Napster The End Or Merely The Begining Essays - Virtual Communities

Napster: The End Or Merely The Begining Napster: The End or Merely the Beginning If you havent heard of Napster before you should be asking yourself what planet youre from? From when it first was programmed by 19 year old Shawn Fanning, people could tell it was going to be a big success. And it was, spreading like a fire and causing all kinds of media hype as well as causing its share of various legal problems. So if you have been living in a cave or another planet Ill try to explain Napster to you as best as I can. Napster allows you to log onto the Internet and search (like a search engine only more refined) for songs in mp3 format (the digital form of music). You can type in the name of the song and the artist and it will come up with the closet match as well as a listing the songs name, the speed of the user you are about to download it off of (or the ping) and the users name. When you download this song in mp3 format, it is stored in a personal file on your hard drive and you can listen to them via Napsters own playing device or you can burn the mp3s onto Cd s if you have a cd burner. Mp3s have been around long before Napster but Napster has employed a revolutionary system for the transferring of information between users. It basically works like this; 1) Napster user logs on, 2) Once user is logged onto server this allows other users to access any mp3s youve already downloaded yourself, 3) Napster user downloads more mp3s they are looking for, 4) song is downloaded and stored on your hard drive but is accessible to other Napster users who want the same song. What you are doing in essence is sharing files, one user searches for the song he wants finds it and downloads it off another, in turn that user himself is looking for another file to download off someone else. The files when downloaded are copied to your hard drive from the other users. This said its not surprising to see all the legal action taken against Napster, most see it is plain and simple piracy and it posses a great threat to the Recording Industry. But was taking legal a ction nesecary seeing as the technology would spread and eventually be used for other media? Wouldnt it have been better to work out some agreement between the two businesses instead of merely trying to hold back this technology? Shawn Fanning, the maker of Napster, grew up in Brockton Mass., a working class town outside of Boston. He grew up without his biological farther but him and his mom managed on welfare. Despite this his uncle, John Fanning, was always there to lend a helping hand. John had bought Shawn his first computer when he was a sophomore in high school and later paid for a separate phone line in his house so he could surf the Internet whenever he wanted to. During summer vacations Shawn worked as an intern at his uncles company, Netgames, an online gaming site. This is where Shawn learned and learned to love computer programming. In the fall of 1998 he went to Northeaster University in Boston to study computer science, however he soon became bored of college and would often skip classes to hang around his uncles office. It was here that he began to form a vision, a vision to make it easier to find mp3s on the net. Before Napster, and the many other programs that have recently sprung up because of it, to find digital music you would have to sift through hundreds of sites claiming to have hundreds of free mp3s just to find one song. Now you just type in the name or artist or both of the song you are looking for and Napster comes up with about a hundred matches. With the blessing of his uncle he dropped out of college when John saw the business potential of Napster in January 1999, I didnt see us turning it into a business, says Shawn. I just did it because I