Winter Scene

For anyone in their 30s (or beyond), they've lived through a tremendous change in how music is consumed and shared in a third of a lifetime. From vinyl to cassettes to CDs to mp3s, from mixed tapes to mixed CDs to Spotify playlists, everything about how we engage with music has been profoundly pushed forward, and part of that most recent shift is thanks to Napster. The file sharing service that essentially brought the once mighty record industry to its knees connected listeners in ways that no one had ever thought of. It's a story with more twists and turns than your average Hollywood thriller. And it's now being told. Alex Winter (yes, Bill S. Preston himself) has quietly been putting together a directorial career and his latest is the documentary "Downloaded" that chronicles the rise and fall of Napster, and includes the very players involved to help tell the tale. And in this exclusive clip, co-founder Shawn Fanning discusses the rise of Napster and the fundamental ideas...

Nobody who was there at the time, from the most seasoned astrophysicist to the most inexperienced science reporter, is likely to forget a press co n ference at the American Astronomical Society's winter meeting in San Antonio, Texas, in January 1996. It was there that Geoffrey W. Marcy, an observer then at San Francisco State University, announced that he and his observing partner, R. Paul Butler, then at the University of California, Berkeley, had discovered the second and third planets ever found orbiting a sunlike star. The first such planet, 51 Pegasi b, had been announced by Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz of the University of Geneva a few months earlier--but a single detection could have been a fluke or even a mistake. Now Marcy was able to say confidently that it had been neither. “Planets,” he told the crowd, “aren't rare after all.”