Napster, the revolutionary file-sharing software, was one of the biggest controversial entertainment law issues in the history of the Internet. In 1999, eighteen year old Shawn Fanning created Napster in his college dorm room at Northeastern University. He named it "Napster" after the nickname he had received due to his nappy hair. Napster was created in order to share music, both copyrighted and noncopyrighted, without restraints. Fanning ignored the laws of sharing copyrighted music and realized a dream of sharing free music with the entire world.
The idea of a file-sharing music website was not unfamiliar. Music file-sharing had taken place legally on the Internet before Napster was created. For example, The Internet Underground Music Archive (IUMA), a website created in 1993, distributed the music of smaller unsigned bands to a wider audience using "MP2," the newest form of music compression. MP2s compressed music files, which made them drastically smaller, and in turn, allowed......
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