Born in a student bedroom, Napster appears to have died in a courtroom. Yesterday Chief Judge Marilyn Patel of US district court in San Francisco ordered the year-old start-up to close down its website by Friday night and concluded users gain from making copies using Napster by getting music free they might normally pay for.
In the judge's own words Napster had "created a monster".
The music industry certainly thought so. In court, its lawyers claimed Napster would have 70m users within six months adding that 14,000 songs were being downloaded every minute.
The Recording Industry Association of America trained its sights on the service after stars discovered that their tracks were being traded openly on the internet. Madonna was one high-profile "victim". Her record company threatened legal action after the title track from Madonna's new album Music - which is not due to come out until the autumn - appeared on Napster's site.
Rock group Metallica also went to court and sued for copyright infringement and racketeering. In May the group successfully blocked more than 300,000 fans from using the MP3 site after handing in their names to Napster's US headquarters.
Metallica's drummer Lars Ulrich yesterday said his band was "elated" by the judge's verdict. "Sharing is such a warm, cuddly, friendly word. This is not sharing, it's duplicating."
That is not Napster's view. In court, it cited the US supreme court's 1984 decision that Sony was not guilty of contributory copyright violation with its Betamax videocassette recorder, in part because the device was "capable of substantial noninfringing uses".
The web has been carefully monitoring Napster's fate and many claim that it is the law that will eventually have to give in - not the internet sites. "Intellectual property law has long been strained by technological advances," said Dave Phillips, chief executive at iCrunch - which offers legal digital downloads.
"In the twenties and thirties, when recorded music first appeared, performing rights artists organisations tried to shut them down because they feared they would displace live performances."
Napster is talking tough and plans to appeal. But whatever its fate, experts agree it has changed the industry forever. Scattered around the web are Napster's successors - Scour Exchange, iMesh and CuteMX all use similar technologies - pointing users to computers where songs in MP3 files can be downloaded.
Eric Scheirer, online music analyst at Forrester Research, said: "This will be the end of Napster the company if this is the way the trial is going to finish but the Napster technology will live on." Looming on the horizon are bigger threats - systems which are decentralised and do not keep servers that can be shut down with injunctions.
The decision is likely to have no effect on Gnutella, FreeNet and other decentralised technologies where song files are traded directly among a constantly changing group of computer users.
What is worse for the entrenched entertainment industry is that Scour Exchange, iMesh and CuteMX can be used to search for audio, video and images. Gnutella and Freenet are "file agnostic" and can be used to share all file types. Also lurking on the web is a program called Wrapster which allows any file to be disguised as an MP3 file and transmitted via Napster.
The music industry may have won the battle with Napster - but it is already conceding defeat to the net. EMI have already put some of its back catalogue on the net; Sony will later this year start selling digital downloads on its site for $3.49 a track and BMG will be offering four different MP3 players on the web.
Nick King, a former Virgin Music Group director who runs music and video etailer Boxman, said: "I think it is only a matter of time before the digital music business takes over the entire music industry."
