In 2002, a Tokyo district court ruling shut down File Rogue, and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) filed a lawsuit that effectively shut down Audiogalaxy.ĭemonstrators protesting The Pirate Bay raid in 2006įrom 2002 through 2003, a number of BitTorrent services were established, including, isoHunt, TorrentSpy, and The Pirate Bay. Until its decline in 2004, Kazaa was the most popular file sharing program despite bundled malware and legal battles in the Netherlands, Australia, and the United States. The Audiogalaxy Satellite client grew in popularity, and the LimeWire client and BitTorrent protocol were released. This drove users to other P2P applications and file sharing continued its growth. Shortly after its loss in court, Napster was shut down to comply with a court order. In October 2001, the MPAA and the RIAA filed a lawsuit against the developers of Kazaa, Morpheus and Grokster that would lead to the US Supreme Court's MGM Studios, Inc. The network was proprietary and encrypted, and the Kazaa team made substantial efforts to keep other clients such as Morpheus off of the FastTrack network. Its FastTrack network was distributed, though unlike Gnutella, it assigned more traffic to 'supernodes' to increase routing efficiency.
Share file software#
In September the eDonkey2000 client and server software was released. In July, Freenet was released and became the first anonymity network. In the Gnutella network, all connecting software was considered equal, and therefore the network had no central point of failure. Gnutella, released in March, was the first decentralized file-sharing network. Gnutella, eDonkey2000, and Freenet were released in 2000, as MP3.com and Napster were facing litigation. In the case of Napster, it has been ruled that an online service provider could not use the "transitory network transmission" safe harbor in the DMCA if they had control of the network with a server. In December 1999, Napster was sued by several recording companies and lost in A&M Records, Inc. It is generally credited as being the first peer-to-peer file sharing system. In June 1999, Napster was released as an unstructured centralized peer-to-peer system, requiring a central server for indexing and peer discovery. In 1998, MP3.com and Audiogalaxy were established, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act was unanimously passed, and the first mp3 player devices were launched. The mp3 encoding, which was standardized in 1991 and substantially reduced the size of audio files, grew to widespread use in the late 1990s. Internet Relay Chat (1988) and Hotline (1997) enabled users to communicate remotely through chat and to exchange files. Computers were able to access remote files using filesystem mounting, bulletin board systems (1978), Usenet (1979), and FTP servers (1970's). Comparison of Internet Relay Chat clientsįiles were first exchanged on removable media.Practice of distributing or providing access to digitally stored information