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News Burst: Online music trading to continue

A Federal judge has ruled against Napster, but other music-sharing systems may make more difficult targets
Written by Matthew Broersma, Contributor

Napster, the popular online service for exchanging digital music files, has been slapped with a court order to stop handling copyrighted music -- but industry observers expressed doubt Thursday that the court action would have much impact on online music sharing.

Napster is by far the most popular means for such sharing -- or piracy, depending on your point of view -- but other means exist, and may be more difficult to control. For example, users can exchange music files via FTP servers, the Usenet bulletin-board system or Gnutella, a decentralised system similar to Napster.

The latest music-sharing service, which extends to movies stored in the DivX format, is Scour, a variation on the Napster client.

Full story to follow.

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