Music sharing over peer to peer networks is a part of everyday life. I know myself, I used to, and still do trade numerous albums online. After all, our culture partially revolves around music. From Shakespearian sonnets to roadside bands, music allows us to express our emotions freely.
             In the recent past, the entertainment industry has been bearing down on the "illegal" trade of music, suing hundreds of users. It would seem the music industry has come to a realization it's losing a portion of its monopoly to ordinary individuals since the arrival of Napster. There is possibly a bright future for peer to peer networks. In order to understand this technology we must understand how it evolved and any implications for future development.
             Peer to peer networking (P2P) is defined as, "A communications model in which each party has the same capabilities and either party can initiate a communication session ". In more simplistic terms we could characterize P2P networking as an express communication route between computers, where neither side is the client or server.
             P2P networks officially surfaced in the late 1970's and early 1980's with the rise of USENET and FIDONET. Both applications were created surrounding the general idea of mass application sharing between cooperative machines. During the summer of 1988, a Finnish university student by the name of Jarkko wrote the original Internet Relay Chat (IRC). Little did Jarkko know, his internet relay chat (IRC) would later become the basis of music sharing. IRC originally was designed to optimize campus communications by means of real time discussions and file sharing. Though the technology took nearly a decade to explode, by late 1996 there were over 4,000 real time users and approximately eighty scattered servers world wide.
             Digital music sharing began to grow towards the end of 1997. Unlike today, acquiring digital music in late 1990's was difficult...