About Napster

[Rasputin]

In the South Park episode Christian Rock Hard, Stan, Kyle, and Kenny illegally download music from Napster for inspiration for their band 'Moop.' They are then caught by police and shown the horrors music pirating does to musicians. After seeing this, they start a strike and famous musicians/bands join them, among them are Rancid, Master P, Ozzy Osbourne, Meat Loaf (all four also playing in Chef Aid), blink-182, Horny Toad, Metallica, Britney Spears, Missy Elliot, Alanis Morissette and The Lords of the Underworld (minus Timmy).

In the animated Disney series, The Proud Family, Penny becomes addicted to a site named Ez Jackster, a parody of Napster that allows music to be downloaded illegally.

After a $2.43 million takeover offer by the Private Media Group, an adult entertainment company, Napster's brand and logos were acquired at bankruptcy auction by the company Roxio, Inc. which used them to rebrand the pressplay music service as Napster 2.0.

Although the central servers used by Napster made it a convenient legal target, the record industry failed to capitalize on the power vacuum left in its wake. The years between Napster's demise and the emergence of the iTunes Music Store as the first popular pay-service were squandered as the five major labels failed to agree on a single service or standard for online distribution, launching several mutually incompatible subscription services such as pressplay and MusicNet.

In the meantime, the peer-to-peer filesharing trend Napster started soon resumed, with new programs and networks picking up the torch. Unofficial Napster servers proliferated, aided by a program known as "Napigator", and a second generation of P2P protocols (including FastTrack and Gnutella) were quickly developed. Designed as decentralized networks, these have been much more challenging for copyright owners to pursue in the courts.

The ever-widening availability of broadband has made file sharing even more prevalent, since increasing download speeds mean the distribution of entire movies and other large files is possible. An emerging and cryptographically strong third generation of P2P protocols will be nearly impossible to interdict. In a very real sense, Shawn Fanning can be called the man who opened a Pandora's Box.