A Review and History of P2P File Sharing From Napster to Torrent to Kazaa

As the recent crack down on file trading on internet has been in full swing in the last few months, a handful of people have been led to the belief that peer to peer (p2p) programs are coming to a end. This couldn't be further from the truth.

The creators of the first wave of p2p like Napster could not believe what they had unleashed on the internet, and neither did the recording companies. All you needed was a basic home computer, 56k modem and a compact disk writer and you are able to download and listen to you favorite album in your CD player, car or even Discman. No longer did you have to go to the major outlets and spend money on the CD, now you could get it for free, or at least knew someone who would sell it to you for a few dollars.

P2P started to become a big thing when the dot com surge was on. It is one of the survivors left from that era. Programs like Napster were having thousands of users on their server at any one time with gigs of memory being spread across their network of mp3s (remember the average person was on 56k so this was huge). Very soon thereafter, the owners of such programs began to see the dollar signs rolling in.

With all there weight behind them, they sued and pushed programs like Napster to shut down. It was a bit like a big shopping chain wanting a local shop to be run out of business. There was only going to be one winner.

Next came the second coming in programs like Kazaa. These took off where napster left off but there was one key advantage over the first generation of p2p and that was faster internet connection. Gone were the times where it took thirty minutes to download a whole song, now you could do it in less than ten. Other file types popped up too: you could now start and download movies as it didn't take a week to download it, it usually took a day. As the demand came out, DVD writers came out on the market and quickly went down in price. DVD home players supported the disks burned from a home computer. Things where looking up for the time, or so we thought.