How Napster Worked
"Like it or not, the story of Napster is the story of P2P file sharing" [6].
Napster was created by an 18 year old computer student in 1st year university - Shawn Fanning. At the urging of his college roommate, from October to December, 1998, Fanning began to develop a program to enable easy downloading and sharing of MP3s. The program he initially developed was a real-time program that could locate MP3 files of other internet users. Rather than have it be a massive search engine, he designed his program so that users would compile a list of the MP3 files they were willing to share. This list would be updated every time a user would log onto the internet. An index computer (i.e. index server) would store this list, and users would access files based on the index [6]. For more on how this works, see Napster Architecture.
Initially, Shawn shared this program with his roommates and friends, and the program quickly spread. In response to the overwhelming responses that Fanning received from users, he updated and fixed up the program [6].
| Did you know? Fanning named the program Napster after his childhood nickname, which he earned due to his "nappy" hair [6]. |
With Napster's growing popularity, and Fanning's growing time commitments, he dropped out of school and founded Napster, Inc. with his uncle. After being featured in Download.com's Download Spotlight in September 1999, Napster took off [5].
And quickly gained notice of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA).
In January 2000, RIAA brought suit against Napster, Inc. for copyright violations [5]. For more on this see The Downfall of Napster and Copyright Issues.
Meanwhile, Napster continued to gain more and more popularity. By October 2000, the number of registered Napster users reached 32 million, and by January 2001, 50 million [6]. At its peak, it was reported to have a membership of 60 or 70 million [5]. And to think that Fanning had only begun to think about the project a little over two years before that.
Napster's servers eventually shut down in July 2001 [5]; officially to upgrade software, but likely in response to the US Court of Appeals Ruling that Napster was violating copyright law and had to limit user's access to copyright materials [6]. The Downfall of Napster discusses the lawsuits brought against Napster, and Copyright Issues discusses the main debate and legality surrounding the sharing of music files.
