Can the same thing happen to Gnotella that happened to Napster or are they going to come after us (individual users) since there is no real Mr.Gnotella?

Yes..but what if they go after the Gnutella distrubution sites. I don't know how the program works exactly but how does the client get that list of hostnames? If the riaa wants they can go after the server that holds that list of hostnames, I am probably wrong...so please tell me how it really works...how does the client get that list of other users?

The identity of the host caches is rather ambiguous, rather akin to that of the users themselves. Trying to shutdown host caches would be almost as impractical as attacking the users themselves. The only purpose the caches really serve anyway is to get your foot in the door, so to speak, of gnutellanet.

As to going after the distribution sites, that is also futile because do you really think they can stop it from getting around?

The most they can possibly succeed in doing is making things less easy(hehe) than they already are.

[This message has been edited by DarthGummiBear (edited 07-29-2000).]

I would be curious to see how they could even justify shutting down the distribution sites anyway. I seem to recall a Federal judge recently ruling that source code was considered free speech and protected by the 1st Ammendment. Might have been in the DeCSS trial. If that is the case then you would have no problem defending yourself with this case on the books already.

Would it be possible for a company to build a program that could scan the entire range of internet ips (or just the ones they wanted to) for computers that are using the default gnutella port and then use some loop hole in the gnutella software to bring it down? I dont know much about pcs so im probably wrong.