Spawn of Napster

Ethan Weinberg is the kind of music fan the record industry doesn't like to hear about. Since a judge ordered Napster in March to block copyrighted songs, the Princeton University junior has become a devotee of peer-to-peer music sites Audiogalaxy and BearShare. "Only if they were shut down would I resort to paying a minimal fee," he says.

Or, more likely, he would turn to one of the other free alternatives now reaching critical mass. By crushing Napster without immediately jumping online themselves, record labels created a void that a string of spunky startups has been more than happy to fill.

There's Gnutella and the services that piggyback on its decentralized network, LimeWire and BearShare. Then there's iMesh playing the field from Israel and Netherlands-based FastTrack licensing its surging peer-to-peer technology to two other services, MusicCity and KaZaa.

Eventually, record labels will likely file suit against the heaviest users of decentralized services and against their operators in Europe, which has a tradition of strong copyright law. But that may only drive the free-for-all to countries with less stringent laws, such as North Korea or China.

As a last resort, record labels could pull Internet service providers into the fray. Under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, record companies could seek a court order requiring ISPs to block access to a music-swapping service outside the United States.

In theory, the record industry understands all this and has every intention of providing an alternative. "If the music industry doesn't continue to invest in meeting their consumers' needs with new services, we will be ceding the Internet to piracy," says Hilary Rosen, CEO of the Recording Industry Association of America.

But for now, new services offering free music seem to crop up with every new lawsuit filed by the RIAA. And that's music to Weinberg's ears.