Unsurprisingly, the judge in the RIAA’s case against Napster has issued a preliminary injunction that will shut down Napster. Quick! Everyone over to Gnutella! It seems impossible to me that the RIAA doesn’t understand that by killing Napster, they only make the music piracy community stronger. Napster is the largest “music sharing” service by far today. Their weakness is that they’re a real company with venture capital, centralized servers, and lots of full-time employees. If they die, everyone will flock to decentralized services based on open source software, and then there will be absolutely nothing that the RIAA can do to stop piracy. If the RIAA keeps Napster around, at least they have some hope of getting a handle on this thing, but it doesn’t look like that’s going to happen.