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A paper on Computer and internet crimes
A paper on Computer and internet crimes
A paper on Computer and internet crimes
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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.
Napster is a virtual community, which consists of music news and chat-rooms, the main feature it offers is an easy way to download MP3's (music files). This controversial service has brought the lawsuit to Napster. Napster allows its subscribers to download the music files without charge. It is not however, from Napster that the subscribers get these files. It is from each other. The users share their hard drives so that other users can download any of their music files that they want.
About 5 years ago Napster, a network software application, was being used to download music files. The network was growing faster than anybody who ever started it would have imagined. When artists, songwriters, and all of the other people involved in making CD's realized that this wasn't going to slow down any time soon, they decided that they needed to stop Napster. Little by little, Napster was being less used and it became harder to find the songs wanted until nobody used it anymore. When all of this was happening, other applications were made available. Kazaa and Grokster are probably the two most used Peer to Peer, or P2P file sharing networks you can find, although there are many others.
First, I would like to touch on the aspects of Napster that has aided the record sales industry. Take these facts into consideration when contemplating my argument. The highest selling group album sale was the new N'Sync CD, selling over 1.4 million in its first week of sales. Add this to the highest debuting solo artists; Brittney Spears and Eminem, each selling over 1 million in their first week on the shelves. All of these examples were available on Napster at the same time they were made available in stores.
CD sales are up 16% across the nation. How can Napster be a bad thing if it is helping the
Throughout time, people have resorted to stealing in order to obtain items instead of buying them. It became a problem so consequences were made. Even dating back to the Ten Commandments there were laws against stealing. Recently, theft has become a problem over the internet. Musicians and music companies have lost millions in revenue. Websites such as Napster, The Pirate Bay, and Pandora have made it extremely easy for people, specifically teens, to illegally download and or listen to music for free. Pirating music has become a problem especially because “91 percent of all new music was downloaded illegally over the Internet instead of purchased,” says Logan Lynn from Huffington Post (Lynn). Many, such as the RIAA claim that music piracy is “an ongoing and evolving challenge,” (Who) while others suggest that it is “keeping the music industry alive,” (Issacson).
A big topic that has come about is should people be prosecuted for illegally pirating online files. This includes; music, movies, programs, games and pictures. The large portion of online piracy is music. Some will argue stealing a song is as bad as stealing a car. (kain) Others will concur that song artist and record companies are losing big time bucks. Downloading music should be prosecuted as it is still stealing. Whether the person has it in their physical possession or files on their electronics it is still stealing and artist are losing money that is rightfully theirs.
What trends in networking in the 1990’s and early 2000’s drove the popularity of Napster? What other technologies contributed to Napster’s success?
Ljung and Wahlforss were not the first people to start a music sharing website, or be successful starting one, but they have proved to build upon past companies in revolutionary ways. SoundCloud was founded in 2007 and became increasingly popular around 2009 (Robedhmed). Ten years earlier in 1999, Napster became one of the first websites to design a peer-to-peer music file-sharing platform, with a...
Today there is an ongoing debate on whether online piracy should be prosecuted against. People today do not consider downloading a song without paying for it stealing. Stealing by definition is taking somebody else's property without permission or legal right. So not paying for a song is right but taking something off a shelf at the store is wrong? No. There is no right or wrong way to take something that is not yours. Online piracy should be prosecuted against because it costs people money, limits the investment in new music and costs people their jobs.
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).
IN an ever-changing world, there is no doubt that technology enables users to experience an evolving music industry. Along with being able to interact with artists and offer opinions on their music, anyone who has access to the Internet can share, search and steal. Online criminals fly under the radar and crime as a whole just isn’t as obvious anymore, because the majority of culprits don’t realise that their actions are illegal.
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.
There has been controversy as to whether music should be free or not. As for the people who love to listen to music all the time, they would agree that the music should be free of charge. Benefits of free music are that you can listen to music fan free, helps out bands to be known, and reaches the crowds in less time and boots the popularity of the song; however, there are drawbacks, such as CD & MP3 gross sales decline, it’s an insult & harmful to artist and in all actuality, you are paying the record labels.
With the popularity of the Internet, sales for CDs, DVDs, Movies, and many other products have increased. Along with the increase of sales has brought forth an ever increasing problem of illegal media being downloaded. Programs such as Bittorent, Kazaa, and other direct-connect networking programs have allowed the transferring of such illegal media. Downloading song files from the Internet over a free peer to peer network is the moral equivalent of shoplifting music CDs from the local mall.
In this paper I am going to talk about the issues with illegally downloading not only music, and movies but all copyrighted materials. The simple fact that just because everyone else may be doing it does not make it right to do. My personal opinion on whether I consider myself a moral person. Then lastly how this compares to the millions that Bernie Madoff stole from his clients.