Redwood City, Calif – The Gnutella network, which adopted portal
functionality from WEGO and is hosted on the WEGO Portal Platform received
30,000 unique visitors within the hour after U.S. District Judge Marilyn
Hall Patel issued injunction against Napster. Site numbers have jumped to
1.2 million hits in the last 24 hours and is peaking at 75,000 hits per hour
making the Gnutella portal one of the most trafficked sites today – compared
with some 300,000 hits per day before the Napster ruling.
At the Gnutella site, a portal devoted to the file-sharing software dubbed
“Gnutella”, officials said Napster’s difficulties had led to an explosion of
new visitors seeking safe ways to keep downloading music.
“We had so many visitors we were down for several hours this morning, but
we’re up and running now,” said Karen Lim of Wego.Com, which provides portal
services for the Gnutella portal (http://www.gnutella.wego.com).
The experience at the Gnutella portal demonstrates the eagerness with which
music fans have embraced the online distribution of music, and the
difficulties that the recording industry could face in attempting to enforce
standard concepts of copyright law.
“The record companies should be careful about what they ask for,” said
Stephen Bradley, a research fellow for Gartner, a technology consulting
firm.
“Their shortsighted desire to shut down Napster will make it nearly
impossible for them to control the online trading of music…with Napster
potentially shut down, the record companies have no one to negotiate with as
distributed trading architectures like Gnutella have no management team,
facilities or place of business.”
Due to unprecedented traffic volume, the Gnutella portal faced several hours
of downtime this week. The portal was back up after bandwidth and capacity
upgrades were completed. Since the portal was launch since March 2000, this
was the first site downtime. WEGO provides flexible portal platform that is
used by over 1000 customers.
