Who Created Napster?

Napster was one of the first file sharing devices. This program introduced a number of ethical questions, and the program was found guilty of copyright violations. However, what was the history behind this program? How was it created?

Napster was created by Shawn Fanning while he was attending Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts. Shawn Fanning was from Massachusetts, and he became interested in programming when he was a young child. He worked during the summers for his uncle’s Internet Company.

While he was working for his uncle, he began to write the code for Napster. He wanted to create a program which made it easy for individuals to download music. He wanted to create an easier way to search for music other than searching IRC or Lycos. He went to Northeastern before he was done writing the code. During his first semester there, he rarely attended his classes. Instead, he focused on writing and finishing the code for Napster.

Release of Napster

In June of 1999, Napster was released. Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker jointly released the program. Sean Parker was an American businessman, and helped Shawn Fanning launch Napster. At the beginning, Shawn’s uncle ran all aspects of the company.

The headquarters for the company was in an office in Nantasket Beach. Shawn controlled only thirty percent of the company, and his uncle controlled the rest. Although the first program was written for PC computers, a program was later written for Macintosh computers. This version was written in 2000, and was written by Black Hole Media. The program was called Macster. Macster was soon bought by Napster, and the name Macster was discontinued.

Popularity of Napster

The program was immensely popular. Although it wasn’t entirely a peer-to-peer file distribution system, it operated extremely similar to a peer-to-peer distribution system. Napster wasn’t the first program that allowed files to be distributed over the Internet.

Napster specialized in MP3 files and it was an easy to use program. Thus, users who weren’t that technologically savvy were able to use the program and easily download MP3s. The program was also extremely successful because it soon accumulated a huge selection of music to download. This included songs that weren’t tremendously popular, or songs that had never been played on the radio, or songs from decades earlier.

They were able to do this without paying royalties to the record companies. The program was extremely popular at colleges because of the high-speed Internet networks in college dormitories.

Napster Lawsuit

In 2000, Metallica filed a lawsuit against Napster. The band realized that the demo for one of their unreleased songs was circulating through the network. The song was “I disappear.”

Since the song was circulating through Napster, it eventually made it to the radio stations before Metallica had released the song to the stations. Metallica then realized the their entire back catalogue of studio material was also circulating the network.

Dr. Dre, a rapper, soon followed Metallica and filed a lawsuit of his own. He had written to Napster and asked that the program remove his songs. When Napster failed to remove his songs, he then filed a lawsuit. A year after the lawsuits were filed, Napster settled the suits. However, it was already too late for Napster.

Apart from the Metallica and Dr. Dre lawsuits, A&M Records and several other companies sued Napster for contributory and vicarious copyright infringement under the United States Digital Millennium Copyright Act in 2000. The District Court ruled against Napster, and Napster appealed the decision to the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. The court ordered for Napster to monitor the activities of its network and block access for infringing material. Napster was unable to comply, and had to be shut down.