Napster

Napster, currently the most widespread peer to peer technology, was written by former Northeastern University student Shawn Fanning for over a week Shawn did not leave his uncle's apartment, coding what would become the spark for an online music revolution. When he created the program, he planned to give it to his friends so he could share mp3s with them. But when the program was made availible to the public, it was obvious that it would be much more than a small group of friends sharing music.

In late 1999, a group of investors realized Napster's potential and invested 15 million dollars into the formation of Napster inc. Soon after becoming a company, the contoversy over Napster began. Metallica was first in taking action, and Dr. Dre and the entire recording industry followed. In summer of 2000, the Recording Industry Association of America along with Dr. Dre, Metallica, and representitives from independent labels filed suit against Napster for copyright infringment. The suit went to the San Francisco District Court, where Justice Marylin Hall Patel ruled to shut down Napster. Napster appealed this ruling to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, which ruled that while they agreed with Justice Patel, her ruling was too broad. This sent the suit back down to Justice Patel for her to change her ruling. In early February, a hearing was held to determine Justice Patel's preliminary injuction. She ruled that Napster was to block all songs that the record labels requested them to. This started Napster's current blocking system. For more information on the Napster hearing, click here.

Napster works by users uploading the names of their files to a central server. When another user searches for that file, the server shows the matching filenames. If the user wants the file, then the server initiates a file transfer between both computers. To put it simply, the server is a middleman delivering messages to other computers. The layout would look something like this:

There are many advantages and disadvantages to using a centralized server as Napster uses. The main advantage is that users are not dependent on other users to search for files. When I use Gnutella on a 56k modem, it is almost impossible to find things because the network is constantly passing on searches to me. With Napster, searches pass through a dedicated server, making the system more accessible to people with slow connections. But because Napster uses centralized servers, there are many security concerns. All of the filenames from all of the users are on one easily accessable server, along with usernames and passwords. This becomes incresingly important with servers which share content that is not just music, because some people would not want people to know what files they have. But for music sharers, there is not very much danger.

To download a Napster client, go to the software folder.

To find out more about Napster go to the links folder.