Metallica, Eminem and Madonna's manager nearly got their way last week and banned Napster, an internet site which has provided free music to millions of fans.

A small programme created by 19-year-old Shawn Fanning while he was still at college has terrified the music business.

It lets web browsers pull MP3 music files from fellow Napster users' hard drives.

Those files are usually illegal recordings of chart hits.

Fanning and his chief executive Hank Barry celebrated when a judge overruled an order demanding Napster was shut down immediately.

The Recording Industry Association of America, which brought the case against them, may well silence Napster in the end.

But Napster is only the start of its worries. There are plenty of other ways to get hold of free music on the net.

So how are the internet equivalents of the man at the car boot sale selling dodgy copies of Titanic taking on and beating America's corporate lawyers?

More importantly, how can you sample their wares?

Napster does not store illegally copied music files. It lets internet users copy these files off fellow browsers' hard drives.

Yet while Napster does not hold the music, it does keep a database of its users.

Other web sharers do not.

The closest thing to Napster on the net is Gnutella.

This is not a website but a downloadable application letting you search hard drives for files like Napster but without registering anywhere.

However, it is not simple to get going.

You need to tell it where to start searching the net by typing in an internet protocol address - a string of numbers separated by dots.

These can be found on Gnutella support sites. Once the connection is established, Gnutella works nearly as well as Napster.

Type in the name of a familiar artist and you are flooded with options.

More simple, if less flexible, alternatives are Gigabeat and Findsongs.

These two sites are fundamentally no different from normal search engines such as Yahoo! and Altavista.

Rather than search for pages, they find individual music files which have been left lying around the web.

Gigabeat is particularly sophisticated. After entering the name of an artist, you can leap to an internet radio station playing their music.

After listening to songs online, you can buy them from Amazon via a link on the site.

Gigabeat presents itself as another lifestyle portal.

You can type in a favourite artist and search for similar works. There is even a "gigaspiral" which claims to explain how Debbie Harry relates to Madonna.

While these web-based searches are far simpler to use than Gnutella, they do have major disadvantages.

Dodgy servers and slow connections could leave you waiting for half an hour for a download which never happens.

Sheer frustration alone could drive you to buying your desired tracks in the Amazon store.

Above all, nothing is quite as good as Napster. It became an internet sensation because the sheer number of users made for a massive selection of music.

If Napster is silenced and those users migrate to Gnutella and web-based searches, they too will become more effective.

If there is one site out there which will scare U.S. entertainment chiefs it is Scour.com.

This multimedia search finds not just audio but video files.

Scour.com is not the product of a lonely teenager but the creation of a former Hollywood executive.

It allows users to download illegally copied MP3 files.

With the growth in broadband connections, it is only a matter of time before whole films are available for free swapping online.

The U.S. entertainment industry's lawyers may yet crush Napster but they will not be able to halt the technology behind the site.

www.napster.com
welcome.to/gnutella
www.gigabeat.com
www.findsongs.com
www.scour.com