18 Year Old Blindsides a $40 Billion Industry

In 1999 an 18 year old decimated the profit model of a $40 billion industry. Shawn Fanning released a program called Napster which changed forever the profit model of the recording industry and the way music will be distributed in the future.
Fanning sent Napster to just 10 friends in August of 1999 - allowing them to share MP3 files over the Internet. By November of 1999 over one million people had downloaded the program. By mid July 2000 the software had been downloaded 20 million times. In July media coverage of the Recording Industry Association of America's (RIAA's) lawsuit peaked. The result? By the end of August 2000 another 18 million people had downloaded the software!
The RIAA felt it could kill Napster in court. The threat of Napster's death drove usage to all time highs - with a record 2.79 billion music file swaps in February 2001, the month Napster died. The day after Napster died 90 new file sharing services sprung up and by August 2001 the top four had collectively facilitated 3.05 billion file transfers.
And many of the new services don't reside within the US so the RIAA can't use US courts to shut them down.