📸

Epilogue :
After the Revolution

FROM THE TIME OF THE BANKRUPTCY FILING, EVEN SHAWN Fanning suspected that Napster could never again be what it was. Napster had begotten Gnutella. Gnutella had begotten Kazaa, and Grokster, and MusicCity, an interlocking network of decentralized peer-to-peer file-sharing systems. By 2002 those services were almost as easy to use as Napster was, had as many users as Napster did at its peak, and were far harder to shut down, though the record and movie industries were trying through a lawsuit in Los Angeles. Because many countries didn't recognize the concept of contributory copyright infringement, Kazaa and its ilk looked unstoppable, even with the Napster precedent. Once tapped into one of those systems, users could trade not only music but also movies, pirated software, and almost anything else digital. The systems had their drawbacks as well. Some distributed invasive pop-up ads and viruses. And their users were not just college kids looking for music. The website GnutellaMeter, which tracks search terms on that network in fifty-minute intervals, reported that the top thirty terms in one sweep included valuable software Windows XP and Office XP; new movies Harry Potter and American Pie 2; and the discomfiting porn terms "Lolita," "rape," and "preteen." There wasn't a song title or rock-group name in the bunch. More than 1.8 billion files were being transferred monthly on the three biggest post-Gnutella networks, and Morpheus had been downloaded 89 million times by May 2002.

📸