By Hiawatha Bray, Globe Columnist,
The digital file-swappers of Harvard got a nasty shock last week: a report that the university would soon block peer-to-peer (P2P) exchanges of digital music and movies.
The report turned out to be untrue - sort of. Nobody has approved an outright ban on file- swapping, but the bosses of Harvard's data networks are giving serious thought to the matter. It costs a lot of money to deliver high-speed Internet access to thousands of students and faculty members, and Harvard was hoping to get a decent return on its investment - a cure for cancer, perhaps, or the discovery of life on Mars. Instead, much of the school's network capacity has been given over to stolen Springsteen albums and illicit copies of ''Reservoir Dogs.''
It all goes to show that the death of Napster, the first great P2P file-swapping system, hasn't done a thing to halt the trade in pirated music and movies. Napster was a soft target, with its central bank of server computers that coordinated the theft of digital files. The music industry had little trouble persuading colleges to block the use of Napster on campus networks; then they drove Napster itself out of business.
But the current generation of P2P programs, like Kazaa and Morpheus, don't rely on a central server, with an operator who can be hauled into court. There are millions of Kazaa users, and each is his own server. The recording industry can't sue them all.
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