College students have been at the leading edge of the growing awareness of the centrality of intellectual property in a digital age. When American college student Shawn Fanning invented Napster in 1999, he set in motion an ongoing legal battle over digital rights.…

…and thus less legally vulnerable, file-sharing systems. Partly as a result, sales of authorized copies of recorded music began to decline, and the recording industry attempted to develop procedures to enable it to profit from Internet file sharing.

file-sharing computer service created by American college student Shawn Fanning in 1999. Napster allowed users to share, over the Internet, electronic copies of music stored on their personal computers. The file sharing that resulted set in motion a legal battle over digital rights and the…

…American entrepreneur who cofounded the file-sharing service Napster in 1999 and was the first president (2004–05) of the social networking site Facebook.

…led to the development of file-sharing networks, such as Napster, that relied on peer-to-peer (P2P) software for distributing songs. Although the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) succeeded in shutting down Napster, which had facilitated billions of song transfers over the Internet from 1999 to 2001, newer P2P programs became…

…an Internet company whose “peer-to-peer” file-sharing program allowed users to download music for free. Artists lined up on either side of the issue. In the end Bertelsmann became the majority owner of Napster, anxious to provide a fee-based service. But this was only the beginning of what became an ongoing…

>file-sharing Web site founded in 2003 by the Swedish anti-copyright group Piratbyrån (“Bureau of Piracy”). The Pirate Bay is the most popular site in the world to use the BitTorrent protocol that allows the distribution of very large files such as those containing movies and…

Through the 1990s, sales of compact discs (CDs) were the major source of revenue for recording companies. Although piracy—that is, the illegal duplication of copyrighted materials—had always been a problem, especially in the Far East, the proliferation on college campuses of…