Napster

Cause of death

Killed by lawsuit

Made by

Napster, Inc.

Napster shut its entire network on 11 July 2001 to comply with a court injunction won by the record labels.

A March 2001 injunction ordered Napster to keep copyrighted music off its network. Napster filtered until it was blocking 99.4 percent of infringing files, and the court wanted 100, which at that scale is less a filtering problem than an existence problem. It shut the network down on 11 July 2001, roughly two years after launch. The brand has been bought and sold repeatedly since, always by someone selling music legally.