Let's talk about current events first, before digging down into the more interesting issues. For those of you who are busy leveraging rather than enjoying the Web, MP3 is a music standard released a few years ago. Although not its intent, you can use MP3 to record music from existing music CDs and upload these music files to the Web. The words piracy, copyright infringement, and violation easily come to mind. Okay, so you have some cool music.
Search engines are slow and swamped.
Enter Napster to save the day. A simple search locates the music of interest, which users can then download through the free Napster network. I don't think that Napster folks were originally thinking about piracy, and I don't think that Tim Berners-Lee worried about copyright infringement when he created the Web. None other than Andy Grove, CEO of Intel, expressed an interest in Napster in the May issue of Fortune. This means that I can connect directly to your computer and you to mine, without the intervention of an external server.