Napster introduced a revolutionary change to the way music was distributed conventionally. Music companies worked with the artists to produce music. Thereafter they invested heavily into burning the music CD’s, marketing and advertising of the music and managing the distribution of the music to end customers via retailers. Retailers incurred staffing and real estate and costs. In contrast to this, Napster was able to bring together over 60 Million users who would share their collection of music to the remainder of the user base. In doing so, the reach and range of music distribution was significantly raised. Strong Community Feeling, word of mouth effect and High customer awareness led to low cost of marketing for Napster.…
Software piracy and illegal file shares is becoming a bigger issue in modern day society, more likely with the youth of society. All computers now come with burn-ware technologies in which the user can take a product and create copies of that software. Originally, this process was created in order to provide methods of backing up a person’s computer files, in case of hardware crashing and system reboots. However, the situation has changed. People are now able to copy any type of media file (DVDs, CDs, operation systems, etc) and give out these products, free of charge. Do you like that CD that your friend bought the other day? Ask him to burn you a copy, then you can have it too. Did your latest version of Microsoft Windows crash…
Person-to-person or P2P networking, Sean Fanning, an 18-year-old student with the nickname ‘the Napster’, was intrigued by the challenge of being able to enable his friends to ‘see’ and share between their own personal record collections. Napster.com did not actually hold any music on its files – but every day millions of swaps were made by people around the world exchanging their music collections. Napster opened a door for many others to reinvent similar software’s or technologies successful iPod personal MP3 player they opened a site called iTunes which offered users a choice of thousands of tracks for download at 99c each. This allowed over 1 billion songs to legally be purchased and downloaded…
The courts ordered Napster to stop allowing users to download copyrighted material. Napster subsequently shut down its service and filed bankruptcy, giving rise to peer-to-peer computing. The major recording companies filed a lawsuit against two companies offering peer-to-peer software in their pursuit to stop music sharing. In April 2003, the U.S. District Court in Los Angeles ruled in favor of Grokster Ltd and Streamcast Networks, Inc. because they did not have the ability to control or monitor how the users of their product were exchanging files (Vance, 2003). This ruling has since been overturned by the US Supreme Court. The parties settled the lawsuit and both services agreed to stop offering the free file sharing software (RIAA,…
Peer-to-Peer technology allows you to share of computer files by exchanging them with other systems. This kind of sharing became popular in the late 90’s with the first site by the name of NAPSTER. Napster changed file sharing because it was accessible for anyone that had an active internet connection. After Napster became so popular, a lot of individuals saw this as a gateway to open more sites to upload and share music files over the internet.…
Napster is a very popular web site that allowed many users to share music files. The way that Napster shared music files is through peer-to-peer sharing. These files that are called MP3’s (Motion Picture Expert Group 1, Audio Layer 3: an algorithm that compresses digital music files) were shared between registered users anonymously at no cost to the users. The format of MP3’s reduces the files allowing users to quickly and easily share these files. MP3’s can also be copied multiple times without damaging the quality of the file. Napster allows registered users to download a “Music Share” software that will allow peer-to-peer sharing of the MP3 files. There is a large hub that all registered users had access to through the music sharing software where Napster would manage the download process.…
In particular, online piracy is the only way you have at accessing products that are unavailable.Similarity, it is like trying to go buy something but unable to find it and getting it for free online.You can watch tv shows you miss when it came on tv with piracy.It allows you to find movies that you would not find in stores. That shows piracy is not really a bad thing and it should not be a law for it.…
Napster is a good example of how these intellectual property rights are being compromised on the Internet. Napster is a simple, yet sophisticated program created by a young college student named Shawn Fanning that enables users to anonymously swap and share audio files known as MP3s. During its infancy, Napster only had approximately 3,000 users. At that time, Napster could probably have been protected by the Audio Home Recording Act, "which gives consumers the right to create and transfer digital music for noncommercial purposes" (Gurly). Since that time, according to Chris Sherman, writer for the magazine Online, "Napster has become the most successful new Web technology ever by gaining more than 25 million registered users in just over a year or existence." At this point, however, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) is quite unhappy with Napster 's existence and its service. They believe "the fact that millions of users can share songs with one another is a violation of copyright and constitutes outright theft ' of intellectual property" (Sherman). The RIAA won a lawsuit under this argument against Napster in early 2001, so the program may go offline unless a compromise is reached.…
Students engage on this because they want free stuff like games, music, and shows; furthermore, it is easy to access websites that offer to give away these services. Additionally, items could be super rare and hard to find, so students will commit to piracy to get what they do not have. Sometimes, they could be expensive to students who do not have enough money. Though everything is there, the risks for these simple material is critical to the students' information because piracy easily steals it by offering fake rewards in exchange for their information. Not only information is at stake, but millions of dollars are lost in this practice which makes the industry who made it, close down because of the lack of income.…
When speaking economically, the digital music sector of the international music industry is undoubtably the most important sector in the industry. Within the last decade, music has seen cardinal changes in the way both major and independent labels distribute their products. An industry that once relied on Payola 's and mass distribution of physical records and CD 's now relies heavily on the power of the internet. The first instance of mass distribution of music through the internet was by the service Ritmoteca.com in 1998 [1]. Ritmoteca had a library of over 300,000 songs, offering individual songs for 99 cents each and albums for $9.99. After signing distribution deals with many major music labels such as Warner Bros, Sony, and Universal, it was clear that the market for selling music online was opening up. The year following Ritmoteca 's inception, the peer-to-peer file sharing service named Napster opened its virtual doors to listeners across the world at the price of nothing [2]. At its peak, Napster had over 80 million users across the globe [3]. The service 's popularity sparked a great deal of controversy, as the artists whose music was being downloaded for free felt they deserved to be compensated. Naturally, dozens of lawsuits followed, resulting in Napster 's peer-to-peer file sharing system to be shut down. However, Napster was able to make somewhat of a comeback by competing in today 's ever popular music streaming industry, which allows for users to listen to music at a monthly fee or for free, all the while compensating artists. However, artists still feel they are being compensated at too low of a rate. Clearly, there is still friction in the industry between the consumers and producers.…
It is illegal to download music, software, and video off the internet, this material is copyrighted. “Copyrighted is a form of protection by United States laws to the creator” (source 1). This is basically a form of protection against stealing other peoples work. Copyright is to software as plagiarism is to writing. People put money into copyrighting any original work. This includes, literary, musical, dramatic, artistic, and other intellectual pieces. When avoiding the cost of these works, people are stealing money. Not only is online piracy morally and lawfully wrong, but it comes with hefty consequences. According to source 3, “Criminally copyright infringement is investigated by federal law enforcement agencies and is punishable by up to 5 years in prison and a fine of $250,000.” Even though the consequences are severe, people continue to commit online piracy.…
The Internet has changed the entertainment industry and continues to do so, it has its pro’s & it has its con’s. The Internet has come a long way in the last ten years, with more and more people entering the online world and discovering its marvels. One of which being, downloading media such as movies & music. Illegal downloading has become rife in modern society, with broadband speeds getting faster & broadband becoming more readily available around the world. This in turn makes it easier to obtain such media. It wasn’t long before sites such as ‘Napster’ were born, which allowed people to download media for free from the Internet via peer to peer networking (P2P). People soon realised the potential for such capability, leading the creation of more and more similar sites such as ‘Limewire’ and ‘Bareshare’. Even though ‘Napster’ was shut down in 2001, this discontinuation made little impact on the industries fight against illegal file sharing, as others still operated, and indeed continue to do so today in some form or other. Torrents or ‘Warez’ sites are similar concepts. As opposed to one click download, the user downloads ‘torrents’, which are essentially links to a source from which the desired file is obtainable. The…
For centuries, the term piracy calls forth an image of a plundering character that can be found in one of today’s most popular movies, Pirates of the Caribbean. But over recent decades, the term piracy has evolved into one who infringes copyrighted material. Instead of that dirty one-eyed pirate with a wooden peg leg and cutlass sword, the pirate now can be anyone, any size, any age. Charles Moore wrote the essay, “Is Music Piracy Stealing?”, and tried to answer his own question. Moore started off by explaining that current day pirates simply do not care about copyright laws. He goes into detail about the philosophy, ethics, and morality of the threat of the free exchange of information over the Internet. Moore’s argument is that piracy is a victimless crime and that laws must change along with technology. But does he convince us all that music piracy is in fact stealing? No, he doesn’t, because even if the information comes from statistics, the question of music piracy will always be an opinionated answer.…
You are sitting at home on the computer thinking of what you want to do. You realize you haven’t heard the latest song from your favorite band. You start up a P2P (peer-to-peer) program called Limewire. You search for your song and it appears in the list; you start to download it. What you just did was completely illegal and can get you into a lot of trouble. Most people would think to themselves, “What’s the harm in downloading a couple songs here and there?” Internet Piracy as defined is “using the Internet to illegally copy and/or distribute software”, and is a huge offense here in America. You wouldn’t walk into a Circuit City and take a 52” Plasma Screen TV right out of the store without paying for it, would you?…
The movement of pirate websites to foreign jurisdictions cannot easily be tackled through litigation in those countries, so often a more nuanced response is required (see box, International piracy solutions).…