Napster was a peer-to-peer file sharing application that originally launched on June 1, 1999 with an emphasis on digital audio file distribution. Audio songs shared on the service were typically encoded in the MP3 format. It was founded by Shawn Fanning, Sean Parker, and Hugo Sáez Contreras. As the software became popular, the company ran into legal difficulties over copyright infringement. It ceased operations in 2001 after losing a wave of lawsuits and filed for bankruptcy in June 2002. Later, more decentralized projects followed Napster's P2P file-sharing example, such as Gnutella, Freenet, FastTrack, and Soulseek. Some services and software, like AudioGalaxy, LimeWire, Scour, Kazaa / Grokster, Madster, and eDonkey2000, were also brought down or changed due to copyright issues. More information...
According to PR-model, napster.com is ranked 29,449th in multilingual Wikipedia, in particular this website is ranked 21,677th in English Wikipedia.
The website is placed before computing.co.uk and after cbn.gov.ng in the BestRef global ranking of the most important sources of Wikipedia.
