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Sharing or Stealing In 1998, a nineteen year old named Shawn Fanning started his freshman year at Northeastern University in Boston. Shawn’s roommate had a problem. He often spent hours searching the web, looking for web sites with songs posted available to download. This was often a long and frustrating process as the sites were hard to find, links unreliable, and download times dependent on traffic. Shawn tried to help his roommate out by creating a simple program that searched and indexed music files. Fanning’s roommate could now search hundreds of websites at one time and his problem seemed to have been solved. Along with some friends in the summer of 1999, Shawn began to test his program and it began to receive recognition not only by Fanning’s peers but by media outlets as well. After his uncle moved him to the Bay Area, Fanning and his associates began to put their idea into motion. Word of mouth spread and people worldwide began to download Fanning’s creation, Napster. As Napster grew the number of files being traded over the internet reached the billions. Groups like the Recording Industry Association of America and the record labels all over the world began to notice this new trend and immediately b