Sons of Napster costing industry

Napster may be all but dead, but its descendants are even more powerful -- and are costing the music industry millions

LONDON, England (CNN) -- Music for nothing -- your tunes for free.

Napster, the free music-swapping trailblazer, may have been effectively shut down by the courts last year. But downloading copyrighted music -- piracy according to the industry -- is still going on, and indeed is growing.

Napster's descendants, a new breed of programs called peer-to-peer, have been launched. They're proving to be even more powerful than the original and are among the factors costing the industry millions.

Sales were down 5 percent last year, a loss that's likely to grow.

"Each one of these peer-to-peer programs has got in excess of one million people using it at any time," says Jollyon Benn, Internet investigation executive at the British Phonographic Industry (BPI).

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"That's why it's a bigger problem now for not just the music industry but all international property owners than it was when Napster was around."

What's making this a great deal worse is that using these new sites is becoming easier and easier. You don't have to be a computer geek to squeeze music out of the Web.

"As we move forward, it (peer-to-peer downloading) will become ubiquitous, like the telephone," says Steve Griffin of Morpheus, one of the new kids on the block.

"There will be someone sitting in front of this camera 20 years from now and they'll say, 'Remember that streamcast company? They were doing peer-to-peer? It's now as ubiquitous as the telephone. It was the greatest thing for the entertainment and media companies, and they didn't like it either.'

"So we look forward to that."

The record companies are not giving up, though. Having taken out Napster, they intend to attack these latest upstarts, trying to destroy whatever legal loophole they have discovered to stay in business.

"They're all a problem, and for the most part legally we've been able to deal with those problems and we will continue to do it," says Jay Berman, chairman of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry.

"We've been very successful in enforcing our legal rights against unauthorised sites, and we're going to continue to do that. We're not going to rest."