I wasn’t around yet when the whole napster thing happened. From what I understand, it was a huge music sharing website. Did it work P2P like thepiratebay? Or was there an actual legal entity behind it? And if yes, how did they profit?
it was a centralized p2p system. you connect to the napster server and announce your library. anyone can search the currently-online library, and then request the files from the individuals. that central search system is what was targeted. decentralization efforts were made by some others, but it was around this time that we got bittorrent anyway.
I wasn’t around yet when the whole napster thing happened. From what I understand, it was a huge music sharing website. Did it work P2P like thepiratebay? Or was there an actual legal entity behind it? And if yes, how did they profit?
it was a centralized p2p system. you connect to the napster server and announce your library. anyone can search the currently-online library, and then request the files from the individuals. that central search system is what was targeted. decentralization efforts were made by some others, but it was around this time that we got bittorrent anyway.
Limewire and Kazaa spawned directly from Napster then bittorrent soon after which was decentralized p2p.