The Future of P2P Technology and Music

The Future of P2P Technology and Music

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.

Originally, Napster was a kind of file sharing software. File sharing software had been developed as database managing software. As the internet has grown so huge all over the world, a distributed database system model has been proposed as the preferring system. The file sharing P2P software has become the celebrated information tool for storage system. But now, rapid growth of broadband and the ability to be anonymous on the internet threaten the entertainment industry’s control of the distribution of such products as movie and music. We can get music or movie files with P2P software through the internet for free.

The entertainment industry and many musicians regarded P2P as a big crisis for copyright, so that they sued the company that produced Napster. “Anger leads Metallica to the Internet,” an article by Karen Schubert in USA TODAY, noticed that heavy-metal band Metallica was suing Napster. And now some people in the music industry are fighting with a distributor of P2P software even in the Supreme Court, and lobbying to outlaw P2P technology. In “File sharing goes to High Court,” USA ...

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...usic with portable players. They could make it is necessary to get something like a password to listen to music with that players, if music distributors were willing to cooperate with audio device industry. Of course some people would solve the password, but normal people wouldn’t if it was not so easy.

The future of industry depends on whether the people involved in it can use the new technology in a smart way. It’s up to the music industry to make the right next move.

Works Cited

Bruno, Antony. “P2P Is Down, But Piracy Has New Outlets, Study Says.” Billboard, 9 Apr 2005.

“File Sharing Goes to High Court.” USA Today, 30Mar 2005.

“In Praise of P2P.” The Economist,Vol.373, Issue 8404, Special Section, p35.

Schubert, Karen. “Anger Leads Metallica to the Internet.” USA Today,

<http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2003-06-03-metallica-internet_x.htm>