Shawn Fanning was a 19-year old college student when he thought of the idea for Napster. He was convinced that it was a cool idea, but was worried that others might have the same idea and might implement it before he did. So he dropped out of school and with a Windows programming book from his uncle, he made his first Windows program. He named it Napster, his own nickname, given to him for his nappy hair.Napster is a centralized peer-distribution system. When a user downloads and runs Napster, the program scours the user's hard drive for MP3 files. It calculates some simple information, such as the length of the song and the quality of the encoding, and uploads the information (not the song) to Napster's central servers. The user is then logged on and ready to participate. When a user searches for a song in the database, the request is posed to Napster's server. Since the server has a list of the files that everyone else has, it can inform the user what computers are currently online and are sharing the song in question. The user picks whom they want to download the file from and their client connects to the other computer serving the song and subsequently downloads it to the user's hard drive. Likewise, other users may choose to download music from the original user's hard drive. Napster's servers don't actually have any music on them; just where to get that music.
Napster was revolutionary in two ways; it made it easy for people to share music with the world and it made it feel anonymous. Previously, it wasn't impossible for people to share music with each other: a person could just set up a web or FTP site and publish its address on the web. In fact, when MP3s were first becoming popular on the web many people, including us, did just that. Unfortunately, as we quickly found out, it was very easy for rights organizations to discover the proprietors of these sites (there weren't many) and have them shut down or even prosecuted in court. Future webmasters had to be more stealthy, concealing their location by rapidly shifting IP addresses while using dynamic DNS servers to maintain a consistent web address, attempting to remain anonymous but accessible. Many such sites were discovered and shut down nonetheless, since there were a limited number of them.
Napster's innovation then, wasn't so much in being a novel technology, but in making it so easy that everyone would do it. It's feasible to track and shut down a dozen sites a week. It's not feasible to shut down thousands a week. In this sense, Napster pushed the administration's threshold and allowed for the widespread redistribution of copyrighted material on a magnitude that represented a movement, not just a handful of hackers.
Part of getting everyone to share their files with Napster was to partially mask its functioning. Most Napster users still think of their music as coming from Napster, not other people's computers. Most users are also surprised to discover that participating in the Napster network means that their computer is serving up music other users. Slightly more disturbing is the fact that when users click the 'X' box to close Napster, it actually remains running; users have to right-click on the Napster icon in the taskbar and select "close" to actually shut down the program. These attributes cause substantially more music to be shared than otherwise might be. In turn, this makes Napster a more compelling experience; the more music that is available, the more people will enjoy Napster, run it more often, tell their friends, etc. These friends then tell their friends, etc. and the network grows exponentially by the "snowball effect."
The recent cases against Napster show that they're still not homefree, though. Both Metallica and Dr. Dre, as of early June 2000, have successfully requested the removal of hundreds of thousands of Napster users for copyright infringement. The users who were removed suddenly realized that participation in the network was not passive. While individual users could have theoretically been held liable for their participation in the network, the sheer quantity of infringement would make prosecution difficult. Ultimately, it's bad PR for a government or organization to sue a few hundred thousand people, and tends to be rather expensive, since each user must be sought out and tried individually. So several organizations are trying to sue Napster to halt the sharing.
The Snowball Effect In a communication medium, the value of the communications tool goes up exponentially with the number of users. A telephone isn't really valuable if you're the only one in the world with one. It's reasonably useful if 100 people have one, and it's incredibly useful if 95% of the population has one. Napster in the interim is supposedly investigating ways that users can share without exposing their IP address or identity. In such a scheme, Napster would be legally shielded since it isn't actually exchanging any music data itself, and users are technically shielded since there wouldn't be a way of telling who is sharing what music. Many skeptics, like our group, doubt Napster's ability to convert their current infrastructure into one that could support such sharing, however.