1971– The first moveable media, the floppy disk, is developed by an IBM team.
1979- Usenet, created by Ton Truscott and Jim Ellis at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Duke University, allows first file transfer.
January 1984- The Supreme Court decides that time-shifting is fair use in the case of Sony Corp. of America vs. Universal City Studios, Inc.
October 1985- File Transfer Protocol, which allows files to be uploaded and downloaded from a central server, is standardized.
December 1991- The MP3 is decided upon as an ISO/IEC standard.
August 1997- MacWorld announces the release of the program Hotline, which allows for chat, forums, and file transfers among Mac users.
March 1998- The first MP3 player, the MPMan F10, is released.
October 1998- The Digital Millennium Copyright Act is unanimously passed by the Senate.
June 1999- Shawn Fanning creates Napster, a centralized peer-to-peer filesharing service.
March 2000– Scour Exchange and Gnutella are released to compete with Napster, offering extended sharing and a decentralized network, respectively.
May 2000- My.MP3 is shut down after the court case UMG vs. MP3 dot com rules in favor of the record labels with songs that had been hosted on the site.
July 2000- Ian Clarke creates Freenet, now a darknet, which is meant to protect free speech by allowing anonymous file transfers between its users.
October 2000- Scour Exchange files for bankruptcy and is shut down pending copyright infringement charges.
March 2001- Kanzaa and FastTrack (and the malware that came packaged with the desktop client) are released by Niklas Zennstrom, Janus Friis, and Priit Kasesalu.
April 2001- Morpheus is released by MusicCity.
July 2001- Napster shuts down.
July 2001- BitTorrent is released by Bram Cohen.
September 2001- LimeWire is released by Gnutella.
August 2002- P2Pnet is founded by Jon Newton.
April 2003- The Open Music Model, which describes a business model for the recording industry based around filesharing, is published.
May 2003- The iTunes Music Store is launched by Apple with protections against filesharing.
September 2003- The RIAA begins filing lawsuits against Kanzaa
November 2003- The Pirate Bay, based in Sweden, is founded by Gottfrid Svartholm, Fredrik Neije, and Peter Sunde.
February 2005- LokiTorrent is taken over by the MPAA after ignoring cease and desist orders they have aimed at multiple torrent indexes in the past year.
March 2005- Megaupload is launched.
September 2005- UMA vs. Sharman forces Kanzaa to convert to legal-only filesharing.
November 2005- BitTorrent agrees to remove all illegal content and comply with the DMCA.
May 2006- The Pirate Bay is shut down for three days following a police raid.
October 2006- RapidShare is launched.
October 2007- The RIAA files suit against Usenet for illegal filesharing.
October 2007- The first major civil lawsuit by the recording industry, Capitol vs. Thomas, results in a statutory damage payment of $222,000 for 24 songs.
October 2008- Morpheus is taken down.
April 2009- The Pirate Bay Trial concludes with each defendant being sentenced to one year in jail and $3.6 million in damage payments.
June 2009- The Capitol vs. Thomas retrial results in the defendant having to pay $1.92 million in damages.
November 2010- LimeWire Pirate Edition is released under the name “WireShare”.
March 2011- A case against LimeWire for up to $75 trillion is announced.
February 2012- Megaupload is shut down by the US Department of Justice, leading major sites such as Wikipedia to “blackout” in protest.