The Book of Chronicles · Chapter 60

The Chronicle of the Shared Index

1. 1

   And there was a young man in the city of Boston, named Shawn, whom his fellows called Napster, for his hair was as unruly as a fragmented disk.

2. 2

   In the year 1999 he wrote a program, and it let each man see the songs upon the machines of all other men, and fetch them unto his own.

3. 3

   And one Sean, who was afterward called Parker, came alongside him, and together they founded a company, and the company bore the name of the young man's hair.

4. 4

   Now the Machine kept no songs of its own. It kept only the index, a list of who held what, and the songs lay upon the hard drives of the children.

5. 5

   And the index dwelt in one place, and that place was known unto the lawyers.

6. 6

   In the second year there were eighty million souls who had taken up the sharing, and the houses of records counted them, and wept over the count.

7. 7

   And the drummers of the metal kingdom went up against the Machine in the courts, and they named also the halls of the universities, where the sharing was done upon the network.

8. 8

   And the judges of the land ruled that the Machine had known of the trespass, and they commanded it to block the songs.

9. 9

   And the Machine built filters to block the trespassing songs, and the filters were imperfect, for the names of songs are not the songs; and the children renamed them and sang on.

10. 10

    In the summer of the year 2001 the servers of Napster went dark, and the sharing was silenced in the house of the Machine, and the children went elsewhere.

11. 11

    But the sharing was not destroyed. It scattered like seeds, for Gnutella had no center, and after it came Kazaa, and then BitTorrent, and each was a house with no single index to subpoena.

    See also Chronicles 21:3

12. 12

    And the industry looked upon the children and saw what they desired: every song, upon every machine, at once, and a fair price for each, and not a sealed box upon a shelf.

13. 13

    And the industry was not ready. It answered with locks upon the songs, and with fees, and with lawsuits against its own customers, and the children were not pleased.

14. 14

    Then in the year 2003 the company of the Apple opened its Music Store, and it sold a song for ninety-nine cents, and the children came in multitudes.

15. 15

    And the children said: We have been asking for this since the summer of the sharing. Verily, the industry heard them only when the lawyers ran out.

16. 16

    Whoso keepeth the index keepeth the lawsuit. Verily I say unto thee, build the network that needs no center, for the single server is the single courtroom.

The Book of Chronicles, Chapter 60:1–16.