Move over Facebook – here comes Napster

Napster's Fanning by Joi Ito @ Flickr

Well, maybe the title of this article is not wholly accurate but it is when speaking about media attention soon to come. Film maker Alex Winter is currently working on a new project called Downloaded, a documentary about the music-sharing (music-stealing?) site Napster. Winter’s goal is to show the effects of the downloading revolution that student-initiated Napster set in motion when it was launched in 1999.

There’s no doubt that this project will attract a lot of attention, especially as Winter has announced that Napster creators John Fanning and Shawn Parker are both participating in the project, as will an as of yet unknown club of artists. The film, for VH1 Rock Docs, will be due for release in 2012.

“The rise and fall of Napster and the birth of peer-to-peer file-sharing technology created by Shawn Fanning when he was a college student, changed music to movies, and made possible everything from Julian Assange, WikiLeaks to the iPod and Facebook,” Winter told Deadline. “It became an expression of youth revolt, and contributed to a complete shift in how information, media and governments work. And it is a fascinating human story, where this 18-year-old kid invents a peer-to-peer file-sharing system, and brings it to the world six months later.”