Thank you for the music

 

Has anyone seen “The Social Network”? If not, here is a very basic synopsis: “The Social Network” tells the story of Facebook from its very beginning as either the brainchild of Mark Zuckerberg or, depending on whom you believe, members of a fraternity at Harvard. The story turns around litigation proceedings in which you are introduced to the people behind what has been called a global communication revolution. One person you are introduced to along the way is Sean Parker.

Parker was a very early employee of Napster.  He was not, however, its creator as we were led to believe in the film. It could be argued that Napster was the previous revolution to hit the internet. It was the very first widely used file sharing program that allowed peer to peer downloading of files, in particular music files.  It brought pirated music from the exchange of mix tape cassettes to a truly global force: The force that appeared to threaten the very core of the music industry. Every illegally downloaded song was seen by the music industry as a missed record sale and it brought every legal force it could muster to bear on Napster. In 2001, Napster was shut down as a peer to peer system due to the fact that it had encouraged copyright infringement. However, the cat was out of the bag and scores of other peer to peer systems popped up in its place. Napster and some of the early systems are still around today in various guises such as eDonkey and Gnutella. They, as well as the others, ran into the same legal issues as Napster and were either closed down entirely or bought over and the brand was used in some similar but legal way.

 

Many still download illegally from the offspring of these early systems, either through torrents or, more commonly nowadays with the rise in internet speeds, streaming music and video services. These systems are still being shut down as quickly as possible and indeed the individual is the more common target now. Many of us in Germany will know or will have heard about someone who got a big bill for downloading a pop song or a movie clip.