Free Digital Sheet Music

In 1999, Shawn Fanning, an 18-year old Northeastern University computer science student unwittingly forever transformed how people used the internet with one single program named Napster. Napster was a free downloadable program that could transform individual computers into servers that shared MP3 music files across the internet. Users could log in to Napster, search for an artist or song title, and then proceed to download directly from another logged-in user's hard drive. In a little more than a year after its initial launch, Napster soon became one of the most notorious and wildly popular sites in internet history. Ultimately what began as a simple program written for his friends to share music soon caught the attention of not only young people worldwide, but also the ire of the recording industry. This treatise examines the history, legality and morality of Napster and the ensuing peer-to-peer file sharing revolution created across the internet in its wake.