   #copyright

Napster

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Websites and the Internet

   Napster is an online music service which was originally a file sharing
   service created by Shawn Fanning. Napster was the first widely-used
   peer-to-peer (or P2P) music sharing service, and it made a major impact
   on how people used the Internet. Its technology allowed music fans to
   easily share MP3 format song files with each other, thus leading to the
   music industry's accusations of massive copyright violations. Although
   the original service was shut down by court order, it paved the way for
   decentralized P2P file-sharing programs such as Kazaa, Limewire, and
   BearShare, which have been much harder to control. The popularity and
   repercussions of the first Napster have made it a legendary icon in the
   computer and entertainment fields.

   Napster's brand and logo continue to be used by a pay service, having
   been acquired by Roxio.

Origins

   Shawn Fanning along with volunteer Sean Parker first released the
   original Napster in June of 1999 while Fanning was attending
   Northeastern University in Boston. Fanning wanted an easier method of
   finding music than by searching IRC or Lycos. John Fanning of Hull,
   Massachusetts, who is Shawn's uncle, struck an agreement which gave
   Shawn 30% control of the company, with the rest going to his uncle.
   Napster began to build an office and executive team in San Mateo,
   California, in September of 1997. Napster was the first of the
   massively popular peer-to-peer file sharing systems, although it was
   not fully peer-to-peer since it used central servers to maintain lists
   of connected systems and the files they provided—directories,
   effectively—while actual transactions were conducted directly between
   machines. Although there were already media which facilitated the
   sharing of files across the Internet, such as IRC, Hotline, and USENET,
   Napster specialized exclusively in music in the form of MP3 files and
   presented a user-friendly interface. The result was a system whose
   popularity generated an enormous selection of music to download.

   Irrespective of these justifications, many other users simply enjoyed
   trading and downloading music for free. With the files obtained through
   Napster, people frequently made their own compilation albums on
   recordable CDs, without paying any royalties to the copyright holder
   (which was usually one of the big record labels). High-speed networks
   in college dormitories became overloaded, with as much as 80% of
   external network traffic consisting of MP3 file transfers. Many
   colleges blocked its use for this reason, even before concerns about
   liability for facilitating copyright violations on campus. As a partial
   solution to this issue, Napster was used as a test case for the Abilene
   Network, the educational Internet backbone.

Legal Challenges

   Napster peaked in February 2001
   Enlarge
   Napster peaked in February 2001

   Heavy metal band Metallica discovered that a demo of their song "I
   Disappear" had been circulating across the Napster network, even before
   it was released. This eventually led to the song being played on
   several radio stations across America. This brought to their attention
   that their entire back catalogue of studio material was also available.
   The band responded in 2000 by filing a lawsuit against the Napster
   service. A month later, rapper Dr. Dre shared a litigator and legal
   firm with Metallica, and filed a similar lawsuit after Napster wouldn't
   remove his works from their service after he issued a written request.
   Separately, both Metallica and Dr. Dre later delivered thousands of
   usernames to Napster who they believed were pirating their songs.
   Metallica asked their group of users to be banned from the service,
   while Dr. Dre again asked for his songs to be removed from the service.
   All users who were on the list of either artist were banned. Napster
   complied with Metallica's request, but not Dr. Dre's; both the suits
   continued. Members of the Napster community could get around this ban
   with a file that soon began circulating after the ban took effect. The
   ban worked by editing the Windows registry, and this file reversed
   those changes. A year after they began, Napster settled both lawsuits,
   but this came after being shut down by the Ninth Circuit Court in a
   separate lawsuit from several major record labels (see below).

   Also in 2000, Madonna, who had previously met with Napster executives
   to discuss a possible partnership, became irate when her single "Music"
   leaked out on to the web and Napster prior to its commercial release,
   causing widespread media coverage. Verified Napster use peaked with
   26.4 million users worldwide in February 2001; however, former
   employees contend that the service had at least 40 million users in
   June of 2000.

   At the time, the lawsuits were opposed by Napster users and supporters.
   To them, it seemed that file sharing was inevitable on the Internet ,
   and it was not Napster's fault that people used the service to share
   copyrighted files. These users viewed Napster as a simple search
   engine. Many argued that any attempt to shut down Napster would simply
   lead to people using a different medium to exchange files over the
   Internet. Similarly, many supporters of Napster were concerned about
   the media's constant use of the word "site" to describe the service, a
   word which seems to imply that Napster was distributing files itself
   rather than facilitating their exchange.

Promotional power

   With all the accusations that Napster was destroying the record
   industry there were those who felt just the opposite, that file trading
   on Napster actually stimulated, rather than hurt, sales. Proof may have
   come in July 2000 when tracks from Radiohead's album Kid A found their
   way to Napster three months before the CD's release. Unlike Madonna,
   Radiohead had never hit the top 20 in the US. Furthermore, it was an
   experimental album that received little traditional promotion and
   almost no radio airplay. As MP3 Newswire described, it was a perfect
   vehicle to test this theory as the effect of Napster was isolated from
   other elements that could be credited for driving sales.

   By the time of the record's release Kid A had been downloaded by
   millions of people worldwide. The record industry braced for the worst,
   but then came the big surprise. Kid A not only broke the top 20, it
   captured the number one spot on the charts in its debut week. The
   record beat out the CDs of some of the most heavily marketed artists of
   the time including Madonna and Eminem. In the absence of any other
   force that could account for this success, Richard Menta of MP3
   Newswire declared this was proof that Napster was a promotional power.
   In the end, shipments of Kid A as well Amnesiac and Hail to the Thief
   were substantially lower than Radiohead's two previous albums, as
   tracked by the RIAA's "Searchable Database" .

Shutdown

   Napster's facilitation of transfer of copyrighted material raised the
   ire of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), which
   almost immediately — in December 1999 — filed a lawsuit against the
   popular service. The service would only get bigger as the trial, meant
   to shut down Napster, also gave it a great deal of publicity. Soon
   millions of users, many of them college students, flocked to it.

   After a failed appeal to the Ninth Circuit Court, an injunction was
   issued on March 5, 2001 ordering Napster to prevent the trading of
   copyrighted music on its network. In July 2001, Napster shut down its
   entire network in order to comply with the injunction. On September 24,
   2001, the case was partially settled. Napster agreed to pay music
   creators and copyright owners a $26 million settlement for past,
   unauthorized uses of music, as well as an advance against future
   licensing royalties of $10 million. In order to pay those fees, Napster
   attempted to convert their free service to a subscription system. A
   prototype solution was tested in the spring of 2002: the Napster 3.0
   Alpha, using audio fingerprinting technology licensed from Relatable.
   Napster 3.0 was, according to many former Napster employees, ready to
   deploy, but it had significant trouble obtaining licenses to distribute
   major-label music.

   On May 17, 2002, Napster announced that its assets would be acquired by
   German media firm Bertelsmann for $8 million. Pursuant to terms of that
   agreement, on June 3 Napster filed for Chapter 11 protection under
   United States bankruptcy laws. On September 3, 2002, an American
   bankruptcy judge blocked the sale to Bertelsmann and forced Napster to
   liquidate its assets according to Chapter 7 of the U.S. bankruptcy
   laws. Most of the Napster staff were laid off, and the website changed
   to display "Napster was here".

Current status

   After a $2.43 million takeover offer by the Private Media Group, an
   adult entertainment company, Napster's brand and logos were acquired at
   bankruptcy auction by the company Roxio, Inc. which used them to
   rebrand the pressplay music service as Napster 2.0. As of 2005, this
   new service has met with moderate success.

   Although the central servers used by Napster made it a convenient legal
   target, the record industry failed to capitalize on the power vacuum
   left in its wake. The years between Napster's demise and the emergence
   of the iTunes Music Store as the first popular pay-service were
   squandered as the five major labels failed to agree on a single service
   or standard for online distribution, launching several mutually
   incompatible subscription services such as pressplay and MusicNet.

   In the meantime, the peer-to-peer filesharing trend Napster started
   soon resumed, with new programs and networks picking up the torch.
   Unofficial Napster servers proliferated, aided by a program known as
   "Napigator", and a second generation of P2P protocols (including
   FastTrack and Gnutella) were quickly developed. Designed as
   decentralized networks, these have been much more challenging for
   copyright owners to pursue in the courts (see MGM v. Grokster).

   The ever-widening availability of broadband has made file sharing even
   more prevalent, since increasing download speeds mean the distribution
   of entire movies and other large files is possible. An emerging and
   cryptographically strong third generation of P2P protocols will be
   nearly impossible to interdict. In a very real sense, Shawn Fanning can
   be called the man who opened a Pandora's Box.

Popular Culture

   In the 2003 remake of The Italian Job, a flashback depicts Shawn
   Fanning (playing himself) stealing the program from a computer expert
   played by Seth Green while the latter is napping, providing a humorous
   folk etymology for the name.

   The suffix "-ster" has become a popular component of the brand names of
   many Internet products, suggesting a peer-to-peer model, such as
   Grokster, Aimster (later Madster), and Blubster. This has also been
   extended to Friendster, a site which vaguely recalls Napster's
   community-building features.^,

   An episode of animated television series Futurama, I Dated a Robot,
   centres on the illegal distribution of robotic celebrity clones over
   the Internet. The organisation responsible for this was thought to be
   named "Nappster," a reference to Napster. It was later revealed,
   however, that the full name was "Kidnappster" with a piece of tapestry
   covering "Kid" from the logo.

   John Titor, a purported time traveller from the year 2036, says that
   Napster is still distributing music in his time.

   In the South Park episode Christian Rock Hard, Stan, Kyle, and Kenny
   illegally download music from Napster for inspiration for their band
   'Moop.' They are then caught by police and shown the horrors music
   pirating does to musicians. After seeing this, they start a strike and
   famous musicians/bands join them, among them are Rancid, Master P, Ozzy
   Osbourne, Meat Loaf (all four also playing in Chef Aid), blink-182,
   Horny Toad, Metallica, Britney Spears, Missy Elliot, Alanis Morissette
   and The Lords of the Underworld (minus Timmy).
   Retrieved from " http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napster"
   This reference article is mainly selected from the English Wikipedia
   with only minor checks and changes (see www.wikipedia.org for details
   of authors and sources) and is available under the GNU Free
   Documentation License. See also our Disclaimer.
