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Let a Million Napsters Bloom!
Thanks, Monkeys-In-Robes! You just fertilized the market to cause a Million Napster to bloom!
I'm a big advocate of evolving Napster into a legitimate means of distribution that rewards individuals as bona fide distributors of entertainment. I'm in the Napster Action Network and I have dutifully phoned and emailed my representatives to "change the system from within."

However, my position is that word of mouth has always been among the most powerful means of advertising and the least compensated, monetarily. Accordingly, the legacy financial models of entertainment distribution seem to violate fundamental principles of economics. Those who are creating value in the form of word of mouth marketing and sales have not ever received their proper cut.

Enter Napster, creating vastly more perfect market information in this regard. I think that it should be incumbent upon the entertainment industry to keep up with the times and create new business models that spur technology rather than defending oligopolies and stifling innovation.

In the meantime, we the community must scatter in a number or random directions now that the feds have effectively shackled Napster.

I feel really bad for Shawn, but the only way to keep the spirit alive is to abaondon Napster altogether and go somewhere else ... and we must keep migrating and scattering like this until the feds get the hint that file sharing is not going away simply because the RIAA pays them to prop up their anachronistic institution.

Here are some starter ideas - LET A MILLION NAPSTERS BLOOM!

Hotline
Gnutella
Fidelio - Hotline for Linux
Gnucleus - Another Gnutella for windoze
BearShare - Another Gnutella for windoze
Aimster
And lots more on ZeroPaid