How is MP3 Rocket still in business?

Factual Questions
1

Today someone asked me to find an old obsure song that she needed for a 50th birthday party.

I remembered a program that I used several years ago named MP3 Rocket. To my amazement, I was able to download the program and found the song almost instantly, downloading it (I assume) illegally.

How is the company behind MP3 Rocket still in business. It uses the Gnutella network which is what Napster used (I think).

You can download any song that is on the network at no cost. Something doesn’t sound right.

So what’s the SD on MP3 Rocket?

2

Gnutella is decentralized enough that it’s essentially impossible to kill.

3

But someone is behind the software and the website. Napster hosted no material but got shut down.

4

Napster used their own network, not Gnutella. It was run and operated by them.

LimeWire, on the other hand, does use Gnutella and is currently involved in a suit with the RIAA.

LimeWire may get shut down. There will be other Gnutella clients to take its place. The network, not the client, is what’s important. It’s unlikely that the RIAA can go after every single client and shut them all down.

5

And Gnutella is the worst of the lot. There are torrents, eMule, DC, The Japanese P2P (Perfect Dark, Share, Winny), Gnuetella 2 network clients like Shareza, and many smaller ones.

6

Napster was one of the earliest incarnations of extremely successful and widespread software file sharing programs. It was possible to shut it down in its early incarnation because there were specific servers that served as pointers to the places where the files were stored. Gnutella and others like it don’t work the same way and can’t be shut down completely without shutting down the entire internet because it is peer-to-peer and there is nothing central to shut down. Each computer that connects to it acts as its own server and a client at the same time.

I don’t know about MP3 Rocket itself but it is just a front end to a network that already exists. You can shut it down but there are many other ways to access the same files so it is like bailing water out of the Titanic with a single bucket if someone tried to shut it down. Services like MP3 Rocket can exist anywhere in the world and copyright law doesn’t have a good way to deal with it so the legal crackdowns are arbitrary and opportunistic.