The first fight was about a device

Before the file-sharing cases came a case about hardware. In 1998 the recording industry sought to stop the sale of the Diamond Rio, an early portable MP3 player, arguing it was a digital audio recording device subject to the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992.

The Ninth Circuit disagreed in 1999. Its reasoning is worth quoting in substance: the Rio merely made copies in order to render portable — to "space-shift" — files that already resided on the user's hard drive, which the court called a paradigmatic noncommercial personal use.

That sentence is why MP3 players were legal to sell, and it is the legal ground the entire portable-player industry was then built on.

Napster

Napster arrived in 1999 and made peer-to-peer sharing something an ordinary person could do. The design was not fully decentralised: a central index held what was available, users searched that index by song or artist, and the file itself came directly from another user's computer.

At its peak in 2001, as many as 1.5 million people were sharing files simultaneously. More consequentially, it established the idea of downloading a song from the internet as a normal thing to do.

The lawsuits began in December 1999 and January 2000. After concluding it was not technically feasible to comply with the court's order and keep the network running, Napster ceased operations on 1 July 2001.

What replaced it

Shutting one service down did not put the idea back. What changed behaviour was a legal alternative that was genuinely easier than the illegal one: a catalogue you could search, a single track for a fixed price, and a download that took seconds.

The album was the casualty. For fifty years the unit of purchase had been a record, partly because a record was physically a set of songs. Once a single track could be bought on its own, a great many albums turned out to have been sold on the strength of two songs.

Why it still matters

Every argument about streaming today — what an artist is paid, who decides what is available, whether you own anything — was first had in this period, with lower stakes and louder rhetoric.

The lasting change is that distribution stopped being a physical business. Once that was true, the shift to access rather than ownership was a matter of time.

Names that mattered

Listed because of what they did, not as recommendations. Velorex Music did not make any of these.

Did you know?

• The Ninth Circuit's 1999 Rio ruling used the term "space-shift" — moving your own music to a portable device.
• Napster used a central index server, so it was not the fully decentralised system it is often remembered as.
• Napster ceased operations on 1 July 2001 after finding it could not comply with the injunction and keep running.
• Around 1.5 million people were sharing simultaneously at the service's 2001 peak.