10th Anniversary of Napster This Month
DrewWilson, ZeroPaid:
Some may not know it, but June is an interesting month for file-sharer’s. This year, June marks a major milestone for file-sharers. It was June, 1999 when Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker released the first version of Napster — an application that has since changed the face of entertainment, the internet and copyright to name a few.
What would it mean if files couldn’t be freely distributed online? For one, the whole idea of sharing viral video’s on a site like YouTube would be completely gone. You couldn’t listen to music via the internet, so naturally, music sites couldn’t exist and, arguably, there wouldn’t be much evidence to suggest that taking your music to the internet and selling them would be viable. Of course, pictures ranging from personal scrapbooks all the way to the often silly lolcats couldn’t happen. Then there’s the web itself since they are little more than HTML pages, javascript pages and PHP pages to name a few distributed freely via servers. Of course, what about email? They’re little more than text files with the ability to attach files to begin with, so e-mail would be out of the question — the same would apply to chat in general. Ultimately speaking, the internet would cease to exist without the idea of sharing data freely. So really, one could safely argue that file-sharing is loosely based on the whole concept of how the internet works.
Still, for over 10 years, file-sharing has spearheaded a debate that pitted companies against their own customers. The idea of file-sharing, for a time, was largely an underground movement — hardly known to the average person. Files were transferred through bulletin boards and chatrooms, but since internet connections at the time were dominantly 56k modems, the only things that could be transferred were video games and software (as some at the time hovered around the 1.4MB mark to fit onto a floppy disc) as well as pictures and books. Of course, it was only a matter of time before this phenomenon of file-sharing reached a larger audience and few would argue against the idea that Napster did just that.
