In Napster-less world, plenty of other options

His dorm room is festooned with posters of music icons past and present - Bob Dylan, Bob Marley, and Britney Spears. Shirtless and barefoot, Adam Finck, a freshman at the University of California (UCLA) here, hovers over his flickering computer as he downloads digital music files for free over the Internet.

"Why would I buy a CD when I can get anything I want in the history of music delivered instantly to my room for free?" he asks.

It's a question the music industry hoped would die, or at least shrivel, with the death of Napster - the popular, free online music service shut down by courts in June. But as dozens of Internet libertines promised, a dorm hamper's worth of alternatives has filled the Napster vacuum, forcing the music industry to find ways both in and out of the courts to protect copyrights.

By nearly all accounts, just as much or more free music is available now - and just as easily - through programs known as "peer-to-peer" file-swapping, which eliminate the centralized server that got Napster in hot water.

"Napster let the genie out of the bottle, and it doesn't appear it will ever get put back in again," says Michael Epstein, a specialist on Internet law at Southwestern University School of Law in Los Angeles. "Despite efforts by Congress and the music industry to get tough with copyright laws in the digital era, they have not been able to prevent the unlimited free exchange of music over the Internet. Nor does it seem they will."

Among the dozen or so well-known alternatives to Napster are services called LimeWire, MusicCity.com Morpheus, Gnutella, Kazaa, and BearShare. Because most require no central producer to maintain file lists, they have so far escaped being shut down as Napster was. "It's like giving consumers a fishing rod instead of the fish," says Jonathan Zittrain, co-founder of Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

Moreover, such services allow users to exchange more than just music files - including movies, pictures, and written text. "Since there are perfectly legal maneuvers you can make with these systems, it's harder to prove they are contributing to the kind of copyright infringement that killed Napster," says Mr. Zittrain.

But the words "legal" and "illegal" are not on the minds of students on the fourth floor of Riebart Hall here. "I use several of these all the time and find I can get more titles, in more versions with better delivery than Napster," says Pete Anderson, a UCLA junior who has downloaded about 2,000 songs in recent years.

He's not alone. Yahoo Internet Life, an online magazine that covers the Internet, recently counted a typical Napster daily index of music files up for sharing at 233 gigabytes. By comparison, one of the alternative services, Morpheus, listed 107 terabytes, roughly 500 times the size of the Napster network.

While the rise of swapping networks has further fueled ongoing debates about intellectual property rights and copyright infringement, the Recording Industry of America (RIAA), which represents the major record labels and thousands of composers and songwriters, is making a many-fronted counterattack.

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