Wait a second!
More handpicked essays just for you.
More handpicked essays just for you.
Napster incident according to legal and ethical
What are the legal issues with napster
Napster legal case study
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
Recommended: Napster incident according to legal and ethical
Napster, an idea from the head of a teenager redefined the Internet and the music industry forever. The Napster website concept is simple: its creator hoped to design a "program that allows computer users to swap MP3s with one another directly (aka Peer to Peer File Sharing), without going through a middleman. Napster had achieved a tremendous level of success, but it once was a controversial service that spurred what is still one of the greatest Internet-related debates: Just because we can get the music we want without paying for it, should we?, although it is technically a file sharing program that has a central server. However, this simple idea has caused one of the biggest Internet revolutions in history, growing in popularity. It has also caused retaliation from the Recording Industry Association of America, which has unleashed its anger in the form of many lawsuits against Napster for copyright infringement. Napster has also divided musicians and the music industry like no other issue in recent memory. In this essay I will speak about MP3, peer to peer file sharing, legal troubles, where Napster is now, and a conclusion of this all. (Hart)
First, MP3 crazes were fueled by sites like MP3.com. On these sites, anyone may upload a song. The songs are then stored on a server that is part of the website. After other users can connect to the site and download songs that have been uploaded. Another way of obtaining MP3 files is to perform a search on the title or artist that you are looking for. The search would return a lot of links that were broken, meaning that the page could not be found. In early 1999, Shawn Fanning began to develop an ideas to better this market of finding MP3s. He thought that there should be a way to crea...
... middle of paper ...
...ng payment and royalty fees for their songs being downloaded and shared. These artists should be getting money for their music being sold just like how they are given royalty money for selling CDs. The main reason for Napster being shutdown was the lawsuits for piracy. (Tyson)
After a US $2.43 million takeover offer by the Private Media Group, an adult entertainment company, Napster's brand and logos were acquired at bankruptcy auction by Roxio which used them to rebrand the Press play music service as Napster 2.0. In September 2008, Napster was purchased by US electronics retailer Best Buy for US $121 million. On December 1, 2011, Napster merged with Rhapsody. Best Buy will receive a minority stake in Rhapsody. On June 3, 2013, Napster became available in 14 more countries in Europe; it had already been available in Germany and the United Kingdom. (Chacksfield)
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.
which gives artists the exclusive rights to their music from the moment of its creation until,
The music industry has had problems with computer piracy for many years now. There have been many programs devoted to giving out free music. Many of these programs are well know, but still very hard to stop. Napster, Kazaa, and the newest program, myTunes Redux are the most popular programs for music sharing. This essay will explain all about these main programs which allow free music to be shared all over the world.
Big time record companies and artist are losing billions of dollars due to people illegally downloading music files. The
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.
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 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.
Plus, it still pays the artist every time their song is played or their music video is viewed on YouTube. In fact, they could make money from people having to listen to their music for free rather than buying it on iTunes or another
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.
People pay low subscription fees to streaming services, and as a result of this, listeners can be exposed to new artists and help these artists become popular (“Music Industry”). New artists are exposed to more people as streaming services often increase the amount of artists that people listen to. While streaming services do result in more exposure for an artist, that’s where the benefits stop. One of the issues with streaming services is payment issues. "Public relations missteps in the early 2000s kept many musicians from speaking out about economic issues, artists and executives said... But the shift toward streaming in recent years has prompted many musicians to investigate the changes in the business and comment online (Sisario)." Artists are not being paid much for providing their music to streaming services, but these issues and artist protests are being ignored by executives of the services until a high-profile artist makes the wage disparity public. "Streaming services pay a lot less than downloads, with the artists receiving a fraction of a cent per play on the service. Newer artists could struggle with the level of payments offered by the services, opponents have argued (O’Brien).” Hardworking artists are not receiving as much money from streaming services as they did from people purchasing their albums. This
Consumers can do multiple things with the current era of digital music format. Most digital music is in the form of an MP3, a sound compressor that allows sounds to compress and move sound into very small
As successful as musicians are, many believe downloading music without payment should not be considered stealing; due to the justification that artists already reel in large sums of money because of the exposure the act brings. In this competitive industry, “without exposure, no one enables you to earn a living doing what you love.” (Ian), and downloading platforms such as, “Napster become the world’s greatest stocked record store - for free.” (Siegel). Thus, music acquired without a form of payment is beneficial for the artist, as it provides a revenue of new listeners, and extends their fanbase.
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 music industry started in the mid 18th century with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Through the decades there has been a great increase in this industry; however, the revenues for this industry have declined by half in the last 10 years. This has been caused by music piracy, which “is the copying and distributing of copies of a piece of music for which the composer, recording artist, or copyright-holding record company did not give consent” . After 1980’s, when the Internet was released to public, people started to develop programs and websites in which they could share music, videos, and information with...