Essay On Ripping

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Ripping The personal computer and its widespread use in the homes of consumers is a great place to start when looking into how piracy is mainly conducted today. Personal computers equipped with compact disc players and the correct software allowed users to be able to copy a song in file format onto their computers hard drive. This process is referred to as ripping. In the early days just as with computers themselves there were many file types floating around. MP3, Wav, WMA (windows media), AIFF, Real audio, and M4A to name a few. The file that stuck the most in the early days of ripping was MP3. Ripping itself is not an illegal operation. Consumers have always had the right to copy media that they have purchased as a backup. Things become illegal when these individuals take files that they have ripped and begin to copy and distribute them to others. This could be done in a number of ways. Removable media was originally the most common way this was done. Removable media could include compact disc and other removable storage devices or portable …show more content…

The one thing that everyone should be able to agree on is that Napster’s arrival took the world by storm and changed everything. The site grew to be the number one place for peer-to-peer file sharing in the nation and possibly around the globe. This huge amount of traffic made Napster the target of law enforcement and the whole recording industry. Artist, record companies, publishing companies, and radio all felt that Napster and similar P2P networks were capable of causing an immense amount of damage to their business models and bottom line. Not only had Napster become the target of all sorts of litigation, it also birthed similar sites such as Limewire, Bearshare, and Kazaa. Each of these sites may have had slight differences but they all pretty much operated in the same fashion as

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