With a single program written in 1999, an 18-year-old student of computer Northeastern University named Shawn Fanning would always inadvertently transform how people use the Internet. The name of his program was Napster. Dubbed after his teenage nickname because of his nappy hair, Napster was a free downloadable program that could transform individual computers into servers that shared MP3 music files on the Internet. Instead of a central server, where all music files, Napster instead worked as a means were stored. Users may access to Napster, the search for a title of artist or song, and then proceed to download directly from another user's hard drive connected. In just over a year after its initial launch, Napster soon became one of the most famous and wildly popular sites in Internet history. At its peak, Napster was touting a total of about 60 million users worldwide (Collins, 02). Little did Fanning realize that his invention would soon become ubiquitous on the Internet as e-mail and instant messaging. Neither it has little Fanning realize the legal storm resulting in that its creation would eventually create. Ultimately what began as a simple program written for his friends to share music soon caught the attention not only of young people around the world, but also the wrath of the record industry.
The story of Napster begins just south of Boston, in the city of Brockton, Massachusetts. At 17 years old Colleen Fanning was a senior in high school there in 1980. One night, the elder brother held a party to celebrate her graduation from high school and hired a local band called "Macbeth" to play at the party. It 'was a great success, with around 3,000 people mobbing the house. Colleen's younger brother John went around with a hat collection of funds to pay for the band and a couple of large networks by the end of the night, his first business experience. That same night, they say the Fannings, Colleen connected with one of the musicians and settlement pregnant. With his father's support, Colleen kept her baby, and named Shawn. However, Shawn's biological father who happened to be the son of one of the richest families in Massachusetts saved. Colleen eventually ended up marrying an ex-Marine who drove a delivery truck for a local bakery. His name was Raymond Verrier. The couple had four more children, and Colleen took care of them all while her husband worked. "Money has always been a big enough problem," said Shawn in a Business Week article in 00. He added: "There was a lot of tension around that" (Ante, 00).
Shawn grew up near the public housing projects in Brockton. At that time, Verrier could see her son already shy was withdrawing from the city center chaos constantly surrounding him, "It went real deep within himself and said, 'I want to get out of this.' Even if it meant losing a little ', is what I wanted for him, "said Verrier, employed then as a nurse's aide. As Shawn grew older, Verrier turned to his business-minded brother, John, to help guide his son. As an incentive to learn, for each "A" took home from school his uncle John Fanning gave him the money. also he bought his nephew an Apple Macintosh computer that Verrier would have had the money for (Menn, 03). Life for Shawn Fanning at home, however, was constantly getting worse. The relationship between his parents finally culminated when his mother and stepfather had a split. For a year Shawn and his siblings were forced to live in a foster home (Ante, 00). However, the entrepreneurial uncle John Fanning Shawn was always there to offer support to the young nephew. Shawn worked summers as an intern in the division Chess.net his internet company's uncle John, NetGames, in the neighboring city of Hull. There, Shawn became quite adept at programming from fellow interns who were studying computer science at Carnegie Mellon University. Yet, in spite of John to take a vested interest in his nephew, Shawn was reluctant to absorb ethics of careful work of his uncle. Shawn had difficulty completing assignments and instead would often focus on video games. "I was entering programming, so I spent a lot of my time just fiddling with projects and hanging out," said Shawn (Ante, 00). E 'was also in this period, however, that Shawn learned about what would soon make it known, MP3 digital music files (Menn, 03).
Immediately after graduating from Harwich High School in 1998, Shawn enrolled at nearby Northeastern University. What it would eventually become Napster was created in the freshman dorm room of Fanning's roommate at Northeastern University. After listening to the complaints of his roommate finding nothing but dead links for MP3 music files with conventional search engines like Lycos and Yahoo !, Shawn tried a simpler alternative. His idea was simple. He wanted to combine the conventional ease of using the Internet with similar to Internet Relay Chat network file technology (IRC) transfer. Shawn knew that there should be a way to combine the breadth of search engines like Google with the "presence awareness" of systems like instant messaging, they know that it is signed at a given moment (Menn, 03). This was combined with having the ability to choose individual users which files can be shared with others while you are connected to the Napster network. These innovative elements of the program Napster network and finally eliminated the problems associated with dead links. In addition, having all users to store their music on their computer, electronic pipes would not clog if the new system just connected a couple of people and then dropped its own connection to them (Menn, 03). Finally, he added to these elements was a feature that allowed users of Napster to chat with each other in real time.
Shawn dropped out of Northeastern in January 1999 in order to devote his full time to perfect his invention. According Chess.net former colleague Tarek Loubani, he has rarely seen someone so. "I do not think people can appreciate how hard he worked," said Loubani (Menn, 03). Only remember vaguely that stage in mid-1999, unable to recall exact months, weeks or days. Among the only memories you have of that time you are hunched over his Dell notebook computer, writing code and dozing on his couch or on Uncle John's floor. Fear of having a software company to introduce a similar product before him, obsessively wrote the entire source code of Napster in 60 straight hours (Greenfeld, 00). In May 1999, Shawn's uncle John incorporated the company as Napster. John Fanning would retain a 70% stake in the company, while his nephew Shawn would retain only 30% of the company's capital. The justification offered by uncle John was that Shawn desperately needed a businessman expert like him to handle the nuances of management of the company. (Menn, 03).
Word spread quickly throughout the Northeastern University campus as soon as their former classmate Shawn had a preliminary beta program of Napster ready for testing on June 1, 1999. Soon, hundreds of university students were busy commercial music. This revolutionary new file sharing service quickly became the buzz among the internet literati frequent message boards and chat rooms. The Napster network was growing and it was growing at a fast pace. Faced with the prospect of unprecedented popularity in a short period of time, the Fannings set out to raise capital for additional bandwidth and servers. The company moved from Hull, Massachusetts in San Mateo, California, to a more spacious location and hired additional workers. The additional capital investment in Napster came just in time. Napster became so popular that some university campuses were experiencing clogged servers by students using Napster quantity alone. Schools such as Pennsylvania State University in 1999 issued a moratorium on the use of Napster on campus computers and internet connections in an attempt to alleviate the problem. Napster troubles were just beginning.
The notoriety eventually caught the attention of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). The RIAA has filed a lawsuit against Napster, December 7, 1999, relating to copyright infringement. In addition, the RIAA wanted compensation of $ 10,000 for each copyrighted song traded across the Napster network. The lawsuit unprecedented has garnered much media attention and further propelled the popularity of Napster, particularly with college students. Increasing droves of young people flocked to Napster to swap music, and the community soon touted millions of members around the world. At any time during this period, there would be millions of users, exchanging hundreds of thousands of songs.
Later, during the spring of 00, the heavy metal band Metallica learned that an unreleased studio outtake of their song "I Disappear" had been leaked and was being traded on Napster. The result was that the single was heard on numerous radio stations across America. Metallica was determined to find out how the song became so widely spread. The culprit was obvious Napster. A lawsuit for copyright infringement was filed on 13 April 00. After hiring consulting firms PDnet, early Metallica discovered that during a weekend in April 00, over 335,000 individual Napster users were trading their music online. On May 3, 00 Napster was presented with 60,000 pages of user names that had allegedly traded copyrighted Metallica songs through Napster network. Metallica demanded that Napster ban 335,000 users for trading their copyrighted material, and Napster agreed. Napster attorney Laurence Pulgram said, "Napster has taken extraordinary measures to meet the demands of Metallica to block hundreds of thousands of his fans to use the Napster system." He further added, "Napster has always stated that it would act in response to the notice from the copyright holders, and has lived up to that commitment in good faith." (Dansby & Uhelszki, 00).
On May 5, 00, Napster has received a fatal legal shot. The district Marilyn Hall Patel judge ruled that Napster was not entitled to the status of "safe harbor" under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act 1992. Original defense of Napster RIAA in her costume is that was included under section 1008. In this section in the law explicitly stated that:
"No action may be brought under this title alleging infringement of copyright [1] based on manufacture, importation or distribution of a digital audio recording device, a support digital audio recording, an analog recording device, or an analog recording medium or [2] not based on commercial use of a consumer of such a device or means for making musical recordings or analog musical recordings digital ".
The Court found that Napster's users were engaged in widespread violation of copyright. Furthermore, the judgment also stated that Napster is "contributorily and indirectly responsible for their actions." The exclusion under Section 1008 AHRA did not apply here, because the law provides immunity only from noncommercial copying and not public distribution. The Napster network was made up of over 20 million people. Therefore, each time a user is connected to the network and shared his hard drive contents, the user was distributing copyrighted material for the masses. Section 1008 AHRA deals with the reproduction and not the distribution of copyrighted material. Therefore, according to the court, the Napster users were in violation of copyright infringement and the Napster was facilitating copyright infringement. Judge Patel granted the RIAA request for a preliminary injunction and the site was ordered closed on 26 July 00.
Meanwhile, Napster appealed the judgment of 2 October 00. The Napster appeal was lost in the February 12, 01 an offer of $ 1 billion from Napster to settle out of court with the recording industry was shortly rejected. March 5, 01, the Ninth Circuit Court ordered Napster to stop the copyrighted material on its network business. As a result, Napster began using the filters in its search engine. The Napster system completely blocked any artist or song title that was copyrighted from user searches. popular artists and song titles were no longer showing up in search results. As a result, intelligent users of Napster circumvented the filters by intentionally misspelling the artist or song title on their hard drives. Napster users may still be able to download copyrighted music. As a result, completely shut down Napster throughout its network in July 01 to fully comply with the court order. On 24 September 01, Napster settled with the holders of the copyright to the tune of $ 26 million for the illegal use of music, and $ 10 million in advance to cover impending royalty agreements. Napster announced May 17, 02 an agreement with Germany's Bertelsmann AG. The agreement would allow a form-based Napster subscribers to develop with the music catalog of Bertelsmann AG, in exchange for the German company to drop its lawsuit against Napster. However, June 3, 01 Napster filed for bankruptcy under Chapter 11. The sale of Bertelsmann AG was blocked, and Napster was forced to sell its remaining assets.
The current legal incarnation of Napster is a subscriber-based service fee. Roxio bought the Napster assets at auction in 02. According to Wikipedia (05) a monthly fee of $ 9.95 is charged to members that can provisionally rent songs, with the option of paying an extra $ 0.80 and $ 0, 0 to permanently download songs. While the new Napster has only a fraction of the popularity of the old Napster, others have filled the void in the world of file-sharing peer-to-peer. Popular services like Kazaa, Limewire and Morpheus utilize the technology made infamous by Shawn Fanning. However, if the original Napster had a central server, these services rely on connecting directly to other network users. They are inherently more difficult to adjust for copyright infringement and likewise almost impossible to stop.
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