see all the legal action taken against Napster, most see it is plain and simple piracy and it posses a great threat to the Recording Industry. But was taking legal action nesecary seeing as the technology would spread and eventually be used for other media? Wouldn’t it have been better to work out some agreement between the two businesses instead of merely trying to hold back this technology? Shawn Fanning, the maker of Napster, grew up in Brockton Mass., a working class town outside of Boston. He grew up without his biological farther but him and his mom managed on welfare. Despite this his uncle, John Fanning, was always there to lend a helping hand. John had bought Shawn his first computer when he was a sophomore in high school and later paid for a separate phone line in his house so he could surf the Internet whenever he wanted to. During summer vacations Shawn worked as an intern at his uncle’s company, Netgames, an online gaming site. This is where Shawn learned and learned to love computer programming. In the fall of 1998 he went to Northeaster University in Boston to study computer science, however he soon became bored of college and would often skip classes to hang around his uncle’s office. It was here that he began to form a vision, a vision to make it easier to find mp3’s on the net. Before Napster, and the many other programs that have recently sprung up because of it, to find digital music you would have to sift through hundreds of sites claiming to have hundreds of free mp3’s just to find one song. Now you just type in the name or artist or both of the song you are looking for and Napster comes up with about a hundred matches. With the blessing of his uncle he dropped out of college when John saw the business potential of Napster in January 1999, “I didn’t see us turning it into a business,” says Shawn. “I just did it because I loved the technology.” In May, a m...
