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Nearly a quarter of a century ago, in the summer of 1999, a start-up company launched an application which instantly became a global phenomenon. We were in the heady days of the Internet bubble, with the dot-com crash still a year away, and the founders of this new company had identified an inflection point in the development of technology.
Sean Parker and Shawn Fanning hit upon the moment where network speeds and costs dropped so low that high-quality music files could easily be shared between ordinary users, effectively lowering the cost of distribution for this medium to zero. Their application, Napster, provided an easy way for users to take advantage of this, and the response was instant – within months it had tens of millions of users, an immense number in an era when Internet access was still far from universal.
source https://www.gamesindustry.biz/were-in-the-wild-west-of-generative-ai-beware-the-outlaws-opinion
