Communication is the one need humans seek all day, every day. Internet is all about connecting individuals to other individuals, or o information. For the average person, the TV industry was very difficult to get into, but YouTube changed this by enabling people to broadcast themselves on an internet website where peers could see their content.Digg was an internet company focused on aggregating news that was valued by the users. The more people who vote for a given story, the more prominent it gets on the site. Digg was putting out the message that a simple blog could be just as informative as the New York Times. Gives more power to the people (wisdom of the crowds). There were developments when music was combined with the internet and computers by people such as David Weekly, Cabel Sasser, Steve Frank, and Justin Frankel. They discovered how personal computers could put tunes together. They were all pioneers in the field of MP3. MP3 could compress audio files; it was a digital audio coding format. Media players such as Winamp were developed for personal computers.
Shawn Fanning developed Napster, a file sharing platform that was popular in downloading audio files from one computer’s hard drive to another. In June 1999, Fanning finished the code for Napster and shared it with his friends. Within weeks, 10 thousand people had downloaded Napster. 75-80% of University bandwidths nationwide were used to download audio files using Napster. It reached 1 million downloads in just weeks after it was created.
Hilary Rosen, the head of the Recording Industry Association of America, contacted Napster to inform them that sharing the audio like that was illegal because of copyrights on music records. Howard King and Peter Paterno were L.A entertainment lawyers. They realized that the power of file-sharing could be the end of the movie, music, book, and other entertainment industries’ revenue. May 3, 2000 – Lars Ulrich and his lawyers spoke to Napster about banning users that had shared Metallica songs because they were copyrighted.
RIAA filed a lawsuit against Napster, causing Napster to shut down in July of 2001. Viacom launched a lawsuit against YouTube for copyrighted material that was on YouTube. Using Google’s resources, YouTube avoided being shut down like Napster was. Google bought YouTube in 2006. Web2.0 refers to social website, user-generated websites, and rich web applications. MySpace grew in popularity by summer of 2005. It was a social networking website where users discussed music among other topics. Facebook grew from a social networking platform that was made for Harvard students to a platform used by 50 million active users.