File-sharing means exactly what the title says. It’s sharing files between users.

Everyone knows about how the Internet is your source to download any information you could ever possibly want. The Internet is like a massive network. There are millions and millions of hard drives out there in the world that contains everything – computer games, pictures, MP3s, videos – everything that you could ever think of. However, you couldn’t actually gain any of these files, as access to them was unavailable.

What Napster did was created a program that allowed you to link up your hard drive onto a network that connects you to every other hard drive on Napster. With a searching facility, you could look into the hard drives of others and find MP3s you want to download off them. It really was a unique and masterful idea that Shawn Fanning (the founder of Napster) created.

One person describes the Internet as a restaurant and file sharing changes the idea in which customers order from a menu to one in which everyone samples everyone else's dish.

Of course, the only problem with file-sharing is the amount of food on each others plates are far too much to carry between tables. Or in other words, your crawling 56k modem will take far too long to download the large .wav files.

But then came the compression of files. You probably have heard of the program called WinZip. Well, what WinZip does is it compresses a file down to a much smaller size and stores it as a WinZip file. This file can then be put on the Internet where it can be downloaded much quicker than usual. And then, all the other person has to do at the other end of the Internet is to ‘unzip’ the file to use it.

MP3s work on the same basis. The sizes of music files are massive. 1 averagely lengthed song is about 45 Meg, which can take around 5 hours to download. But someone (don’t ask me who) invented software like WinZip that compressed the music files to a tenth of that size, and this compression was so good that it also causes hardly any loss of sound quality. The other great thing about MP3s is that you don't need to de-compress them. You can happily play them with an MP3 program such as Winamp.

This meant people could download MP3s off the net at around 1 Meg per minute.

It wasn't long before people heard about this technology, and the way in which to obtain the files for free, that Internet File-Sharing was born - Rish