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Napster case analysis
Napster legal case study
Napster case analysis
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The sharing of illegal or copyrighted material is against the law. Also known as copyright infringement is the act of violating any of a copyright owner’s exclusive rights granted by the federal Copyright Act. There are three elements that must be in place in order for the infringement to occur. (1)The copyright holder must have a valid copyright, (2).The person who is allegedly infringing must have access to the copyrighted work. And (3).The duplication of the copyrighted work must be outside the exceptions.
Overview of the crime: I used the Napster Case
Napster was an early peer-to-peer file sharing network which could be used for transmitting various files, but which attained massive popularity as a way to share music through .mp3s. Unsurprisingly, major record companies took issue with
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This is a concern because hackers can hack into an unsecure network and steal valuable information from individuals or companies without their knowledge. Downloading music from the site opened up thepossibility of identity theft.
Remote storage systems
• With remote storage systems hackers can secretly backup files from computers and can access them later. It creates the possible theft of hackers sending virus out, stealing confidential and personal information from others.
Encryption technologies
• Encryption works by securing a network. Encryption is used to protect information such as social security numbers, banking information, company information and credit card information. Without encryptiontechnologies hackers could plant viruses, making everyone susceptible to identity theft. When you download music from the site there are multiply downloads to choose from.
Anonymizer
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.
So why are people like Metallica and Dr. Dre so angry with Napster? One reason, unrelated to record sales, is that Napster offers unperfected versions of unreleased songs that these artists do not want released until they are completed.
In 1998 a university dropout, Shawn Fenning, nicknamed napster, spent days without sleep in his uncle's office producing a new music-swapping programme now known as napster. Napster is an MP3 file sharing programme that lets you connect to millions of other users world-wide and swap music with them for ABSOLUTELY NOTHING, even Napster itself as a programme is FREE and is available to ANYONE with a PC and the Internet.
Thanks to today’s technologies, music can be compacted into MP3s and sent all across the Internet. MP3s use about a tenth of the memory that CD format does. This makes MP3s extremely popular on the Internet. Being of a small size, downloading speeds are faster, and hard drives can store ten times the amount of songs it previously could. Digital music is also popular because of its perfect reproducibility. Analog music can be copied, but the more copies you make, the worse the quality gets. Unlike analog music, digital music can be copied over and over again. Digital music, such as CDs and MP3s are made up of bits, which are 1s and 0s. You can infinitely copy 1s and 0s correctly, but imagine trying to copy something like the graph of ...
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.
The purpose of this paper is to discuss the ethical problem that file sharing software creates when used to transfer copy written material. It is contested that the very existence of this software promotes piracy. The paper will focus on the creators of the file sharing software, knowing that the user employs their product illegally. The software creators (Kazaa, Grokster, Morpheus, etc) are claiming that they cannot control what the end user does with its product. In fact, this point has been upheld by a recent court ruling.
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 first was that Napster’s users were directly infringing on the copyrights of the music they were sharing. RIAA argued that even though Napster didn’t benefit by its users’ downloads financially, the use of the service could be considered commercial. The transfer of MP3s via Napster’s service negatively affects the quantity of CDs the record industry would ultimately sell and the opportunity for the record companies to market their own music digitally in the future.
Napster is a peer to peer file-sharing program designed specifically for the exchange of MPEG 1
One thing illegally downloading music has an affect on is the record companies that produce the music. The record companies have to pay for the studio time and pay for the album to be made. If they don’t get any money in return from the people buying the album, then they have to cut back on employees. Michael Poth, in his article “Illegally Downloading Music”, he quotes Amy Adkins in her online article “How does illegally downloading music affect the music industry”. She writes that the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) has reported over seventy one thousand people have lost their jobs due to illegally downloading (“Michael”). They have to take away peoples jobs to recover from the loss of the billions of dollars due to illegal downloading. The RIAA tries to catch the hosts of the sites that have illegal music download available, such as Pirate Bay and Mediafire. The RIAA caught one student at Boston University and charged him $675,000 for downloading music (Lavoie).
Nowadays, most people can search for what they want through the Internet. The Internet has become powerful because it allows people to share or copy music, pictures, movies, software and different formats of documents. We know the Internet allows sharing of all kinds of information but that doesn’t mean it should be unrestricted. Through the Internet, people can find many materials and download them as references or for general interest, and some of these files are cheap or even free. Therefore, music downloading has become a popular way for people to get audio files. As downloading becomes a prevailing way to share information, the government decides to develop copyright laws to limit people. It can protect a creator’s rights and prevent other people from stealing original products.
In the modern world, as technology improves, it has become popular to obtain the digital copies of songs from online stores such as Amazon and iTunes, without even leaving the house. Unfortunately, many people choose to steal their favorite songs from countless available file sharing sites and peer to peer networks. Most music files downloaded from internet and peer to peer networks are illegal, this commonly includes MP3s created from CDs that are posted online by people who have not acquired permission from the artist or record company to do so. Downloading MP3s and other illegal music formats distress the music industry radically. It is estimated by the RIAA that 3.6 billion songs are illegally downloaded each month and It is also believed by (IFP, 2009) that 95% of music files downloaded from the internet are illegal. Thus, colossal number of dollars are lost as an eventual outcome of pirating. The primary explanation for downloading music illicitly is because it is available and free. Some music downloaders do not even feel that downloading and sharing music through peer-2-peer and copying from CDs as ‘stealing’ astute work of the musicians, composers and recording companies and this creates the problem.
So whether you think of downloading as just testing out the music or that there is just nothing illegal about it, it will always be stealing.
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.