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to-use technology. Only when it was crippled in court did rivals surpass Napster, and many users say that the system’s successors have yet to match Napster’s execution.

None of the current generation of souped-up file-swapping services were anywhere in evidence in the fall of 1999. Back then, Shawn, Sean Parker, and Jordan Ritter were alarmed by programs with names like CuteMX, iMesh, and Napigator. CuteMX was among the first real threats, developed in mid-1999 at a software firm called GlobalScape Inc. Like Napster, CuteMX had a hybrid peer-to-peer architecture, with a central index that referred visitors to content stored on users’ personal machines. GlobalScape was known for its Windows applications, and the “client” features seen by the users were “gorgeous,” Ritter said. As a result, “they had a following. They were neck and neck with us,” he said. Users could share music and also movies, which were mostly pornographic at the time. CuteMX could have been bigger than Napster, but two things got in the way. One was that as the product of client-program specialists, the central servers were structured poorly. That meant it was more vulnerable to hackers, and it was even less stable than the early Napster. When demand grew, the CuteMX servers had a harder time keeping up. The other problem was more basic. GlobalScape was a real company with traditional executives. When the record industry called and warned them that they were facilitating copyright violations, the executives listened. The lead developer of the project left the firm, and GlobalScape pulled the plug.

The most consuming of the competitive worries came from an origin markedly similar to Napster’s. That was Gnutella, the brainchild of another brilliant teenage hacker from the boondocks, Justin Frankel. So great was Frankel’s underground reputation that Shawn and his team were terrified of Gnutella before they had any idea what it did or how it worked. An Arizona college dropout, Frankel had made his mark by writing and distributing the best-known MP3 player for personal computers, Winamp. Frankel’s tiny company, Nullsoft, was then bought by America Online in June 1999, creating an unholy alliance of corporate distribution power with technical expertise. Frankel moved Nullsoft to San Francisco and became friends with Shawn, bonding mainly over their love of fast cars.

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