It allows people to hear music before they buy it."
But before Deep can stop sweating the payments on his BMW 528i, he faces a mess of challenges. Bringing big-bang ideas to market costs big, and as yet, Deep has no real financial backing. Potential investors, Deep noted in October, are "kind of paranoid until the Napster ruling comes out." He has kept Aimster afloat on his own limited cash, supplemented by loans from wealthy friends. By the time this story is printed, the still technically rickety service could well have crashed.
Moreover, Deep could get derailed any number of ways. Why, for instance, would AOL, zealously protective of its proprietary IM services, allow Aimster to leech on to its software? The answer may be that swapped files are not transmitted via AOL servers - Aimster uses AIM and ICQ only to detect buddies. "Therefore, AOL can only stop Aimster by rewriting the AIM and ICQ software it distributes to users or by kicking Aimster users off of its service," says Eytan Adar, a peer-to-peer researcher at Xerox (XRX)'s Palo Alto Research Center. These scenarios, say sources close to AOL, are possible but unlikely.
AOL, though, might sharpen its swords when Deep releases a potent new version of Aimster, due out this month. Among other improvements, it will allow AIM users to communicate with, at first, ICQ users, and later, with users from Yahoo and MSN.
Assuming it works the way Deep says it can, interoperability among different IM systems would be groundbreaking. AOL has aggressively fought off any attempts to connect AIM users with others, especially rival MSN, citing security concerns. Through an effort known as IMUnified, the Yahoo and MSN messenger services plan to be interoperable with each other by the end of 2000. "But though we would welcome them, AOL is not part of IMUnified," says Yahoo Messenger's senior producer Brian Park. Deep's interoperability trick is switching technology: Instead of trying to connect two incompatible services, AIM users with messages bound for or coming from other IM services will be routed through Aimster's own servers. "You get to IM your buddies from any service," says Deep. "That's a cool thing."
This added popularity will only exacerbate the problems the music industry may have with other plug-ins that Deep says public-domain programmers are developing for Aimster 3.0. These plug-ins will enable both widespread music and video file sharing. Like Gnutella and Freenet, they will have a distributed index, and they will be as easy to use as Aimster, but they will not be restricted to the smaller instant-messenger buddy groups. That is, they'll allow the same widespread sharing as Napster without the vulnerable central index. "This is history in the making," says Deep.
Lightning Fast
The big question is whether it will be a milestone in the history of digital entertainment, or a legal footnote. Ted Cohen, EMI's vice president of new media, says he originally partnered with Aimster because he felt that Deep was willing to work on legal models of music distribution. But despite Capitol's toe dip, the major record groups are not about to condone the service. "We're not risking musical assets," says Cohen. "Without security measures or something that monetizes the sharing, it doesn't return revenue to the artists and labels commensurate with putting it out there." Another major-label executive is more blunt on the subject of p-to-p technologies: "We won't work with people who are inherently criminal."
In the wake of the Napster litigation, the Johnny Deeps of the world hope to design services impervious to the entertainment industry's legal arguments. Deep contends that his Version 3.0 plug-in architecture will help Aimster differentiate itself from Napster, because Aimster would then facilitate everything from instant messaging to, possibly, a music retailer's marketing campaigns. According to Deep, Aimster clearly has non-copyright-infringing uses, and he can't help it if public-domain programmers release plug-ins that allow the promiscuous swapping of copyrighted files.
Legal experts cautiously
