The rising fear of crippling hack attacks, combined with the rhetorical leftovers of the War on Drugs, drew listeners close to their radios for the details of this new software drug, named Napster. Everyone using Napster publishes to a common database, which you can then search to find any title you might be interested in. Napster is just a clearinghouse, a way-station on the road to tunes.
Songs come and go.
So eternal vigilance is the price of a good collection of MP3s. But it's just a piece of software, and designed, ostensibly, to help artists promote their own work without a record contract. Put simply, it's because Napster portends a complete revolution in the distribution of media. The folks at Napster may not yet know it, but they've stumbled onto a general system for the location and distribution of media in a networked world. Napster won't replace the Web, but will be an essential part of the 21st century Net.