📸

knew McGann's victim: It was Rogers, a friend of Song's from when they rode skateboards together as teens. Song warned Rogers to secure his machine and asked McGann to back off. McGann did as he was told. “I had hacked into Dugsong's friend's machine,” McGann crowed, peacefully enough. “I felt good afterward.” Ritter, who had pressed Minus to go after the code, agreed with the decision to drop the spy operation. “We would never fuck Dugsong,” Ritter said.

The Nullsoft team posted Gnutella on the company's site in March 2000. America Online fielded a host of media inquiries about the conduct of its subsidiary, looked at the program, and gagged. It came to nearly the same conclusion that the Nullsoft team had come to about Napster: If it wasn't illegal, it was close. And it didn't help that AOL was in the process of buying Time Warner, owner of Big Five record label Warner Brothers. Aiding and abetting the theft of its acquisition target's intellectual property wouldn't go over very well. AOL ordered Gnutella deleted from Nullsoft's pages within days. Soon someone using Frankel's IRC handle “deadbeef” said he was wondering about “accidentally” releasing the source code. Gnutella-like code did emerge soon, to the delight of file-swappers, technophiles, and open-source enthusiasts. With Gnutella free for anyone to tinker with and improve, it got much better, overcoming some of the roadblocks to scaling.

If AOL's reluctance to embrace Gnutella delayed its emergence as a powerful Napster foe, a quieter bit of corporate politics helped stop another Napster rival from getting critical backing. IMesh was close to Napster in structure but had some advantages, including the fact that it was based in Israel, where it would be harder for the record industry to attack. And IMesh beat Napster to the punch on one technical front, known as segmented downloading. In segmented downloading, the system identified segments within each song. Users were then shipped the multiple parts simultaneously. The process “generally results in the fastest possible transfer rate and almost guaranteed file transfer success,” Shawn wrote to his coworkers.

As a user innovation, segmented downloading was great. As a legal proposition, it was a more interesting question. It offered a possible legal advantage for the users, according to Dug Song, who was developing something similar and offered it to Shawn. If files were split among mul-

📸