ABSTRACT
Peer-to-peer file sharing programs were used for mass distribution of files, particularly music tracks in copyright violation, from the very beginning. Intensive action to suppress and close down each generation of program led to a subsequent one that was more stealthy and harder to target. In the beginning, back in 1999, there was Napster, so named after creator Shawn Fanning’s nickname. Fanning had been dissatisfied with existing programs for sharing music files, because they were too hard to use. Fanning had attained his objective— Napster was so easy to use that by February 2001 Napster had more than 26 million users. In some universities, more than 80 percent of the high speed Internet bandwidth was being used for MP3 file-swapping. It's very success led to its undoing. Gnutella is basically a protocol for joining a network of Gnutella machines, searching in a distributed way among these machines for a file or set of files, and then downloading one.
