Where do you go to get the latest tunes online? If you are not a fan of the high prices that the music industry think is fair for a single track, then you are not alone. Sharing of music on the internet really took of with the invention of Napster, now many years ago. Before that users were forced to share the files themselves for others to download from their FTP servers or from public FTP servers that had been hacked. FTP isn’t very user friendly though so when Napster arrived it really revolutionized file sharing and music downloads by hosting files on large servers where users could search for their favorite band. Napster really took of with millions of users, but came to a quick end, when the music industry, fronted by Metallica, sued Napster for everything.

The problem was that Napster was actually hosting copyrighted music files on big servers, which made it very easy to prove copyright infringement, since the “smoking gun” was actually still on the scene of the crime. With this fall came an opportunity for P2P networks like Ares. An Ares download is done not from a single server, but from a distributed network of servers across the world.

The Ares download software doesn’t host files on individual servers, but rather the user downloads parts of the file from many other users at the same time making it legally impossible to prove sharing of copyrighted material.