Peer to Peer: Collaboration and Sharing over the Internet

Napster

The free-for-all music-exchange fest at Napster (www.napster.com) finally ended in June 2001, marking the close of a remarkable era during which the service registered some 65 million users in just 20 months, with billions of client swaps a month. As with IM clients, the number of real, unique users was probably much lower.

After its earlier skin change when it became part of Bertelsmann multimedia publishing, Napster tried to profile itself more as a commercial music download service, but despite its attempts to prevent commercial CD music files from appearing in the server database, users could still find and download as before. Continued efforts to implement content management and filtering of the eventually million or so music titles ...