History of Peer-to-Peer File Sharing

The rise and fall of Napster in the late 90's brought file sharing over the Internet, and peer-to-peer technology, to the attention of the world. Napster's demise led to the creation of companies such as KaZaA, Morpheus, and Audio Galaxy, whom all learned a valuable lesson from Napster. Avoid copyright infringement and elude record companies. So far they have been pretty successful, but record companies are getting closer and closer to putting these new companies out of business. Record companies are looking to software companies to beat these file sharing organizations at their own game, creating software that would elude the copyright laws but contrary to downloading copied files, they seek to eliminate sharing.
One reason the growth of peer-to-peer file sharing has happened is possibly for one reason alone, the constant expansion of the capabilities of the ordinary PC computer. Top of the line PC's have the capabilities of a supercomputer ten years ago. …