With Gnutella, as with the Internet itself, there is no such central point of weakness.
Greg Bildson, chief operating officer, LimeWire, a startup online music service dedicated to Gnutella software development.
Even if Napster is forced to closed, a number of other file-swapping programmes exist, including Napigator and Gnutella.
Created in 1999 by a programmer at Nullsoft, Gnutella is an information-sharing technology more freewheeling than HP's e-speak.
Gene Kan proved its usefulness by turning Gnutella into a fast search engine.
SightSound.com, a company that legally distributes movies over the Web, this week said it will soon be selling films using Gnutella.
Gnutella's users make some of their PCs' information public in exchange for access to the information on thousands of other computers.
Even after the dot-com collapse, there is still cash being thrown at young techies with a genius for a hot thing--like Gnutella.
He then proceeded to download The Matrix from Gnutella, a file-swapping site.
Unlike Napster, Gnutella is distributed for free by a loosely organized community of users, and it does not rely on any central computer.
"Gnutella is a fully distributed, peer-to-peer solution--buzzword-compliant, " says Kan, who sat through dozens of VC meetings with his programmer friends Yaroslav Faybishenko and Cody Oliver.
But so far, e-speak encompasses more applications than Napster or Gnutella.
Compared with Napster, Gnutella is nowhere near as easy to use and illustrates the danger of sharing files, including viruses that can spread quickly throughout a network.
To get a copy of a movie off Gnutella, for example, a user need only double-click and wait for the download, while videotapes require setting up multiple VCRs.
It uses a central server to link computers together to avoid the complexity of other peer-to-peer programs such as Gnutella, a file-sharing program popular among the high-tech community.
Gnutella was designed for sharing files between computers, not piracy.
Whether they use the Web or Gnutella, SightSound users download an encrypted, compressed file, and then pay for a license with which they can decode it into a viewable movie.
On top of this, the fact that a relatively small group of people are actually sharing files makes Gnutella and similar systems more vulnerable to legal attacks than is generally assumed.
File-exchange sites like Gnutella and Hotline, which act as matchmakers for people who want to exchange movies and other copyrighted material, aren't nearly as easy to use as the popular music-exchange program Napster.
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But Gnutella, along with new hardware that will make films look almost as good at home as they do in theaters, may soon move enough files to drown out the loudest whines Hollywood can muster.
Instead, many will switch to free alternatives such as Gnutella and its variants, which are less easy to scale up than Napster but are also harder to shut down and are getting easier to use.
Services with cool-sounding names like Napster, Kazaa, Limewire, Grokster, Morpheus, Gnutella, BitTorrent and MegaUpload flourished among the digital cognoscenti in the days when broadband Internet penetration had just started to gain real traction here and abroad.
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