For months, Sandra Poole-Christal watched as Napster grabbed headlines and millions of users, while her competing service, CuteMX, largely went unnoticed by the media and most music fans.
The attention and usage Napster got was a bit galling to Poole-Christal, who said CuteMX was the first file-sharing program released and targeted at digital music.
However, while the chief executive of GlobalScape, which owns CuteMX, is not envious of Napster's current dilemma, she's also taking no chances.
GlobalScape, the San Antonio-based company that owns CuteMX, took the service offline Thursday, temporarily depriving the millions of music fans who'd been scrambling for a Napster alternative.
"We're not rebellious teen-agers over here," said Poole-Christal. "This is not my uncle's money. We take matters like this seriously. But it does not mean we are afraid. We are not afraid."
The unplugging of CuteMX is another wave in the churning controversy over the sharing of digital music files over the Internet. The music industry has taken aim at products just like CuteMX, filing suit against Napster and Scour Exchange, which drew a companion suit by the movie industry.
Poole-Christal said the decision to turn off CuteMX's servers for now "was motivated by a desire to understand the case law as it comes down."
While Friday's decision by a federal appeals court to stay the injunction slapped on Napster by U.S. District Judge Marilyn Hall Patel is welcome news to Poole-Christal, that doesn't mean the service will come back up immediately.
"We're continuing to evaluate this on a moment-by-moment basis," she said. "We hope to move forward responsibly in a very short period."
Poole-Christal also wants to stay in the good graces of the music business. The company's longterm goal is to license its file-sharing technology to Web portals and record labels.
CuteMX was born in the spring of last year, a collaborative effort by GlobalScape's technical and marketing group, Poole-Christal said. Its release came several months before that of San Mateo, Calif.-based Napster, which debuted in the summer of 1999.
The two products are remarkably similar. Both allow users to connect to a central computer, which creates a catalog of the files available for sharing on individual hard drives.
Users can search the catalog to find files they want. The service links them directly to the computer of the person who has that file, which is then transferred.
However, while Napster only lets users download music files, CuteMX works with almost any kind of multimedia file.
CuteMX has about 500,000 users, a small percentage of the 21 million that Napster claims. However, its small user base and relative obscurity may be one reason the Recording Industry Association of America, which sued Napster and Scour Exchange, has not sicced its lawyers on GlobalScape.
Pool-Christal said CuteMX also has features in it that can help prevent the downloading of copyrighted music.
For example, MP3 files -- the primary digital music format promulgated over the Internet -- can include a software flag that indicates the content is copyrighted. CuteMX will look for that flag and, if it is set, won't display the file in the service's catalog.
She said a new version, which would have been released early next week, also filters for key words related to hit songs. However, the features in the new version are under review as a result of the Napster decision.
Fortunately, CuteMX is not GlobalScape's only product. It is best known for CuteFTP, one of the most popular file-transfer program on the Internet.
The company was founded around CuteFTP, which was developed in the mid-1990s by Alexander Kunadze, a Russian college student whose father was that country's ambassador to North Korea.
GlobalScape is owned by publicly held American TeleSource International, which sells wholesale long-distance services in Latin America.
Kevin Dede, an analyst in San Francisco with First Security Van Kasper, said GlobalScape should generate as much as $5 million, about double the subsidiary's 1999 revenues.
So far, CuteMX is the only service that has been shut down in reaction to the initial Napster decision.
Dan Rodriguez, president of Beverly Hills, Calif.-based Scour, said his service will remain up because "It's simple; we are a perfectly legal service."
"We follow all the applicable laws, and our service is specifically designed to protect copyrights online," Rodriguez said.
The RIAA and the Motion Picture Association of America, however, do not agree. They filed suit against Scour earlier this month in a federal court in New York.
"We recognize that this is the frontier of the Internet," Rodriguez said. "With a ruling like this, precedents are being set that will affect where this business is headed."
Because of that, he said, it's important that Scour stay up and running.
"We don't think it is a good idea to be in a reactive mode right now," he said.