At its peak, the Napster service had about 80 million registered users. History Īlthough there were already networks that facilitated the distribution of files across the Internet, such as IRC, Hotline, and Usenet, Napster specialized in MP3 files of music and a user-friendly interface. Although the original service was shut down by court order, the Napster brand survived after the company's assets were liquidated and purchased by other companies through bankruptcy proceedings. Its technology allowed people to easily share their MP3 files with other participants. The service operated between June 1999 and July 2001. Initially, Napster was envisioned by Fanning as an independent peer-to-peer file sharing service. Napster was founded by Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker. Best Buy later purchased the service and merged it with its Rhapsody service on December 1, 2011, rebranding back to Napster.

Napster's assets were eventually acquired by Roxio, and it re-emerged as an online music store. Some services and software, like AudioGalaxy, LimeWire, Scour, Kazaa / Grokster, Madster, and eDonkey2000, were also brought down or changed due to copyright issues. Later, more decentralized projects followed Napster's P2P file-sharing example, such as Gnutella, Freenet, FastTrack, and Soulseek. It ceased operations in 2001 after losing a wave of lawsuits and filed for bankruptcy in June 2002.

As the software became popular, the company ran into legal difficulties over copyright infringement. It was founded by Shawn Fanning, Sean Parker, and Hugo Sáez Contreras. Audio songs shared on the service were typically encoded in the MP3 format. Napster was a peer-to-peer file sharing application that originally launched on Jwith an emphasis on digital audio file distribution.

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