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Illegal P2P File Sharing Essay example

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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.

The Recording Industry Association of …show more content…

It goes much farther than that.

What they say obviously has to be true because its logical. With all of the people that are involved in getting CD's out to the public, every person only gets a small fraction of the cost of each CD. When one person burns one CD rather than buying it, not much is effected. But CD's are getting burned by millions. Even more than burning CD's, music is illegally and unthoughtfully being downloaded. It has to be a lot considering lawsuits are only being held against people downloading over thousands of songs copyrighted to the musicians (RIAA 1). The article also states that "In today's first round of lawsuits, RIAA member companies filed copyright infringement claims against 261 individual file sharers." (RIAA 2). Just those few people caught have to have over 261,000 files. Say a CD contains an average of 15 songs and costs an average of $15. Simple calculations show that over $261,000 is lost. When every person that downloads files is taken into account, these numbers have to multiply. There are good reasons not to download music.

If the main reasoning for downloading music is because CD's are too expensive, think about this for a second. For anybody to make a profit off of music, prices have to be reasonable. If more CD's were being bought, the prices would probably be dropped. Prices for concert tickets and other merchandise would probably be cheaper too. Because the music industry is being cheated,

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