Napster Wars essays

Napster Wars essays A young Shaun Fanning, attending school in high school in Harwich, Massachusetts had two loves: 1) Sports ( baseball, basketball, and tennis ) and 2) computers. As his curiosity grew for computers, he decided to stop his sport playing, and spend most of his time working with computers. He primarily focused on two aspects of the computer, programming and the Internet. His computer fascination grew into an obsession throughout high school. His freshman year at Northeast University in 1998 was spent trying to enter computer science classes higher than the entry level. Not finding anything challenging about the courses, he decided to start writing a Windows based program in his spare time. He started spending time in IRC chat rooms with experienced programmers who knew the tricks of the trade. Shauns roommate loved MP3s, but disliked the unreliability of old sites, and having to search endlessly for songs that were usually not even available. With this in mind, and his developing skills as a programmer and his curiosity for the internet, Shaun decided to write the Beta for Napster. He used the idea of all users being connected to one central computer server, yet all having access to each others music files. He wanted a continually updated list of songs to choose from. He wrote a small version and distributed it to friends and family. The results were all positive. He had fellow programmers detect bugs, and perfect the program. Napster got its big break, when it was featured as Download.coms featured download. The system would be revolutionary, he thought. A sharp contrast to the traditional search engines, this community would be user powered, based only on what the users want to share with other users. After the advertisement on Download.com, Napsters user count sky-rocketed. Shaun was on the right path. How creative! This creativeness would soon turn to turmoil (Fanning ...