The Rise and Fall of Napster
It started as an accident. Shawn Fanning was just experimenting and thinking of an easier to go through a search engine for music. What was a simple idea turned out to be a phenomenon in the Internet world. The creation of Napster led to many problems and brought about new issues that involved the entertainment industry and piracy laws. Napster is a software where a compilation of all of its user’s files are held in a central unit and each user is able to use its search engine to look for a song from another person’s computer.
The issue surrounding this problem arose when the Recording Industry Association of America claimed that Napster was basically giving out free music and was not paying the fees to issue “free” music. Napster claimed that all the music was shared among its users and were shared from computer to computer rather than a free website issuing free files for all to download. With the innovation of new technologies today, new problems will always come up due to better ways of getting things done. The same incident happened with the “new and improved” VCR. After fighting some battles, it was made legal for consumers to record from their own home and uses it for personal matters. Again, this situation is similar, but with more strings attached.
Napster was thought to be similar to the VCR problem, but with the piracy laws and the government still trying to find ways to regulate the Internet, it became a more difficult battle for Napster to fight. Recording artists were losing money in the sales of compact discs and they were blaming it on the rise of file sharing. Although the radio does entertain the public with its free music, they do have to pay the fees to play the music. They make their money but advertisements and sponsors. Napster used the excuse that people record off the radio for free, but they cannot burn the music they hear. What Napster did not understand was that the music is offered free because the radio stations do pay for it, and they have the rights to issue the music at the level of their pleasure. Napster was simply taking it from the artists and giving free music.
This had an effect on both the consumers and producers of music. What turned out to be a result of the matter was that the prices of music were climbing and consumers were not buying as much. They resorted...
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...er was unintentional, but it brought about an enormous worry for many people. The right or wrong answer does not lie in the hands of the “upper class,” but in the minds of each individual who cares about the issue. Many think that Napster did nothing wrong, but when given the facts, it is almost as if Napster was stealing candy from a baby.
Bibliography
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Evans, Chris. “Napster, My.MP3.com, Digital Music, and the Future.” Online Article. March 28, 2000. http://www.netfreedom.org/news.asp?item=113.
”From Betamax to Napster” Online Article. http://www.msnbc.com/modules/DigitalMusic/
Hansen, Evan, John Borland. Mike Yamamoto. ”Napster wildfire spreads beyond music | CNET News.com” Online Article. May 15, 2000.
http://news.com.com/2009-1023-239700.html?legacy=cnet
Kahney, Leander “Wired News: Uncovering the Napster Kitty Ads.” Online article. September 22, 2003. http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,60525,00.html
King, Brad ”Wired News: The Day the Napster Died.” Online Article. May 15, 2002. http://www.wired.com/news/mp3/0,1285,52540,00.html
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).
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?
The Internet—as it did for almost everything—has radically changed the way people get music. The Internet has cut into the music industry's profits. It reduced the demand for CDs, increased the interest in singles and let people decide whether they want to pay for the new Prince album. This alone could be offset if all of the people pirating music would go to their favorite artists' shows. However, the hard economy has rapidly cut into people's ability to spend on luxury items and concerts rank right up there with sports in terms of practicality.
A maker of MP3 portable players said "The year 2000 is a fantastic year for digital music,we had this earthquake called Napster who's aftershocks are still happening". Napster gives publicity to unsigned groups and gives people a chance to listen to their music and so possibly they may get a record deal form the record companies.
Shanahan, J.L., 2001. The consumption of music: Integrating aesthetics and economics. Journal of Cultural Economics 2 2, pp. 13–26
To begin with, it is known that musicians had to be signed to record labels to gain any traction with their careers, otherwise, their careers would be known to flop. However, this has changed with the shell-shock of upcoming technology. “As file sharing eroded the power of the majors and wiped out these music retailers, new distribution channels, firms, and power relations began to emerge” (Hracs 449). The music industry and technological advancement went hand-in-hand, with the compact disc used as one of few sources of playing music. Since the introduction to the MP3, the sharing of music across the internet is a major contributor to the downfall of production labels, and it has been this way since 2001. “Recent developments in online music distribution suggest that it is not so much the availability of music on the Internet that concerns the music industry majors but rather the fact that it is free” (Gündüz 205). This included the pirating of songs from online file sharing networks, which hit the industry with full force. ” According to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), CD sales have been falling continuously (except for a status quo in 2004) from 2.5 billion units in 2000 t...
This led to negative side-effects and the backlash from the music industry because people could share music and download it illegally. In July 2000, the Recording Industry Association of America had won in a legal battle against Napster stating that Napster must stop aiding the exchange of music under the copyright of the major labels the RIAA represented. This lawsuit caused Napster as a Peer-2-Peer file sharing site to shut down. However, this seemingly made the problem worse as alternatives to Napster quickly rose up. One of the bigger alternatives was Limewire.
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.
There are several competitors who have modeled their distribution after Apple. However, Napster 2.0 takes a very different stance on digital music distribution. They charge customers a monthly subscription fee and allow users to stream and download as much music as they want. However, if customers want to copy music to their mp3 player, or burn songs to a CD, they music pay extra. Napster also uses Microsoft's WMA format for their DRM scheme which makes Napster incompatible with the iPod. Both Apple and Napster are United States based companies and therefore must abide by our laws. However, a Russian website called allofmp3.com offers DRM free music....
“Unsurprisingly, major record companies took issue with large-scale distribution of their music for free, and sued Napster for direct, contributory, and vicarious infringement of copyright in order to protect their intellectual property” (Washington University School of Law). Despite the fact that people and companies are violating copyright infringement, many people think that copyright infringement isn’t such a bad thing. They feel copyright actually helps the artist’s exposure by giving people a convenient way to listen to their music. This interpretation is unreasonable. Artists should not be embezzled and filched of their musical products.
The music industry impacts the lives of people from around the world. With the implementation of technology, the influence of the music industry has spread to affect anyone with access to technology. Streaming services have contributed to the increased popularity of music. While there are positive effects to being able to stream music and have multiple ways of listening to it, the music industry suffers from the lack of revenue and illegal activity associated with technology. Technology has had both positive and negative effects on the music industry by affecting how people access music and how music is produced
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]
with one solution. In the meantime, Napster is a huge force in the dynamic of music today and
Record sales not only benefit the record labels, but they also benefit the songwriters. “The obvious problem is that more than 90 percent of the music tracks that are being shared for free through services like Napster are copyright-protected works. Napster, however, makes no provision for collecting royalties for the owners of these copyrights, nor does it provide any other means of compensating artists and record labels” (Toomey, 2000). The president of Time Warner, Richard Parsons, has been vocally opposed to web sites, such as Napster, because he believes that they are encouraging illegal acts like piracy: “‘Digital music is illegal,’ he said. ‘They are ripping off artists and hiding behind third-party neutrality.
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...