In the courtroom, things look bleak for Napster -- the poster child of the dot-com set -- and major record companies are claiming victory. But for those in the know, the big firms haven't even found the battlefield yet, let alone carried the day. PNS commentator Scott S. Louie writes on technology and pop culture issues.

Rumors that no-cost Napster will ultimately succumb to a subscriber-based business have millions of music fans gorging themselves on free, high-quality MP3 music files for hours at a time.

On just one of Napster's many high-volume servers, 11,000 users logged on offering almost 9,000 gigabytes of high-quality MP3 music files. To put that in more familiar terms, you would have to listen 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, for more than 16 years to hear to every song on just that one server alone.

This not only marks an unprecedented diversity of music files trading but provides a real-world demonstration of Napster's capabilities.

Despite its success, Napster's deathblow may come not at the hands of the record industry but from its own 60 million music loving users. That may explain why, with court rulings making the outlook for Napster grim and grimmer, there's been surprisingly little public outcry.

Angry Napster users do show up in chat rooms -- blasting everything from "corrupt corporative government" to Lars Ulrich, drummer of anti-Napster band Metallica -- but none have ventured outside the cyberrealm. There are no public protests, not even here in San Francisco, home of the 9th Circuit Court, no rallies, no fans on the evening news, no visible support.

The secret is that seasoned Napster users aren't worried. Not because they think Napster will survive, but because they know they don't need it. Almost a dozen other services do essentially what Napster does: allow people to share music -- and increasingly non-music -- files for free.

The leading contender is "OpenNap." Where Napster users log into Napster servers -- and Napster, as owner of the servers, is responsible for whatever flows through them as the courts have ruled -- OpenNap lets anyone set up a Napster-like server without asking permission or providing any personal information.

What results is a slew of anonymous, untraceable servers, giving user access to vast amounts of free music. When they log on, they don't know if the server is next door or continents away - - and neither do the record companies. OpenNap accesses these clandestine servers using the already-familiar Napster software making the crossover to OpenNap easy, seamless, and completely off most radar scopes.

In the same fashion -- that is, without fixed-location servers, other online companies like Gnutella, AudioGalaxy, and Hotline will all continue to flourish legally regardless of Napster's fate.

In addition, hardcore computer users will continue to utilize "FTP sites." These increasingly secret "sites" are set up by anonymous users ("administrators") worldwide.

Once trust is established, the administrator gives the user an address and other information needed to log in to the site using widely available, free software.

From there, the user can instantly download whatever the administrator makes available -- not just music files but movie clips, even of new releases, and unabridged electronic versions of popular books. This cloak-and-dagger approach is far from Napster's slick, simple, user-friendly interface, but many users enjoy the challenge of going the long way around.

One barometer of "coolness" now is how many gigabytes of music one has, and suddenly being a geek isn't so bad. The creators of such programs, however, are hardly people in need. The picture of starving students saving a few bucks on sounds fades in the reality of affluent, technologically-savvy, software-and-hardware- loaded kids with lots of time to tinker.

So ironically, it's the rich kids, the ones who could pay, that devote their time to scamming free music. Claims of billions lost in record sales since Napster's inception may be accurate, but they don't worry the record companies nearly as much as they let on.

The "power users" -- those that would download whole albums for hours on end -- are a small minority in the Internet world. What the record companies really fear is that within the next four to five years, the technology needed to become a power user will be dirt cheap and widely available to novices.