Iria

SAN FRANCISCO - Shawn Fanning turns 25 on Tuesday, and it has been a very long seven years since he wrote a little computer program that let him trade electronic music files with his dormitory mates at Northeastern University, where he was a freshman.

He called it Napster, after his nickname, and it quickly grew into an Internet phenomenon - not to mention the music industry's bête noire, until it was shut down by the courts four years ago.

Now the public spotlight is turning back to Fanning, this time as a symbol of how big business and the disruptive force of the Internet just might find a way to get along. This month, Grokster, one of the file-sharing services that emerged after the original Napster vanished, stopped distributing its software and agreed to pay the record industry $50 million - which Grokster, a tiny California company, has no prospect of ever raising.

Grokster decided to give up on a legal battle that had effectively been lost when the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously decided in June that it and other file-sharing services could be held liable if people used them to steal copyrighted works.

By the end of the year, a new version of Grokster will appear - this one sanctioned by the record industry because it will use technology, designed by Fanning, that requires file-swappers to pay for copyrighted material. In other words, Fanning, who let the genie out of the bottle when he created the copyright-busting Napster, is now selling a way to put the genie back into the bottle.
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Read More / Source: International Herald Tribune