Napster is the world's largest file sharing community. Napster enables users to locate and share Digital Music/ MP3 files all from one convenient interface. It also provides music fans with a way to interact with each other over a system of chat rooms and message boards and other venues. Napster's software allows users to log on to its servers and make there personal MP3 collections available to be download by other.
             Since the companies debut last year, an estimated 20 million people have used Napster's software to download MP3 music files. But recently Napster has been the topic of much concern due to the fact that Napster is assisting in the duplication of copyrighted songs and musical compositions of which the composers hold rights. This caused a series of court cases and ethical banter between Napster and certain musicians that have differing views of Napster's affect on the music industry. The most recent news is that Napster has made peace with some of the record companies since the initial complaints but there are still other companies and music groups that are not ready to settle and accept that Napster will not be shut down.
             Shawn Fanning, an eighteen-year-old collage dropout, created the internet's latest craze. Not a corporate company that had a team filled with scholars, just one teenager who had a vision. It was mid 1999, and Fanning was sitting around with his friends listening to one of them complain about how hard it was to download music, and it was there that he decided to make a program to make downloading music much easier. Fanning who was already really good with computers taught himself the necessary code to write the program. He dropped out of Northeastern University in Boston and started what would become Napster. His goal was to make a program that allowed you to exchange music files with other people without going through a website. After moving in to his uncle's office, wi...