rved as the breeding ground for the file sharing community known as Napster.
             Fanning's software, released in August of '99, included the features that made Napster a millennial college trend: live chat and MP3 indexing combined with fast, clean file sharing that bypasses your computer's sluggish downloading programs. It wasn't revolutionary so much as ingenious, linking existing concepts rather than breaking new programming ground. Unlike the programs of old where a user would download from a website, therefore violating copyright laws, this new program allowed users to download from each other. The program only serves as a forum to locate these users, making it different than anything before it. Users could not only download music easily, they were able to communicate with each other through instant messages. Right away the program took off. The company claims that in these first months of Napster there growth rate was as much as 25% daily.
             As Napster continued to grow, the music industry got more and more wary of its influence on and presence in the business. The industry decided that something needed to be done about it. They took Napster to court. The major problem with their case was that there were no laws dealing with this type of situation because Napster is different from the companies that had taken to court before.
             -More notes on court cases (still getting all the facts straight)
             The music industry as well as a small portion of musicians themselves claims that Napster hurts their sales and takes away from Music. Many people as well as many musicians believe exactly the opposite, which is also the truth. The true numbers show that since Napster was started record sales have gone up. Napster is a place where people can sample tracks off
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