Napster's dead - long live Napster...

And so the legal battle over the future of Napster continues, with the latest round going to Napster's opponents. In a strongly worded judgement, the San Francisco 9th court of Appeals ruled: "Napster, by its conduct, knowingly encourages and assists the infringement of plaintiff's copyright."

To put it another way, the judges think Napster knew people were breaking the law by sharing MP3s of copyrighted material, leaving it open to huge lawsuits from the record companies who claim the service has cost them CD sales.

However, it won't mean an immediate end to Napster. The judges decided the original ruling (which would have shut down Napster) went too far, and asked the court to draft a new ruling. Until this is done, Napster remains open, but the new ruling will likely close the service down. With me?

Not surprisingly, the Recording Industry Association of America (the RIAA) - who originally brought the case - was happy, with RIAA boss Hillary Rosen claiming: "The court of appeals found that the injunction is not only warranted, but required. And it ruled in our favour on every legal issue presented."

Hank Barry, CEO of Napster, said: "We are disappointed in today's ruling. Under this decision Napster could be shut down - even before a trial on the merits."

But in the meantime, the judgement doesn't seem to have affected Napster. Yesterday evening, after the judgement was released, the site was still going strong, with over 10,000GB (equating to over a million MP3 files) being listed on the service. In fact, some users were complaining the service was too slow, presumably because many people had come online to get the tracks they wanted before Napster was shut down.

However, long before this case was even a twinkle in a lawyer's eye, a variety of free and open source peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing services such as Gnutella, OpenNap and BearShare were being launched. These had the same idea as Napster, but with one big difference: there is no central server, so there is no one person to sue. To shut down these services, the RIAA will have to sue every person who uses them, which simply isn't going to happen. Whatever the RIAA might say, this particular genie is well out of the bottle.

And this is the problem: however hard the RIAA might try, P2P file sharing isn't going to go away. All this ruling is going to do is encourage people to switch over to other services. Much of the chat on the Napster service recently has been about which service people are going to turn to when the end comes. These people aren't going to stop sharing and copying music. They will just change how they do it.

In fact, this whole case could work against the RIAA by encouraging more people to try these services. While Napster may soon be gone, the other services will thrive and grow, with the RIAA being able to do little or nothing about them - apart from complain.

The ironic thing is that Napster is trying to work towards a fee-based model where users pay to use the service and the record companies get their share.

This is now called into question, despite the enlightened attitude of several record companies working with Napster.

The RIAA has lost a chance to try and have some level of control over how people share music because they couldn't bear to loose control over the entire process. So, instead of embracing the technology, the RIAA is fighting a desperate battle to stop something that's as irresistible as the internet itself.

While Napster may die, other similar services will live and thrive, and there is nothing the RIAA can do about it. As one user in Napster's chat room put it as he was leaving: "I'll see you all somewhere else soon."