P2P technology has come a long way since a college dropout named Shawn Fanning created the first server based P2P program, dubbed Napster. After the inception of Napster, the internet underwent nothing short of a revolution. Following the revolution, came a flurry of lawsuits and technological advances. A pseudo guerilla war between Recording Industries such as the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) versus the authors of P2P programs has erupted, and there is no clear end in sight. We shall now take a look at the start of this war, the battles that have been fought and the future of P2P.
The first mainstream P2P Program was Napster. It was created in 1999 by a college dropout named Shawn Fanning, who was looking for a better way to trade music files. What he came up with started the wave of popular technology that we now commonly call P2P. What Fanning did was he combined a file search engine with a centralized server to route the searches, and allowed peers to download through his server.Source
