Napster founder gets engaged

2011-04-05 18:40

Los Angeles - Technology entrepreneur Sean Parker, a co-founder of Napster and the founding president of Facebook, has become engaged, his spokesperson said on Monday.

Parker proposed to girlfriend Alexandra Lenas, a singer-songwriter, said his representative Matthew Hiltzik.

Justin Timberlake played Parker as a hard-partying ladies man in the Oscar nominated movie The Social Network, about Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg's creation of Facebook.

Parker has dismissed the way he was portrayed in the film as fiction. He left Facebook in 2005 and is now a managing partner at the venture capital firm Founders Fund.

Aside from his time at Facebook, Parker is also known for co-founding Napster in 1999 when he was 19 years-old.

Napster caused anguish in the music industry by allowing free peer-to-peer file sharing of songs, and it was shut down by court order in 2001 over copyright infringement claims.

It has since been revived as a subscription music streaming service, but the company is now run by Best Buy, not Parker.

- Reuters