![The big thing in digital music these days is the cloud--your songs hosted on someone else's servers, accessible to you from a variety of devices rather than locked into a specific gadget. It's an area that's drawing the attention of movers and shakers including Google, Amazon.com, and Apple.
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However, a <a href="http://news.cnet.com/8301-31001_3-20065489-261.html">shift to cloud music</a> is just the latest in the evolution of digital tunes. Here, we offer you a ranking of the music sites that have had the greatest influence over the last decade or so.
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<b>10) Grokster</b>
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Grokster was a peer-to-peer company that gained a following in the early 2000s and will forever be associated with the landmark copyright case known as MGM Studios v. Grokster. The case helped define the limits of online file sharing--some would say unfairly--for movies and songs.
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Film studios and record labels filed the lawsuit against Grokster and Streamcast, the firm that created the Morpheus file-sharing client. They accused the companies of inducing copyright infringement. Two lower courts found legitimate purposes for P2P technology and ruled that the services should be protected from liability. But in a unanimous decision in 2005, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Grokster and Streamcast "fostered" infringement and were "liable for the resulting acts of infringement by [users]."
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That Grokster became synonymous with the case was purely by chance, said former Grokster President Wayne Rosso. Streamcast's Morpheus system was much more popular, but the defendants were listed in alphabetical order.
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