A student in my class recommended watching this documentary considering that I was doing a presentation on Napster. It is a full length movie documentary that goes from the founding of the file-sharing service to its eventual demise. Mind you, the founders of the company aren't exactly poor, especially since one of them did get in on Facebook at the ground level, so he ended up walking away with a cool billion or so.

The thing about Napster is that it revolutionised the internet at the time. Before that the internet was really just a hub and spoke model, where people would access files on a central server, though in the days of dial-up-internet, downloading files, such a music, took a really long time. What Napster did was change that model to what is known these days as a peer to peer networking model. Basically people would share the content of their hardrives, and you could thus download the files not from one server, but from multiple sources, which sped things up incredibly. What surprised a lot of people was that nobody expected people to agree to share the contents of their harddrives, and it turned out that they did.

There were a couple of problems with Napster though, one of them being that they didn't actually have any way of making money, beyond what Venture Capitalists gave them. However, what the funding did was to create a new technology that has pretty much changed the internet as we know it. For instance, Bitcoin works on the same technology that powered Napster.

The other problem was that people were using it to share music, and this was a huge bone of contention. Some musicians loved it because it meant that their music got to a lot more people that it otherwise would have. Others didn't, in particular the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America). Mind you, that had a lot more to do with corporate greed than anything else, and also a business structure that wasn't designed to exist in this new world. Of course, they fought back, and while they may have defeated Napster, the problem was that the genie was out of the bottle, and once that happens, you simply cannot put it back in again.

What Napster did was that it democritised music. That meant that the recording industry no longer had any control over what they wanted people to listen to. It also destroyed the concept of the record, namely forcing people to pay something like $30.00 for a bunch of songs, half of them which they probably didn't like anyway. Napster opened up the possibility that people could thus pick and choose the songs that they wanted. Another argument was that it actually increased record sales, at least for the good ones, plus it allowed people to sample the contents, and if they liked it, they would buy it.

This is quite an interesting documentary actually, and really goes to show how the internet literally changed to world. It was also made by the guy that plays Bill in Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure. Like the newspaper industry, the music industry was completely blind-sided by it, and had not chosen to embrace this new world. Ironically, it was actually the bands that prided themselves on being anti-establishment that kicked up the biggest fuss over this new paradigm. Others really didn't understand, and as such didn't care, while the rest simply went with the flow. However, one should remember that it has always been the case that bands have never made huge amounts of money from record sales, and the big bucks really come with concerts and merchandise sales.

Oh, and as for Napster, the only money they made was from selling some T-shirts.

A documentary that explores the downloading revolution; the kids that created it, the bands and the businesses that were affected by it, and its impact on the world at large.

Who can ever get enough David Boies! This film needed more Boies. Also, it was great to see Sean Parker evolve from teenage geek to slick, young entrepreneur. While Shawn Fanning has largely dropped off the map, Parker is a story all in himself, with his various projects (including Facebook) and involvement with the CIA (which was ignored in this film).

Alan Scherstuhl of The Village Voice states: "The doc is only about as revealing as a middling magazine article on the subject." There is truth to that. Nothing here will be shocking for those who followed the story when it happened, but it is nice to see the story arc all in one place.

This is a somewhat interesting documentary which I mainly found interesting because I am a bit of geek. I do feel however the whole piece was not particularly reviling of any subject in particular, they should have focused on at least some more areas including the relationship of the founders in a more critical way, how it is for the music industry now (perhaps talked to some current more relevant people than Liam Gallagher about it, maybe some current Record company folk or perhaps the current opinions in more detail of Metallica,Dr Dre or Snoop Lion),what is currently using the same sort of technology, how the same thing is happening in the Movie industry and what they have done about it also perhaps some explanation of the technology involved in some level of details. I am not disappointed as it was much better than the average National Geographic level of documentary, but it could have been better.