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No doubt the most famous story of musical "innovation" has been the ex-
plosion called Napster -- a technology simplifying file sharing for MP3 files.
The idea was the brainchild of Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker -- in the
eyes of many, children themselves.

Fanning and Parker's idea was just this: Individuals had music stored on
their computers -- think again about the hoarder Zittrain. Others would
want copies of that music. Fanning devised a way to engineer a "meeting"
between the copies and those wanting them. His system, Napster, would
collect a database of who had what. And when someone searched for a par-
ticular song, the database would produce a list of who had that song and was
on the line at that moment. The user could then select the copy he or she
wanted to copy, and the computer would establish a connection between
the user and the computer with the copy. The system would function as a
kind of music matchmaking service -- responsible for finding the links, but
not responsible for what happened after that.

Napster is an "ah-ha" technology: you don't quite get its significance until
you use it. The experience of opening a Napster search window, rummag-
ing through your memories for songs you'd like to hear, and then, within a
few seconds, finding and hearing those songs is extraordinary. As with the
lyric database, you can easily find what is almost impossible to locate; as
with the MP3 server, you can then hear what you want almost immediately.
Music exchanged on Napster is free -- in the sense of costing nothing. And
at any particular moment, literally thousands of songs are available.

The innovation excited an immediate legal reaction. The Recording In-
dustry Association of America (RIAA) immediately filed suit against Napster
for facilitating copyright violation. That may have been a mistake. At the
time the RIAA filed suit, the number of Napster users was under two hun-
dred thousand; after the suit hit the press, the number of users grew to fifty-
seven million.

In Chapter 11, we will consider in some depth the legal questions that
Napster raised. Focus for the moment just on the innovation. For what Fan-
ning had done was to find a way to use the dark matter of the Internet -- the
personal computers connecting the Net. Rather than depending upon con-
tent located on a server somewhere -- in this strict hierarchical client/server
model of computing -- Fanning turned to the many individual computers
that are linked to the Net. They could be the place where content resides.
Using the protocols of the code layer, he was able to find an underutilized

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