Don't believe me? Check the number of downloads at download.cnet.com. But getting these highly sought after MP3s was another issue altogether. People had to either keep MP3s of their own CD collections, borrow CDs from a friend, or find a website that was gracious enough to upload MP3s to their site. In the first two instances, they had to use a MP3 encoding program (such as MusicMatch or RealJukebox), which can be hassle. But in 1999, one small program changed all that, and its name was Napster. .
Shawn Fanning, an entrepreneurial freshman about to major in computer science at Northeastern University in Massachusetts, launched Napster (www.napster.com) in May of 1999. It was, to the audiophile, the greatest invention since the phonograph. When installed and ran, a black screen would appear, with legal jargon on it for all to read, about the nature of MP3s and copyright and so forth. There were gray tabs at the top for different parts of the program; click on "Search" to get a search form; "Library" gave a list of all the MP3s on one's own computer; and Napster even had its own media player bundled with it (represented with the "Media" tab). There were also tabs for help and the main webpage. At the height of Napster's popularity, anyone could enter almost anything in that search form and find an MP3 of it. Kenny Rogers? No problem, just type in his name and you were guaranteed at least 100 results. Want something more rare or unique? Chances are, it was there. From Britney Spears to Kraftwerk, from NSYNC to Radiohead, if it was wanted, it was there. And this is what angered the industry. .
On November 15, 1999, Wired News (www.wired.com/news/) reported that the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) was going to sue Napster, on the ground of piracy. The RIAA spokeswoman at the time, Lydia Pelliccia, said, "We spent many days sampling the Napster community, and found that virtually all file traffic was unauthorized" (qtd.
