Sons of Napster face lawsuit

Three leading US entertainment companies are taking legal action to shut down Napster-style operations.

These file-sharing services offer everything that can be stored on computer files - music, video and software.

And leading industry analysts forecast that these services will be far harder to shut down and prosecute than Napster.

MGM, Columbia, Sony and Warner are among those filing suit in Los Angeles federal court against file-sharing services - just as the industry is launching its own subscription online music services. .

The file-sharing system was developed by Amsterdam-based firm Consumer Empowerment, also known as FastTrack, and is licensed to MusicCity and Grokster.

The software has grown rapidly in popularity since Napster went offline earlier this year - during September, users on the FastTrack-powered network downloaded 1.51 billion files.

"The FastTrack network already is very close to the levels that Napster was at during its peak," said Matt Bailey, an analyst at Webnoize market research.

He predicts that Morpheus and Grokster users would be difficult for the entertainment industry to stifle because, unlike Napster, they seldom log on to central servers at a company's headquarters.

Instead, FastTrack allows the users with high-speed Internet connections to serve as 'supernodes' - personal PCs acting as a hub to connect file-sharing users to each other. Napster required users to log on to the company's own servers, which were subject to a court-ordered shutdown.

The Morpheus network offers everything from Shania Twain songs to unauthorized digital copies of the hit movie "Hannibal" - plus full versions of Adobe Photoshop, a professional-quality image editing software normally costing around £400.