Raise the flag, start your BitTorrent clients and set sail into Digital file-sharing! I’m your captain for this and all of the subsequent parts of this never-ending high-seas drama. This “war” has been going on for nearly a decade by this time. It first started with simple radio streaming on the Internet, which was mostly ignored until the next incarnation of file-sharing went live in 2001. Napster is widely regarded as the granddaddy and one of the original founders of this digital file-sharing movement that is prevalent in our culture to this day. It made public the friends swapping CDs to burn onto their computers. What Napster did was take file-sharing online and into an arena where the record companies didn’t want to travel and still don’t.
Napster fought the good fight for user rights, but ultimately succumbed to the numerous attacks on it. The recording industry thought it had won…little did it know there was a new fleet of ships ready to set sail. After Napster’s demise, came the wave of P2P clients. Limewire, Kazaa and a host of others took up where Napster left off. Allowing users to share everything and anything with each other. Users contributed items for download and shared the load by passing it directly from person to person. Ironically, isn’t this exactly what people had been doing for years before by passing CDs to each other?
P2P clients allowed users to connect and share music, movies, games, documents and a whole host of other things, but they also had their share of difficulties. The smaller clients were taken down by a myriad of factors. Kazaa downloaded malware and trojans onto its users computers that were near impossible to get rid of. Limewire did better without the malicious hidden software and soon emerged as the top public P2P client. Even to this day, Limewire is still going strong and is one of the places users got to share items.
The war is still be waged and the third wave of ships is about to come about.
