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The best known example of P2P technology was Napster 1.0, a program that allowed computer users worldwide to swap music and movies files through a centralized file server.
Napster Inc. was created in May of 1999 by Shawn Fanning (PC Magazine Technical Excellence Award winner Person of the Year 2000) and Sean Parker, co-founder. A centralized service for sharing of millions of music titles, this P2P network of “real time” file trading also incorporated chat rooms with “instant messaging” and a “hot-list” function, and was even featured on Download Spotlight of the prominent Download.com.
Napster was so successful, over 70 million users joined its community. Even more amazing: an estimated 85% of all college students in the world were part of that group, and they managed to download 2.79 billion songs! This mass downloading also attracted the attention of mega-artists Metallica and Dr. Dre. These two artists vehemently opposed the free trading of their music.
In December 1999, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) launched a law suit against Napster Inc., charging it with tributary copyright infringement (i.e., contributing to and facilitating other people's copyright infringement).
- Cary Sherman, senior executive vice president and general counsel for RIAA, summarized Napster’s activity as: ”facilitating piracy, and trying to build a business on the backs of artists and copyright owners”.
- Metallica and Dr. Dre also launched individual law suits against Napster for a three-fold attack on its operations.
In February 2001, a judge ruled that Napster had to stop the distribution of copyright material through its network. Record companies provided the list of over 250,000 song titles for immediate removal of the Napster’s network. In July 2001, a judge told Napster it must block all files infringing copyright, effectively forcing it to shut down.
Napster folded in September 2002, after its unsuccessful sale to Bertelsmann AG.
Napster has been reborn in a milder and tamer way as "Napster 2.0", which is now a division of Roxio, Inc. Napster 2.0 has cultivated extensive content arrangements with the major record labels. As long as you are willing to pay a user fee of $10USD per month, you can legally download over 500,000 songs from all genres of music at Napster 2.0. Unfortunately, Napster 2.0 is only available to residents of the United States, and no longer enjoys the immense following of its 1999-2002 days. www.napster.com
Today, Napster's illicit P2P niche been replaced by several big players. These entities have managed to elude legal prosecution to this point: BitTorrents, Limewire, Gnutella, OpenNap, KaZaA, Morpheus, WinMX and FastTrack. These P2P communities are under constant threat of civil lawsuits, but millions of users still use their services every day.
Next: how BitTorrent sharing has become the new Napster. And how it is under fire from the RIAA and the MPAA.
