A teenager named Tom, walked into a music store last week and went straight to his favorite music section. After looking around for a short amount of time he spotted the CD he wanted. Tom then tore the magnetic sensor off the front of the package, stuffed the CD down his pants and then proceeded to walk through the front doors of the store, stealing the CD. Most people would say what Tom did was against the law and he should be punished for the crime. What if I was to say this crime happens thousands of times per hour everyday, in a slightly different way and the people who commit the crime get away with it almost every time. The type of crime I am talking about is file sharing over the Internet. Particularly music files otherwise known as MP3 files. MP3 is short for MPEG audio layer three, which is an audio compression file that enables you to download high fidelity music from the web by shrinking the file (Goldsborough 21). This has been made extremely popular by a program called Napster, which allows people to share music over the net in MP3 form. One can imagine why this sort of program may be loved by some and hated by others. Napster was designed in 1999 by a college drop out by the name of Shawn Fanning. According to Larry Graham in an article he wrote for IEEE Software, Fanning originally designed Napster so he could exchange music files with his friends but once he posted it on the Internet, thousands of others began using it (18). "In terms of users, the Napster site is the fastest growing in history, recently passing the 25 million mark in less than a year of operation"(Taro 1). One may ask, why has Napster become so popular? The answer is simple people love getting things for free (Graham 18). What also helps is the average price for a new CD is around eighteen dollars and most teens or adults, for that matter do not have that amount of money to spend every time he or she likes a song. The other side of this argument comes from the people that absolutely hate Napster. Musicians, record companies and anyone that makes money off the sale of music are Napsters biggest enemies, and the reason why is money.
The RIAA believe that Napster has helped users infringe copyright. The threat of the lawsuit has been around since the conception of Napster and was actually filed four months after Napster went on line. The case is not as clear-cut as it first appears. RIAA argues that most of the MP3's on Napster's site are mainly pirated. Therefore, by Napster allowing and actually making it easier for users to download MP3's this means that they are assisting Copyright infringement.
A popular program easily accessible on the Internet is called Napster. After you download it from Napster’s site, you basically tell it where you keep your Mp3 files and when it connects it cross-references everyone’s files and lets you search through them all and download as you please. 90% of the files that are traded daily are illegally “ripped” from CDs. Napster has a blurb at startup that states “Copying or distributing unauthorized Mp3 files may violate United States and/or foreign copyright laws. Compliance with copyright law remains your responsibility.” The RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) is charging the site with copyright infringement and alleges that Napster has created a base for music piracy on an unprecedented scale. Napster contends that they provide the platform, not the actions, and that as the blurb states it’s up to the people. Napster is not at fault because the RIAA has overstepped their boundaries and infringed on first amendment rights online.
In this case, there are three main effects of Napster on the recording industry. The first one is that it caused a large decline in record sales in a short time. According to this case, the spending on recorded music in U.S dropped 4.1% in 2001 and the industry’s top 10 albums also sold much less compared to the year before. The second effect is that it cased the sales of CD burners, blank CDs and digital audio players increase and nowadays, most new computers come with CD-RW drives installed, which means people can easily store downloaded music, share music with friends and take it with them anytime as well. The third effect is that it increased the cost of recorded music. Once people can download free music through peer-to-peer software services, they have less incentive to buy original editions, which will make recording industry spend more to fight against copyrights and invest more in new artists and new music. Overall, these three effects make the recording industry go through a hard time.
CD sales are up 16% across the nation. How can Napster be a bad thing if it is helping the
The approach that was taken by the music industry to take down file sharing service was to attack it from all sides – Napster was hit with several lawsuits from different sectors of the music industry. First to hit was A&M Records. A&M Records was actually not a single record label, but a group of plaintiffs that were all members of the RIAA, the Recording Industry Association of America. Some of these plaintiffs include Sony Music Entertainment, Virgin Records America, Universal Music Group, and Warner Bros. Records. When Napster was issued a preliminary injunction by the District Court, it appealed the decision at the Ninth Circuit. I chose to focus on the District Court case because it was where the arguments were ...
Since 1999, the situation around music has been changed drastically. In that year, the novel software “Napster” was released. With this software, people became able to get any file they want easily, sometimes illegally. Some musicians and people in the entertainment industry have tried to exterminate that P2P “Peer to Peer” technology. But it looks as if their efforts are in vain. People are going to use P2P technology more and it might as well become the official way to handle music distribution. The music industry should rather take advantage of the technology than keep trying to exterminate it.
Napster spreads all types of music ranging from unknown and up and coming bands to famous names like Craig David and Artful Dodger this is all at absolutely NO COST. So as you can imagine as Napster grew more popular than ever its total users topped 50MILLION in November 2000.
Sean Fanning and Sean Parker originally intended for Napster to be a “peer to peer” file-sharing program. Napster changed the way we as a community shared files. Instead of going out and buying a CD from one of your favorite artist, rather you could download their latest single and create your own CD rather than buying just one CD because you only like one of the songs. Instead you were converting different music files into MP3. These changes caused the Music Industry to take a hit singles were being released before they were even suppose to come out. CD sales dropped. The Record industry became outraged, even musicians started getting fed up. When it comes to the whole Napster vs. RIAA I had no idea that it was as huge as it was. I can understand
Music piracy is the process of copying, or file sharing copyrighted materials illegally. Music theft hurts the artists that bring music to your ears due to the fact that they’re not receiving a decent amount of income because their songs are obviously getting stolen. A survey has identified that 70 percent of all 18 to 29 year olds have pirated music, TV shows, or movies. “Music has been compact and easy to reproduce since the days of sheet music. It is, moreover, intensely social: People want to share it with each other, whether by sending a YouTube URL in the 21st century, trading Grateful Dead tapes in the 20th, or copying sheet music for other singers in the church choir in the 19th” (Berlatsky). Another poll found that 46 percent of all Americans have engaged in piracy (Anderson). Back in the 1980s, music piracy was slightly spotted, when people created things called mixed tapes, however making these did not cost the industry much money. Cases of music piracy highly increased after the compact disc (CD) was created in 1982. One major case of music piracy was affiliated with the heavy metal band Metallica on April 13, 2000. Metallica filed a lawsuit against Napster due to many copyright infringements, and racketeering. The heavy metal band found $10 million worth of damages which is roughly $100,000 per downloaded song. NetPD evaluated Napster’s illegal program, and produced a list of 335,435 users that were downloading and sharing the band’s albums.
According to the text A Gift of Fire, Napster “opened on the Web in 1999 as a service that allowed its users to copy songs in MP3 files from the hard disks of other users” (Baase, 2013, p. 192, Section 4.1.6 Sharing Music: The Napster Case). Napster was, however, “copying and distributing most of the songs they traded without authorization” (A Gift of Fire, Section 4.1.6 Sharing Music: The Napster Case). This unauthorized file sharing resulted in a lawsuit - “eighteen record companies sued for contributory infringement claiming that Napster users were blatantly infringing copyrights by digitally reproducing and distributing music without a license” (Communications Law: Liberties, Restraints and the Modern Media, 2011, p. 359).
The story really begins with Napster and its free software that allowed users to swap music across the Internet for free using peer-to-peer networks. While Shawn Fanning was attending Northeastern University in Boston, he wanted an easier method of finding music than by searching IRC or Lycos. John Fanning of Hull, Massachusetts, who is Shawn's uncle, struck an agreement which gave Shawn 30% control of the company, with the rest going to his uncle. Napster began to build an office and executive team in San Mateo, California, in September of 1999. Napster was the first of the massively popular peer-to-peer file sharing systems, although it was not fully peer-to-peer since it used central servers to maintain lists of connected systems and the files they provideddirectories, effectivelywhile actual transactions were conducted directly between machines. Although there were already media which facilitated the sharing of files across the Internet, such as IRC, Hotline, and USENET, Napster specialized exclusively in music in the form of MP3 files and presented a user-friendly interface. The result was a system whose popularity generated an enormous selection of music to download. Napster became the launching pad for the explosive growth of the MP3 format and the proliferation of unlicensed copyrights.
In 2000, Metallica filed a lawsuit against Napster and won. As a result, Napster banned about 300,000 of its users who were sharing Metallica songs. Soon after, the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) filed a suit against Napster and the file-sharing server was forced to shut down. [1]
The prime technology which has enabled the growth of online piracy is known as P2P (Peer to Peer) networking. It is fairly basic in function and operates by two users connecting to a server and then establishing their own direct connection with each other and transferring files of their choosing. The biggest reason for its rising popularity is that the original server that the two users connect to is not directly liable for what content is passed between the users. A large amount of the content passed from user to user could very well be legal and these networks which host such opportunities use that to their legal defense.
Napster users get songs for free from other users, they won't be paying the record companies for
Napster is a company that developed the so-called peer-to-peer technology that lets people search and retrieve music files directly from one another's personal computers. When Napster first came out, millions of internet users worldwide were illegally downloading and distributing copyrighted music, videos, images, and software for free. After being vilified by the entertainment industry, which claims that Napster and any similar programs could make piracy of almost any digital work unstoppable, and many court battles, Napster was ordered by court to be shutdown in 2000. The technology has been praised as a revolutionary development for the Internet—unaware of the problems that would arise from such practices. However, the termination of Napster was not enough, months later, dozens of new, like programs were being developed and used. And since Napster, not much has been done to stop these latest downloading programs.