It then sent a list of those file names to a central server that belonged to Napster itself. Notice this one important fact: the software only sent the file names, not the actual songs themselves. This fact will be significant later on. Now the server sends me your internet address, the IP address.
Using Napster, my computer communicates with your computer and then you send the file to my computer. The first and most important characteristic of this method is that the actual sharing is done between the two clients, and not between the client and the server.
Besides the legal protection, this approach had two other advantages. The other is the saving on bandwidth. But since the files were shared between the clients, the burden of communication was on their shoulders.
Or, their modems, I guess. To say that Napster was a success would be an understatement. The simple software, created by an 18 years old in a marathon of pizza and soda, became a huge hit. The number of users doubled every few weeks, and at its peak — in February — Napster had about 80 million active users per month. Napster was especially successful among college students.
So what made Napster so successful compared to other software and file sharing websites? The first element has to do with the fact that the software focused on MP3 files only, and allowed sharing music but not movies, games, and other software. If you remember our earlier episode with Dr. Another element has to do with a few smart defaults that Fanning and Parker implemented in their software: for example, a user that wanted to download a file had to allow others to download files from his computer.
No free lunch! With the click of the button, a user could scan millions of computers and even locate songs that traditionally were hard to find, like old recordings, bootleg versions, and rare concerts. Discovering new music became as easy as using a microwave: open the software, click and wait. There was no reason to spend time at music stores…. Well, record labels sure noticed that people were buying less music, and it is no surprise that they considered Napster to be a real threat.
While this was a predictable move that Fanning and Parker anticipated, it was a second lawsuit that caught them by surprise. After looking into it, he discovered that someone had shared the song on Napster. Shocked, Ulrich shared his discovery with his bandmates and they were livid! In April of Metallica decided, in an unprecedented move, to file a lawsuit against Napster, demanding tens of millions of dollars due to their responsibility for the copyright infringement.
Napster agreed to block the accounts of all three hundred thousand users, a move which motivated another famous artist, the rapper Dr.
Dre, to file a similar lawsuit against Napster. This fascinating case received worldwide coverage, and the media followed the story closely. While Metallica, Dr. Dre, and Madonna were against Napster, some artists supported the young company. Dave Grohl, the former Nirvana drummer, said in an interview:.
In most cases the division was obvious: known and successful artists were against file sharing, while young and unknown ones were in favor of it. Those who had nothing to lose supported Napster and considered it a way to help people discover their music.
All due to its success on Napster. Other artists, such as Limp Bizkit and The Offspring also used Napster in order to promote their tours. Despite the harshness towards Napster, record labels did see the positive potential behind the new technology. Richard Menta, an American Journalist, wrote the following in one of his columns:.
Many in the ranks see the promotional benefits Napster is having on them. Such an entity, they fear, can eventually undermine the profits that come with an oligopoly. The German media giant, Bertelsmann AG, which was actually one of the prosecutors in the lawsuit, surprised the music world when it announced that it planned to acquire the small company.
According to other media reports, Napster had discussed similar deals with other record companies, but those did not work out due to disagreements regarding dollar amounts.
The judge who discussed their case in the inferior court ordered Napster to remove all the songs protected by copyrights within 72 hours, otherwise, he would shut Napster down. Six months later, in February of , the appeal was rejected, and Napster found itself facing two bad options: either find a way to filter all the songs that are protected by copyrights and prevent users from sharing them on its network or shut down. It was the users who were doing all the copyright infringement, right? One of the big differences, technologically, between the VCR and Napster, is that after you sell someone a VCR you cannot control what they are using it for.
So a decision there is really inhibiting the usage of the product — whereas Napster always had full control over how its users are using it. Napster does not have the same defense because of how it was used. They created three things that were similar to Time Shifting, but are very flimsy arguments.
The problem with all of those arguments is that at the end of the day, people who are taking things on Napster are taking them without paying for them. On a factual level, the big difference between Napster and Sony is there was greater hard to the copyright holders then there was in Sony.
The company had no choice but to turn off the lights and cease all activity in order to fulfill the court order. It was obvious that blocking copyright-protected songs would make users abandon the software. The only possible solution they had was to try and launch a paid service that would allow legal access to music files.
The last option for Napster was to merge with Bertelsmann AG. The deal was supposed to provide some cash flow and allow it to sell songs legally. In May of , Napster announced that it reached an agreement with the German company, according to which it would be sold for the amount of 85 million dollars. But several record labels petitioned the court regarding the legality of the deal, and three months later the court ordered to cancel the deal arguing that there is a conflict of interests with the CEO of Napster being a former executive at Bertelsmann.
The real Napster died. The three founders moved on. John Fanning, the investor, went back to invest in computerized chess games. Sean Fanning became an entrepreneur and founded a few other start-up companies; his personal wealth is estimated at a few million dollars. He was afraid that if he was ever to make money again, record labels would take him back to court; therefore, he made an effort to avoid the media.
Eventually, he got lucky — he was one of the first investors in a small company, you may have heard of … FaceBook? Today, his personal wealth is estimated at more than a billion dollars! File sharing technology itself changed in order to prevent any legal action similar to the one that destroyed Napster, and now not only MP3 files were shared, but also movies and hacked games.
Winamp had millions of users. In they decided to develop their own file sharing software. But Frankel and Pepper made one, very big, mistake. They were talented programmers, no doubt about that — but perhaps due to their young age and lack of experience in handling themselves inside large bureaucratic organizations, or maybe due to a natural rebellious instinct, they decided not to tell their new managers at AOL about their new project.
Even Metallica and Dr. Dre joined the record companies and added lawsuits of their own! The media was covering the story day in and day out. On top of that, AOL did some business with the record labels, and it made no sense to destabilize those connections in favor of distributing an open source software that had no financial potential. The gag order was so strict that around Silicon Valley rumors began spreading about how AOL was holding Frankel and Pepper under home detention in order to keep them away from the media.
Zennstrom and Friis planned to sell this technology to European companies as a fast and convenient way to transfer files between the US and Europe. Kazaa launched in March of Four months later, In July, Napster shut down — and millions of frustrated users found Kazaa to be the perfect alternative.
Three months later, Kazaa had one million and three hundred thousand users! But in the case of Kazaa and FastTrack, this distinction has a lot of significance. The letter A is di-dah, the letter B is dah-di-di-dit and so on. But the beeps themselves could be transmitted in different ways. Alex Winter told me he met a woman, in the course of making his documentary, who over a decade later was still embroiled in a multi-million-dollar action.
She'd once used Napster to download 26 songs. People at the time were saying: 'It's fine for me to take whatever I want. Get over it, grandpa! With Napster there was an enormous amount of grey. Opponents saw no grey. Litigation against Napster came from all angles.
The court battles dragged on and on — long after Parker, millions of users and even Fanning himself had left Napster behind. Reading this on mobile? Click here to watch video. Get to a computer! There was a weekend in February that felt like the last days of Rome. In the US courts a judge had found for the RIAA in the breach-of-copyright case, and Napster had been ordered to start charging or else close entirely. Would there ever be such an opportunity again? By now the individual songs on my hard drive vastly outnumbered those on the CDs I owned.
I had not been using the service cannily, to complete an exhaustive music collection — as Winter had, for instance. He was in his mids that manic February, and remembers booting up multiple PCs to leach off any Coltrane rarities he was still missing.
My approach had always been more of a woozy supermarket sweep, and it meant I'd built up a curious one-track miscellany. At an age by which I should have had a cataclysmic encounter with an album such as Blood on the Tracks , I'd sought out just one Dylan song, The Man in Me, because I'd heard it used to good effect in a film.
Very occasionally I was helped to discover an alien band or artist I remember accidentally getting a cover of Creep by the Cure, hoping for Radiohead, and thinking: hey, this Robert Smith sounds OK When you could download work on a millisecond's whim, there was no bond established.
Being free meant no investment. My experience was not typical. That Marlena Shaw-pilfering colleague told me: "Napster hugely expanded my musical horizons. I felt like one of those mantis shrimps with trinocular vision.
The question was batted about in courtrooms. Were file-sharers really in the wrong? Was Napster? Not a single MP3 was stored on its servers; the software simply enabled users to download from each other. Anyway, might it not be it a good thing that so many people, 57 million users at Napster's peak, were excitedly seeking out music online? Certain musicians thought so. Wyclef Jean wanted his music to be heard, however it was heard. Chuck D thought of file-sharing as "the new radio". Billy Corgan of Smashing Pumpkins was resigned: "There's no stopping it," he said.
By the summer of , Napster had dramatically expanded and about 14, songs were being downloaded every minute. Fanning was a star, sought out at a tech conference by two little-known developers, Larry and Sergey , who told him how much they envied what he'd built.
When Time magazine put Fanning on its cover in October , an accompanying article gushed: "[His] programme ranks among the greatest internet applications ever, up there with email and instant messaging. But the truth was that, for Napster, terminal rot had set in. Sean Parker had been quietly, hurtfully ousted from the company after an email was unearthed in which he referred to file-sharers as pirates, something Napster's lawyers were always careful to deny.
Shown the door, Parker asked Fanning for help, but his friend was so weary and disillusioned that he only said: "You're lucky.
You can go and do something else. Napster had lost its zest. Rudderless and haemorrhaging relevance, it began a series of doomed manoeuvres. Both digital and physical files are shared and shared often.
Software and computer corporations see undesirable effects of file sharing, mainly that people will hand off computer games and programs and music files willingly to not just friends, but complete strangers on the internet. While Mr. Double Def DP warns that copying floppies can lead to the end of computers as we know them! It does, however, serve as a pretty great foreshadowing for the internet piracy that will follow in the coming decades.
Instant messaging is launched by America Online AOL , allowing file transfer within messaging conversations. File sharing site Napster uses peer-to-peer P2P file sharing technology and an easy-to-use interface that indexed MP3 files and made them searchable. The glory days of free music quickly came to an end as the Recording Industry Association of America RIAA file a lawsuit against Napster in , quelling the free music revolution for the time.
File sharing as we know it today begins at the turn of the new century. File sharing programs pop up on the internet like heads on a hydra, heads that RIAA cannot vanquish quickly enough. BitTorrent, a protocol devised by Bram Cohen, provides a faster solution.
Instead of directly connecting two computers, multiple computers are involved in downloading, with each computer sharing a piece of a file that a user has requested. BitTorrent becomes especially useful for transmitting large files. In the late s, consumer cloud storage options like Amazon, Dropbox and iCloud began to appear. Not only do these platforms allow users to share files, but they provide file hosting and management from anywhere, on any device.
These cloud storage options are so convenient that employees eschew email, FTP servers and other more traditional means of sending files internally and externally.
Businesses have to deal with unsecured documents, file sprawl and possible data breaches. As a result, it becomes apparent to companies that a secure way to share and manage files is necessary. In , SmartFile creates a cloud-based business file sharing and management solution that lets organizations set granular rules and permissions for users, maintain audit logs and use an interface that consumer cloud storage users are familiar with.
Still, some companies find that they need these features behind their own firewall.
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