Napster
Napster, was a peer-to-peer file sharing sharing program created in 1999 by co-founders Sean Parker and Shawn Fanning. Napster is the most known and most infamous of any file sharing network. At its peak in the early 2000's there were over 20 million users, the majority being college students. Napster was the first of its kind in which users could download music from other users, rather than from a central computer like other websites at the time. The controversy that Napster is what the software is known for today. Napster was the target of many copyright infringement suits from artists, record labels, and others in the music industry. The legal controversy eventually led to the downfall of the P2P file sharing software which was court ordered to shut down immediately in 2001.
