Monday's court ruling, which threatens Napster with potentially vast copyright-infringement damages, serves as a warning for some rival peer-to-peer services. But many of the companies that have sprung up in Napster's wake say they expect little legal fallout from the decision.
Companies that offer access to files that may be copyrighted must examine their businesses and ensure they are trying to abide by the guidelines outlined in Monday's decision as closely as possible, analysts say.
"Does this mean that peer-to-peer is dead? No," said Gartner analyst P.J. McNealy. "It just means that anybody who does peer-to-peer with a central file system may have to play policeman."
But an increasing number of companies are emerging that use similar technology for less controversial tasks, such as sharing files inside a corporate network, collaborative research, or other jobs less likely to draw the ire of entertainment giants. These companies, many of which are convening in San Francisco this week for the first big peer-to-peer trade conference, say their quickly growing technology niche isn't threatened by Napster's legal woes.
"Will there be fewer places to grab free music and not pay the artists? Perhaps," said David Copans, vice president of business development and chief financial officer for Applied Metacomputing, which makes technology for creating file-swapping tools. "But I think Napster will have no significant impact on the future of computing."
