Napster And File-Sharing

Napster, the revolutionary file-sharing software, was one of the biggest controversial entertainment law issues in the history of the Internet. In 1999, eighteen year old Shawn Fanning created Napster in his college dorm room at Northeastern University. He named it "Napster" after the nickname he had received due to his nappy hair. Napster was created in order to share music, both copyrighted and noncopyrighted, without restraints. Fanning ignored the laws of sharing copyrighted music and realized a dream of sharing free music with the entire world.

The idea of a file-sharing music website was not unfamiliar. Music file-sharing had taken place legally on the Internet before Napster was created. For example, The Internet Underground Music Archive (IUMA), a website created in 1993, distributed the music of smaller unsigned bands to a wider audience using "MP2," the newest form of music compression. MP2s compressed music files, which made them drastically smaller, and in turn, allowed for much faster music downloads.

IUMA featured MP2 music for download by any user that visited the site. The site became so popular that by 1994, bands were paying IUMA to have their music on the site. The main difference between websites such as IUMA and Napster was this: all music hosted by IUMA was only on their database with the expressed permission of the artist. Also, all the music was stored on IUMA's server. Napster, however, connected one user to the music on another user's database. With Napster, the user was the server.

Napster's database was one-of-a-kind. It used a new type of software that implemented what came to be known as "peer-to-peer" technology. This technology became popular for its easy-to-use interface. First, a user would set up a free account with Napster. Once he had done that, the user then connected and signed on to the software that was linked to the Napster homepage. There, they would search for a song, or "MP3 (the most recent form of file compression). The search would go to the host, and the host would look for that song on another user's database. If another user had the song, the host would connect those two computers, and the file transfer would begin.

This type of file-sharing was referred to as "peer-to-peer" architecture because it connected two home computers without going through a central server for a file transfer. No music was ever held on the central host; Napster only acted as a middle man between the users who held all the song. But even though no copyrighted music was ever held or distributed by Napster itself, there was, of course, no way to control any copyrighted music

from being exchanged by Napster's millions of users. This would come into play later on.

Napster was greeted with instant success after its creation in May of 1999. By October of that same year, the number of users were doubling each day. It was already on its way to becoming the fastest growing business of all time. With Napster's success came many copycats, such as Morpheus and Scour Exchange, and even new and improved models such as Gnutella.

Napster's success prompted its leader to realize that there would be a backlash against his company unless he did something charitable and/or got support from the music industry. Fanning pulled off both in one fell swoop. In early 2000, Napster sponsored a free tour for nu-metal band Limp Bizkit, to promote the new company and win their acceptance among musicians. Fanning even went as far as to offer two percent of the company to Limp Bizkit to show the music industry that they have the support of major artist. A similar offer was made to other popular bands of the time, such as KoRn and Matchbox 20, offering them perks that included a promise of prominent placement on Napster's interface, a spot frequented by millions each day.

Although Fanning was trying his best to win friends and influence people in the record industry, he could not hide the fact that music sales were at an all time low. Also, the sale of blank CD's (easily formatted CD's that could easily play downloaded MP3 files) was at an all-time high. With a media whirlwind being created around this new file-exchange system, its illegal nature could no longer be ignored by the public. Musicians, most notably, were beginning to publicly

voice their opinions on the system. At the Grammy Awards in 2002, Michael Greene, president of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, took the opportunity to call unauthorized downloading a "most insidious virus."

The music industry banded together to put Napster at fault for the dropped record sales. In response, Napster was quick to point out that CD prices were reaching an all-time high. Even though the production cost of a CD had been going down to about one dollar per CD, the record companies were charging consumers close to twenty dollars to buy them. Consumers were becoming less and less willing to pay these increasing prices for CD's when they could just as easily, if illegally, download an entire album from Napster, or another program of the sort.

After receiving worldwide attention as an acceptable way to pirate music Napster began to be examined by the government. Although there were disclaimers on the software before you download it that users should not download any copyrighted music, there was no way to stop people from exchanging copyrighted songs. Also, there was no way to look up on Napster's server what songs were being downloaded; that aspect of the software was conveniently left out. Therefore, there was no way to see what songs were exchanged and by who.

That all changed when the metal band Metallica led a fight against the Napster company. The band hired a consultant to analyze the Napster song traffic, specifically looking for the unauthorized trade of any of Metallica's copyrighted songs. The consultant then presented

documents showing that 335,435 Napster users had downloaded copyrighted songs