Limewire Case Summary

I understand and agree with your post. Taking away the protection offered by the Copyrights Act will increase the financial insecurity for the new artist and lower the creation of new material. This is the reason I also completely agree with the court case ruling in against LimeWire

The case of A&M Records Inc. v. Napster Inc., record companies brought infringement action against Napster for the unfair use of copyrighted work and harmed the potentiality of music within the market (239 F3d 1004, 2001). With the burgeoning of the internet age, musicians and artists were faced with the threat of in home piracy, via file sharing programs like Napster, or Grokster.

In 1999, Shawn Fanning and his little program called Napster created quite a stir in society. Napster's software allows music listeners to open pieces of their personal hard drives to everyone using Napster, sharing whatever MP3 songs they have already downloaded or stored. At any time, thousands of people are online, sharing hundreds of thousands of songs, many of which are technically illegal to download without the permission of the copyright holders. [1] This led to a lawsuit filed by the Recording Industry Association of America, with the rock group Metallica as its frontman. In this case, several issues were brought up, one of which was the right of the creator of the music to control what happens with

According to the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), 30 billion songs were illegally downloaded between 2004 and 2009. Even with sites like iTunes and Rhapsody offering legal downloads, peer-to-peer file sharing still exists. Illegally downloading music has had a significant impact on the music industry resulting in a loss of profits and jobs, and changing how music is delivered to the masses. (Adkins, n.d.) Showing that even having the ethically correct option P2P sharing of illegal media is still thriving. The RIAA reports that music sales in the United States have dropped

Applying the June 2014 Supreme Court decision, the Federal Circuit found that Limelight did not control or direct the actions of its clients. Although a contract existed between Limelight and its clients, the contract did not require clients to perform certain steps that Limelight did not itself perform. Consequently, Limelight committed no direct infringement -- and therefore, there was no indirect infringement.

According to the New York Time article, Major Record Labels Settle Suit With LimeWire written by Ben Sisario, the settlement for this suit was $105 million which was far from the $1.4 billion the labels had sought as a maximum penalty. This article also explains that the companies are hoping that the case will act as a deterrent (2). The damage LimeWire created negatively affected the artist community.

This case was quickly followed by another well-know copyright infringement through free software situation. As John Zelezny’s text, Communications Law: Liberties, Restraints, and the Modern Media, notes, “two companies, Grokster and StreamCast Networks, distributed free software that allowed users to share digital files through peer-to-peer networks where personal computers communicated directly with each other and not through a central service” (Communications Law: Liberties, Restraints and the Modern Media, 2011, p. 360).

Major record companies and internationally known bands such as Metallica and many others soon realized how badly Napster was taking a toll on their profits resulting in a major lawsuit charging Napster with contributory and vicarious copyright infringement -(“Piracy and File-Sharing”).  Napster appealed to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. The Ninth Circuit Court noted that plaintiffs had established a prima facie case of direct copyright infringement, meaning that the record labels had to prove their ownership of the allegedly infringed content in order to establish their case -(“Piracy and File- Sharing”). 

The issues that will be slugged out in federal district court in San Francisco sound a little too pop culture to be all that serious. How many music CDs are people buying these days in record stores throughout the nation because of Napster? Is the technology that Napster uses legal? Napster is, of course, the wildly popular file-sharing service whose 20 million users have downloaded some half a billion songs--most copyrighted for free. The technology that Napster has brought to music listeners across the globe has allowed the freedom of obtaining music for free and should not be shut down by the entertainment industry's argument in federal court.

The question then became “Just because we can get the music we want without paying for it, should we?” (Tyson, 2000, p.1). This issue of illegal downloads, which is also referred to as piracy, has been a hot topic ever since the introduction of Napster. According to Recording Industry Association of America “In the decade since peer-to-peer (p2p) file-sharing site Napster emerged in 1999, music sales in the U.S. have dropped 47 percent, from $14.6 billion to $7.7 billion” (RIAA, 2014).

We all know that downloading pirated music and films is illegal, but what exactly is it? The term piracy refers to the copying and selling of music, films and other media illegally; in other words you are copying and selling copyrighted media without the permission of the original owner (NiDirect, n.d.). With the massive growth of the internet and its ability to store and capture vast amounts of data, we have become much more reliable on information systems in all aspects of life, but it does not come without the risk of information technology being used unethically. With the number of IT breakthroughs in recent years “the importance of ethics and human values has been underemphasised” often resulting in various consequences. Not surprisingly one of the many public concerns about the ethical use of IT is that “millions of people have downloaded music and movies at no charge and in apparent violation of copyright laws at tremendous expense to the owners of those copyrights” (Reynolds, Ethics in Information Technology, 2015). This essay covers the ethical issues of downloading pirated music and films and the impact it has on music corporations and recording and film companies.

Napster, a free online file sharing network, allowed peers to share digital files directly with each other by way of connections through its software and system. The no cost peer-to-peer sharing gained popularity, particularly with trendy music. A&M Records took notice of the free digital music downloads and brought suit against Napster for direct, contributory, and vicarious copyright infringements (Washington University School of Law, 2013).

Though Jenny, a thirteen-year-old from Kent, thinks a little different when she responded, "I used to download music all the time, but now people are getting sued in America and I'm not brave enough to do it any more"(CBBC). So the action taken by the RIAA has changed some people's views about the downloading of songs, but there sure hasn't stopped the majority. A lot of the people do not even think of sharing music as stealing, when technically they are getting the music for free.

Companies like Apple, have decided that it is best to get in with the downloading business. However, an end to the illegal downloading conflict remains to be realized. The RIAA and associated artists continue to wage war against illegal downloaders while computer savvy audiences persist in sharing music files online every day. While it is undoubtedly true that downloading music is a crime, it remains to be proven that it is wrong. Without establishing this principle, most downloader's are likely to continue the activity. Even with new, inexpensive and available means of downloading files, they can still be shared for free online. The rift must be repaired between music lovers who feel that they have been taken advantage of in the past and recording companies and artists who worry about their future livelihood.

1. The legal issue involved in this case is the piracy of music from various artists that is easily accesible to everybody from the website called “Napster”. The moral issue in this case is the music being stolen according to the music companies or the music was just being borrowed by people all over the internet according to Napster supporters. The difference between the two is the legal issue is based on actual evidence like there is a law imposed about this case while the moral issue is based on strong likelihood or firm conviction. The systematic, corporate issue is about the website booming and how it affects the music industry while the individual issue is the persons who makes