With a smile on his face, author Stephen Witt told me that before publishing his first book, "There was no mention anywhere that the only reason the MP3 succeeded as a technology was because of the greatest wave of copyright infringement and piracy that the world had ever seen." MP3s are as ubiquitous as music itself, but have we ever really asked ourselves how this new technology came to be so universal, or who exactly was responsible for its pandemic spread, which crippled the music industry at large?