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Copyright Problems with Napster

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Copyright Problems with Napster

Copyrighted we stand, Pirated we fall: This is what the music industry would have people believe. Welcome to the information age! Any information is available to whoever wants it, needs it, or just has a lot of time to spend looking for it. The latest victim of the information age is the RIAA, The Recording Industry Association of America. The argument: The right to trade RIAA artists songs using the Napster server in MP3 format over the Internet. Can the furor over copyright battles hurt the music industry more than help? Artists and record companies must understand that their customers will continue to seek out and develop new technologies that will help them make the best logical decision in purchasing music.

MP3, what is it? MP3 is the latest compression coding software for multimedia files, mostly digital music files. A song on a store-bought compact disc is about one mega byte of information for each minute of actual song time. A song that is four minutes long on a compact disc will result in digital information file of about four mega bytes in length. It will take approximately thirty minutes to download this file over the Internet with a 56k connection. The compression factor of the MP3 encoding is what makes it so attractive. The same song as mentioned before will have the compressed file size of approximately two mega bytes without losing any of the original songs sound quality. The download time for this file over the Internet will take fifteen minutes, cutting the time in half. Why is that important? People have to pay to be on the Internet so the less time it takes to download, the better.

Everyone has his or her own definition of intellectual property piracy. From the ons...

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