morpheus was deemed safe from RIAA lawsuits because it uses Peer to Peer
(P2P) technology to perform its MP3 searches. Peer to peer does not
require a central computer to perform its searches; rather, special messages
(called queries) are bounced from computer to computer -- in a massive
network -- to find a desired MP3. When the query completes, the
results are sent back to the originator. This is referred to as a
Decentralized Network. Because millions of users represent "the whole"
in a decentralized network, the RIAA could not file a lawsuit against
Morpheus. Morpheus simply provided the means of communicating between
all the computers on the network.
The Morpheus software suite uses a patented searching technology which is
made by a third party software company. On Tuesday, February 26, 2002,
a major change was made to the searching technology software. The
changes would only work on a centralized network and would not work at all
on a decentralized platform; this rendered Morpheus completely unusable and
millions of Internet users were once again without a favorite MP3-sharing
program.
So what will happen to Morpheus?
Since the software technology Morpheus uses is now incompatible with the
decentralized network, Morpheus may now be forced to move to the Gnutella
network -- another decentralized network, which is currently used by a
popular file sharing program called
Bearshare. The flipside of the coin is that while Gnutella is a
viable option for Morpheus,
Gnutella suffers from scalability issues as it grows; furthermore,
Gnutella is also known to be significantly slower than the previous
searching technology used my Morpheus.
If you're interested in an alternative to Morpheus, please visit our
Windows Tutorials
page -- it has a video tutorial on
Bearshare. You'll be up and
MP3-searching in minutes! Please pay attention to the video tutorial
so you will understand how to use Bearshare without annoying popup advertisements.
