June 1, 1999
Napster peer-to-peer music sharing launches
Shawn Fanning's Napster went live on June 1, 1999 — a centralized peer-to-peerA network where participants connect directly as equals — no single central server is required. service that let users trade MP3 files and brought music piracy to mainstream college campuses.
What it was for
Napster indexed filenames on users' hard drives and matched seekers to hosts — no warez topsites or crack intros required. The RIAA lawsuit, Metallica testimony, and eventual shutdown defined the copyright wars that produced iTunesApple's media storefront and library — defined how users bought music and synced iPods., Spotify, and today's DMCADigital Millennium Copyright Act — U.S. law on DRM circumvention and online copyright safe harbors. takedown infrastructure. It proved P2P could scale faster than any FTPFile Transfer Protocol — a classic protocol for uploading and downloading files over networks. ring.
Why it's here
Napster was the consumer face of P2P piracy before BitTorrent.
Why it mattered
It forced the music industry and courts to confront digital copying at internet scale.
What it solved
This was illicit sharing — it exposed that MP3 compression made music as copyable as software warez.
Media
ImageShawn FanningJoi Ito, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Related
- BitTorrent client first releasedJuly 2, 2001
- Digital Millennium Copyright Act signed into U.S. lawOctober 28, 1998