In 2003, the RIAA, or Recording Industry of America, launched lawsuits against 261 peer-to-peer file sharing users for illegally downloading copyrighted music. Before these lawsuits, the legality of file sharing was widely debated, and all the while P2P file sharing was wildly popular.
The lawsuits included users of the eDonkey, Limewire, Bearshare, Napster, and Kazaa services, as well as 25 people using university Internet connections to distribute music files. …
