When P2P became popular under Napster, this community was the undisputed king of file-sharing. Its impressive array of mp3 files drew an enormous quantity of individuals to this network, totaling nearly 1.5 million at its peak. However, its glory would not last as the RIAA successfully forced the closure of this network. Permanent indexing servers that were affixed to Napster’s home in Silicon Valley were this community’s Achilles’ heal.
Although P2P suffered a significant setback, file-sharing was far from dead. Advances such as decentralized networking made shutting down a community a thing of the past. Based on the decentralized concepts brought forth by Gnutella, FastTrack emerged as the next king of file-sharing. FastTrack, under the flags of Kazaa, Grokster and iMesh, are more of a hybrid network as it used decentralized supernodes to act as temporary indexing servers.
FastTrack was also powered under the flag of Morpheus during its early days. During this period, FastTrack was considered by many to be in its purist form. There was no spyware, no adware and no bit rate limits. In fact, its multi-source downloading feature, large userbase and decentralized nature made it in many ways better than Napster.
However, its sister client, Kazaa was quickly rising to prominence. Sharman Networks owned the rights to the FastTrack protocol and the Kazaa client. For reasons that to this day remain unclear, Sharman forced Morpheus off the network. From then on, Kazaa became the dominant FastTrack client.
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