Shawn Fanning

Shawn Fanning is an American computer programmer, entrepreneur and angel investor who developed Napster, one of the first popular peer-to-peer file sharing platforms, in 1999. Its popularity was widespread and he was featured on the cover of Time magazine. On June 1, 1999 he released a preliminary beta of Napster and soon hundreds of college students at Northeastern University were trading music; Sean Parker was the co-founder, and the name came from Fanning's nickname Nappy. The site in its initial free peer-to-peer form was shut down in 2001 after the company's unsuccessful appeal of court orders arising from its encouraging the illegal sharing of copyrighted material. In 2002 he was named to the MIT Technology Review TR100 as one of the top 100 innovators in the world under the age of 35, and he later founded or joined Snocap in 2003, Rupture, a social networking tool for World of Warcraft players later acquired by Electronic Arts, Path and, in 2011 with Sean Parker, Airtime.