The Birth Of Napster To The Death Of Privacy Essays

Some would say the government does not need a warrant to search personal, already shared things on the internet. However, the government needs a search warrant to search personal, already shared things on the internet because, the American people have constitutional rights and privacy rights their government has granted them. The First Amendment grants Americans the right to freedom of speech, online or on paper. This shows we should not be worried that we will be punished about what we say because we are granted the right to speak freely. Furthermore, the Fourth Amendment grants Americans the right to be protected against unreasonable searches. This amendment proves that the government needs search warrants to search or look at other people's things.

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

A&M Records vs Napster was one of the biggest copyright infringement cases that later defined the legality of file sharing. It was a class action lawsuit that include over fifteen major record labels including Universal Studios, Warner Bros, and Sony Entertainment. The official case though is called A&M Records vs Napster. A&M Records sued Napster claiming they were infringing on their plaintiff's intellectual property. Napster was a peer to peer file sharing service. It was mostly used to share mp3 music files in mass volumes. This was right at the start of mp3 players. Music was starting to become easily accessible through digital copies.

Napster: It is the future, in my opinion. That's the way music is going to be communicated around the world. The most important thing now is to embrace it, and that was the spirit by which we did this co-promotion. "-- Dave Matthews (Dave Matthews Band).(The Napster Controversy). However on the opposite side some musicians were extremely mad about Napster.

Napster provided users of the system with a platform to facilitate the transmission of digital forms of music files, called MP3 files. Napster’s platform primarily facilitates “peer-to-peer” file sharing, which allows users to present MP3 files stored on their personal computer to other users looking to copy the file, search for particular MP3 files, and transfer

Starting in the year 1999, a company called Napster opened up a whole new world to the Internet where every song ever made was instantly available to you on your computer for free. It was created by an 18-year-old Northeastern University student named Shawn Fanning. Napster transformed personal computers into servers that shared mp3 files all across the Internet (Mayer, 2008). It became popular very quickly because exchanging mp3 files freely and having any music desired right at your fingertips had never been possible before. However, this program that provided the privilege of having free instant music to download did not last long, it was shut down after just two years by

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 was a music sharing software that was shut down because of copying and distributing unauthorized MP3 files that violated the United States and foreign copyright laws. One of the major reasons why Napster was shutdown is

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).

Napster stresses that it is a software provider, and that the users are at fault for any illegally traded files. Napster does not itself make available any MP3 materials over the Internet. It merely provides computer software that lets its users choose which files to make available to each other and which files to download.

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).

And the fact that Napster is free and more convenient than visiting a record store makes it an appealing way to get music for consumers. The problem the record companies have is that there is no way of regulating who has access to the information, and hence no way of profiting from it. This is where Burke, had said that people take things and people are what make them negative. It is obvious here, that the record companies and a scared panic have seen Napster as an easy scapegoat and have tried to show it in a negative light so that Napster will not benefit from them any longer.

Digitalization, data compression, and the internet have affected the music industry significantly. These technologies have shifted the recording industries from hard-copy recordings to digital music distribution. This has made it easier for consumers to enter the music market through copying. Consumers have access to copying technology that allows them to obtain music without paying the record label. The situations clipped high in 1999 when Napster, a file-sharing service was launched. The service facilitated music file sharing on a wider scale. The consumers just download the music and transfer it to a digital music device. This has negatively affected the trade value of music sales, for instance in

Using BitTorrent has become a popular and effective way of downloading files over the internet. BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer file sharing (P2P) internet protocol that allows files to be distributed via an internet connection. The use of BitTorrent itself is a perfectly legal and legitimate process of downloading certain files. For example, if someone wanted to obtain a large free to use file like a Linux distribution, BitTorrent provides a fast and effective means to download the file legally. Another legal use of BitTorrent would be companies like Blizzard who use custom BitTorrent clients to distribute and update their games to avoid overloading their servers. The main