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Glossary of Terms
Napster: The pioneer peer-to-peer (p2p) file-sharing software which lost a landmark lawsuit against the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA).
KaZaA: The most popular, heavily utilized, busiest and largest p2p file-sharing software. Target of many attacks by RIAA and music industry on a whole.
BitTorrent: A revolutionary software which allows super quick downloads from another user's computer.
p2p or peer-to-peer: a network which allows a user to download files from another user's computer. p2p networks are almost impossible to shutdown once started as they do not run on central servers; but rely a little bit on every user's bandwidth.
Gnutella and Streamcast: The 2 major networks where the major files are centralised.
mp3: mp3 is a file format that compresses music of extremely high quality into a tiny file size. The invention of the mp3 file format was the crux that enabled songs to be downloaded in a minute, instead of hours, thus giving rise to the popularity of file-sharing networks.
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