A college student at Northeast University in Boston created the first popular song-sharing P2P Network in 1999. Shawn Fanning created Napster out of a need to get a good variety of music. His invention caught on quickly and by February 2001 Napster had 70 million users. (Gantz & Rochester, 2005) In response to failing CD sales, that free music downloading may not have caused,* the RIAA decided to take action by taking Napster to court. Eventually the RIAA won. Later, Napster was sold and it is currently a pay-per-song site.

However, after Napster disabled free music sharing, other P2P networks replaced it. When RIAA sued them and won, new P2P networks continued replacing the old ones. It was a hard and costly battle. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a consumer-centered digital rights organization, wrote, "Developing such software is well within the capabilities of small offshore companies, or even individual hobbyist programmers. After all, a college student was able to create Napster in mere months. Bit Torrent [a P2P network] was largely the handiwork of one unemployed software developer working in his spare time. Today, most computer science undergraduates could assemble a P2P file sharing application in a few weeks." (2005) It was too easy to create P2P networks and too hard to spend the resources to eliminate them all. The record industry needed a new strategy.