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Shawn Fanning (born 1980), while attending Boston's Northeastern University, developed Napster, the first popular peer-to-peer filesharing platform.
Napster was the target of several music industry backed lawsuits, which ultimately ended up causing the cessation of the service. Key pieces of evidence in the court's final ruling were internal Napster memorandums where it was made clear that the intent of the software was to enable users to violate copyrights.
Supporters of peer-to-peer software consider Napster to have been the worst possible platform to be used to set precedent. Perceived flaws of Napster are that it only shared one file type, that it relied upon centralized servers, and that it was explicitly created to enable copyright infringement.
He recently launched a new company, Snocap, Inc. aimed at keeping track of music for copyright holders.
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