Faced with the potential shuttering of the Napster website--a no-longer imminent prospect in the wake of an appeals court's decision to stay the injunction that would have resulted in the site's closure at midnight on Friday (7/28)--Internet users have deluged a number of Napster-like services.

According to an unnamed source at Scour, Inc., traffic to Scour.com’s website rose roughly 50 percent in the wake of Wednesday's (7/26) decision by a federal court judge to grant the injunction. Scour.com distributes Scour Exchange, a Napster-like utility that allows users to trade audio, video and photo files.

Prior to the Wednesay’s Napster hearing, the Scour Exchange network boasted an average of roughly 25,000 to 30,000 users logged on to its network at any one time, the source said. At press time on Friday (7/28), there were roughly 60,000 users logged on to the network, according to a real-time counter featured on Scour.com.

The Recording Industry Association of America--the group that is suing Napster and that successfully lobbied the court for the recent injunction against the company--joined forces recently with both the Motion Picture Association of America and the National Music Publisher’s Association to file a massive copyright infringement lawsuit against Scour, Inc.

Also catching a major surge in traffic was the Gnutella file-sharing network, which, unlike Scour Exchange and Napster, is decentralized; it is based solely on free software that individual users install on their own computers and does not use centralized servers. It seemingly, therefore, cannot be targeted in litigation.

Gnutella.wego.com--which, according to Gnutellanet.net, was one of the first sites dedicated to the Gnutella file-sharing platform--was bombarded with traffic after the Napster decision, which caused it to go offline for several hours, according to a spokesperson for WEGO, a portal company that facilitates access to the Gnutella.wego.com site.

“We simply ran out of bandwidth,” said Karen Lim at WEGO. Before the Napster decision, Gnutella.wego.com was receiving roughly 1,800 hits per hour, Lim said. After the injunction against Napster was announced, that number “spiked to about 72,000 hits per hour.”

Lim added that Gnutella.wego.com was averaging about 30,000 hits per day prior to Wednesday’s Napster decision; that number climbed to 1.65 million hits on Thursday (7/27), and had reached 1.2 million hits by midday on Friday (7/28), she said.

While Scour and Gnutella have been experiencing a feeding frenzy, GlobalSCAPE, Inc.--which distributes the Napster-like CuteMX--decided to issue a self-imposed injunction; the company on Friday (7/28) released a statement saying it was “restricting public access to its CuteMX service pending [a] review of further developments surrounding the preliminary ruling in the Napster case.”

Speak Out: Voice your opinion in liveDaily's Napster Discussion Forum.