SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- To makers of music, movies and software, it's like a cancer metastasizing out of control across the Web, an infectious method of thwarting copyright law and undermining big business.
But users and proponents of a subversive little program called Gnutellasay it's making the Internet what it was designed to be all along: an easy-to-use and open environment to share information.Whether or not that information is copyrighted hasn't stopped thousands of Gnutella users from peering directly at each other's hard drives to download whatever's being offered.
"It is like a disease. It's a good one. It's going to help the evolution of humans," said Gene Kan, a Redwood City software developer who believes Gnutella will revolutionize Internet use.
Gnutella -- which anyone can get free from the Internet and install in minutes -- is much more pernicious than a similar program called Napster, which is causing headaches for computer systems administrators at college campuses nationwide.
Napster, which is also free, allows online users to search each others' computers for music stored in the popular MP3 format -- a method of copying songs from CDs to hard drives and storing them as easily manageable files.
The Recording Industry Association of America is suing in federal court to shut down Napster, the name of which was derived from a childhood nickname of one of its creators. Meanwhile, several universities have blocked the popular software because its many users downloading sizable audio files have slowed computer systems to a crawl.
"No one is trying to stop technology -- all the RIAA and its members are trying to do is to put a stop to a new high-tech type of theft," the industry group said in a statement.
But preventing Gnutella's great Internet giveaway may prove more difficult.
As with Napster, once a Gnutella user buys a CD, DVD or software and transfers it to a designated hard drive folder where it can be shared, any other Gnutella user can obtain it and make a perfect copy.
The main difference between the two programs is how searches are conducted. Napster searches go through a central server computer, while Gnutella links the individual users directly, so there are no Internet addresses to which the universities or recording companies can block access.
Gnutella is the sum of its parts: a vast and ever-changing network of people. Like its namesake, the chocolate-and-hazelnut spread Nutella, it spreads fast and easy. Once a search request encounters another online Gnutella user, the application automatically tries to contact every Gnutella user the first one has ever reached, making potentially thousands of direct simultaneous connections to personal computers.
Gnutella was developed by rogue programmers at Nullsoft Inc., a subsidiary of America Online Inc., who briefly posted the program on its Web site on March 14. Nullsoft makes Winamp, an application that plays MP3-format music files.
It was yanked off the site within hours, but by then numerous copies had already popped up on other Web sites. More permutations of Gnutella now appear daily.
In one test lasting less than a minute, Gnutella spread its tentacles to 1795 other users offering 260,390 files totaling 1.1 megabytes of information, including songs, images, pirated music videos and illegally decoded DVD movies.
A two-minute search for guitarist Carlos Santana offered 768 songs from 1,935 other computer users offering free downloads of every track from his $13.99 Grammy-winning CD, "Supernatural." Adobe Photoshop, a professional image-editing software that retails for $609, was available on the hard-drives of a half-dozen Gnutella users with high-speed Internet connections.
"How users make use of it, I hate to say it's not our problem, but it really isn't," said Kan, who runs a Web site promoting one of the many versions of Gnutella now freely available.
How do you track down an infinite, ever-changing, proliferating network of participants in this illegal bazaar, much less sue them?
"The battleground is really between technology and the law," said Greg Blatnik, an analyst with Zona Research. "Technology will be the enforcement before the laws ever catch up to it."
Some analysts believe the best recourse for entertainment companies may be to flood the Internet with inexpensive versions of their creative content. BMG Entertainment and Sony Music Entertainment plan to offer online versions of some of its artists' work in the coming months, though these songs will have technical safeguards preventing copying.
But that can't protect creative content that's already available. "The digital cows are out of the barn," Blatnik said.
Meanwhile, Gnutella hurts everyone who depends on royalties from their creations, said Jeremy Schwartz, an analyst with Forrester Research.
These ethical quandaries didn't stop 12-year-old Philip Woodworth from downloading songs using Napster while home sick from school last week. The Morgan Hill, Calif., resident had only learned about the program a few days earlier from a friend at school, but said it was easy to get songs by the pop-punk band Blink 182.
"I wanted their CD, but I didn't have enough money," Woodworth said. "I told my parents that would never buy another CD again."
On the Net:
Gnutella programs: gnutella.wego.com
Recording Industry Association of America: www.riaa.com
Napster Inc.: www.napster.com