Napster
More info
- Creator
- Shawn Fanning, Sean Parker
- Released
- 1999
- Type
- File-sharing service
The 1999 file-sharing service that let millions of students download each other's music, and that the record industry then spent two years suing out of existence.
Shawn Fanning was 18 when he wrote it. The files, nearly always MP3s, sat on users' own machines and moved directly between them, but the search index lived on Napster's servers. Technically neat, legally fatal: with a central directory it was easy to argue the company knew what was being shared. University networks buckled under the traffic.
Metallica sued in 2000 and handed over lists of hundreds of thousands of usernames, the labels won A&M Records v. Napster, and the service shut down in July 2001. The lesson its successors took was to remove the middle: Gnutella, Kazaa and BitTorrent were far more thoroughly P2P. The name was sold on and has since been worn by several legal music services. Sean Parker later sat on Spotify's board.