for: shared resource

File sharing is the exchange of files over computer networks, and peer-to-peer (P2P) networks in particular.

History

main: File sharing timeline Files were first exchanged on removable media. Computers were able to access remote files using filesystem mounting or applications that connected to bulletin board systems (1978), Usenet (1980), and FTP servers (1985). Users of Internet Relay Chat (1988) and Hotline (1997) were able to communicate over chat and use their clients to share files among each other.

The mp3 encoding, standardized in 1991, substantially reduced the size of audio files. From the first half of 1994 through the late 1990s, MP3 files began to spread on the Internet.Fact: date=May 2009 In 1998, MP3.com and Audiogalaxy were established, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act was unanimously passed, and the first mp3 player devices were launched. MP3.com offered music by unsigned artists, and grew to serve 4 million audio downloads daily.

In June 1999, Napster was released and became the first software claiming to be a peer-to-peer file sharing system. Napster ultimately lost the court battle to prove it was a true peer-to-peer application. As defined by the courts Napster uses a central server thus is not peer-to-peer. Users were able to make specific MP3 files available on their computers for others to download, with indexing and searching performed by Napster servers. In December, seven months after release, the first lawsuits were filed against Napster. In January 2000, My.MP3.com was released, and allowed users to share albums that they owned. Litigation ensued, and in May, UMG v. MP3.com caused My.MP3.com to shut down.

Gnutella, eDonkey2000, and Freenet were released in 2000, as MP3.com and Napster were facing litigation. Gnutella, released in March, was the first decentralized file sharing network. In the Gnutella network, all connecting software was considered equal, and therefore the network had no central point of failure. In July, Freenet was released and became the first anonymity network. In September the eDonkey2000 client and server software was released.

In 2001, Kazaa was released and began to grow in popularity. Its FastTrack network was distributed, but unlike Gnutella it assigned more traffic to 'supernodes' to increase routing performance. The network was proprietary and encrypted, and the Kazaa team made substantial efforts to keep other clients such as Morpheus off of the FastTrack network. Despite bundled malware and legal battles in the Netherlands, Australia, and the United States, Kazaa was the most popular file sharing program through to its decline in 2004.

In July 2001, Napster lost in court and was shut down. The Audiogalaxy Satellite client grew in popularity, and the LimeWire client and BitTorrent protocol were released. In 2002, a Tokyo district court ruling shut down File Rogue and an RIAA lawsuit effectively shut down Audiogalaxy. From 2002 through 2003, a number of popular BitTorrent services were established, including Suprnova.org, isoHunt, TorrentSpy, and The Pirate Bay. Kazaa was still the most popular client at this time, and the RIAA was initiating lawsuits against Kazaa users. As a result of such lawsuits, many Universities have included file sharing regulations in their school administrative codes. With the shut down of eDonkey in 2005, eMule became the dominant client of the eDonkey network. In 2006, police raids take down the Razorback2 eDonkey server and temporarily take down The Pirate Bay. Pro-filesharing demonstrations take place in Sweden in response to the Pirate Bay raid. In 2009, the Pirate Bay trial ends in a guilty verdict for the primary founders of the tracker.