Downloading Free Music on the Internet

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.