Menn, Joseph. All the Rave: The Rise and Fall of Shawn Fanning's Napster.
New York: Crown Business, 2003. 355 pages.
From 1999 to 2001, as the rise and burst of the dot-com bubble made
headlines, a smaller rags to riches to rags story was happening at Napster.
This was an interactive website that mediated between users who were looking
for particular tracks of digital music, and other users who already owned
that track and were willing to share it. Shawn Fanning was a programmer
and central figure behind Napster, while his uncle John Fanning wrote the
fine print, ended up with 70 percent ownership, and found venture capital.
By October 1999, Napster could handle 22,000 simultaneous users, as it was
basically a centralized index of user indexes. Once two anonymous users
found each other and began transferring an MP3 file, the transfer happened
outside of Napster. This made the copyright situation somewhat murky.
The Recording Industry Association of America filed a suit against
Napster in December 1999, a judge issued an injunction, and the Ninth
Circuit upheld it in February 2001. Napster died a few months later, and
MP3 files were harder to find within a few years. Update: Several sites in
Russia began hosting huge MP3 libraries, charging as little as 15 cents per
track for downloads. RIAA then pressured Visa and MasterCard, which stopped
service to one of these sites in 2006. Simultaneously, the U.S. was able to
apply pressure because Russia wanted to join the World Trade Organization.
ISBN 0-609-61093-7
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