The Future of File Sharing Essay

The music recording industry is in trouble. For several years now, sales of new and popular music have steadily declined and show no sign of changing. The record companies are quick to blame the growing popularity of the Internet; music is being traded in a digital form online, often anonymously, with the use of file-sharing programs such as Morpheus, KaZaA, and Imesh, to name a few. The RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) succeeded in disbanding the pioneer Internet file-sharing program, Napster, but is facing confrontation with similar programs that are escaping American copyright laws. While there is an obvious connection between declining popular music

The internet has made it easier for music to be sold online. On our smartphones, we have the apple store and the play store where music is purchased and downloaded daily. It has also made it easier for people to download and share music files without paying for it. The Maverick Recording Co. v. Harper case highlights this issue.

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

Christopher Jones’ article “Metallica Rips Napster” is in an early summary of the 2000, Metallica v. Napster, Inc., California lawsuit. The lawsuit included the peer-to-peer file sharing website, Napster, and University of Southern California, Indiana University, and Yale University. Most people don’t even think about file sharing, in this day and age it is generally an everyday behavior. It is very simple for a document or file to be shared between friends or even strangers over the internet. However, in April of the year 2000 the heavy metal band Metallica and the peer-to-peer audio file sharing website Napster were in the center of a lawsuit that would change how online file sharing works forever.

Record companies decided to embrace the profitable possibilities of using the internet and began working on legal pay services. These sites attracted customers by offering legal downloads of individual tracks for very low prices. As a result, millions of music lovers today enjoy downloading 99 cent tracks off of online merchants such as iTunes and Amazon. The music industry is also pleased with these legal pay services, because revenue is increasing again due to the ease, cost-effectiveness, and widespread popularity of buying and selling music digitally. While Fanning’s invention caused a lot of financial damage to the music industry, it also forced them to look towards the future and contemplate how it could adapt to the emerging internet age. Unfortunately, while the recording industry does make plenty of money from legal music downloads, Fanning and his legendary website have become the model for the dozens of illegal music file-sharing sites that have emerged over the past 16 years since Napster’s launch. The educational eMagazine, SchoolVideoNews, states that, “Software such as Gnutella, Limewire, Kazaa…and other free, open-source software used to trade any type of file…have been popular networks for pirating music since Napster” (Britt). These types of companies, and their users, are constantly discovered and sued by

The downside of file sharing brings in more problems such as viruses and hackers to many people's computer systems. With the files being in a person's hard drive, the risk of downloading from another person's computer and acquiring a virus unknowingly is growing greater and greater. More people are able to get into a person's system and complete annihilate a person's hard drive. Even Internet security has become a major issue and identity theft is on the rise. Regulating such sites (including Napster) is important to the consumer. The legal responsibilities of the music companies and the government are far greater than they had expected by ensuring the safety of the communities they serve.

The way Napster worked is by searching other peers "shared" files. Let's say that someone was searching for any song by the band Metallica, the search would report back what is available to be downloaded. Once you double-click on that first mp3 that you would like to download, you officially become "fair game" for the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). After the birth of Napster, there was an explosion of programs that tried to leech off their fame. The next big thing comes when a new and more efficient program to share files emerges. During 2002, a program called BitTorrent arises. This program revolutionized peer-to-peer downloading for many reasons. First and foremost, because of the percentage of broadband users, downloading a music file has become an extremely quick and painless task. Using Napster with a phone-line connection, it would take an average of half an hour to download one song. With BitTorrent and the increase of broadband users, it takes a matter of minutes (if even) to download the entire album. But why is BitTorrent so successful? BitTorrent's successfulness is attributed to the method users share their files. Instead of downloading the file from one user, BitTorrent breaks up the file into thousands of pieces and takes a part of the file from each user that is willing to share it. For example, let's say that there are 10 other peers downloading the T.V. show Lost, 11

Napster is one of an example about the digital copyright violation that happen around these years. It is one of the first companies that had been charged for Intellectual Property Theft. The company is being sued by many professional artists and their record companies for leaking their musics all over the internet. Napster created an application that allowing their users to access a main server that has an IP address in California. When they gain access to the application, they can look up, views and able to download any piece of those artists at anytime they want to. By doing this, the users do not need to pay to gain access to those pieces of art despite the hard work of many artists. The main problem of sharing information and file on the internet is the idea so new, there are many ways to go with it and they can hide them very well to not get caught.

Piracy, in music industry, is a huge problem that gets worse instead of getting better. According to The Guardian newspaper, 90% people between 14-25 years old, make music copy. Most of these copies are made in MP3 for personal music collections. The growing average was 300% in the last two year, in comparation to 150% of growing in two years previus. All of this, shows piracy is unstoppable.

File sharing helps a lot of unknown artist become known, allowing people to hear what they like and don’t like. This increases the brand and purchase of cd’s that are liked by the public. File sharing allows a customer to listen to a wider verity of music rather than what’s on television or the radio wants them to listen to. This gives them the option to decide whether or not the cd is worth buying before purchasing it. Do to file sharing an artist can be recognized quicker, rather than waiting for a cd to be released. File sharing is just another huge step in the music and internet world when it comes to sells and an artist making their brand known in a broader way, in which people will response to quicker. With the way people listen to music now compared to back in the day, electronic music was not always the go to

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).

In response to this “epidemic of illegal file sharing” (RIAA 2003a), on June 26, 2003, RIAA redirected legal threats toward individual subscribers of these networks who, in the past, enjoyed anonymity in P2P environments. Prior to RIAA’s recent legal efforts, individual file sharers were almost completely immune from legal liability when violating copyright law. These recent legal developments have considerably altered that perceived notion (Graham 2003; Lichtman 2003). Owing to the impracticality of filing lawsuits against every individual file sharer, RIAA has chosen to focus on a relatively small group of individuals and maximize the publicity surrounding its legal action to discourage the overall participation in file‐sharing networks.

It may or may not be obvious why illegal file sharing is a problem. Millions of people see nothing wrong with downloading a song or two without paying for the download. It?s a problem because it causes the price of albums to increase considerably for non-file sharing consumers. The average music-loving American pays approximately from twenty-two dollars to thirty dollars for each album he or she purchases. This wasn?t the case in the years prior to Napster?s debut. The average American paid from eighteen to twenty dollars for each album, with the exceptions of anthologies and double-album sets. It creates a problem for the file sharing user. Most people have morals, or appear to, and constant stealing might compromise those morals, which ultimately leads to other forms of theft in some cases. It causes a problem for the music industry because 1) the record companies lose money behind slumping album sales 2) the ?people behind the scenes? at the

Continuing on the ethicality of file-sharing, I found an interesting trend based on gender. Females, consisting of half the survey, while still downloading music as often as males, were the only ones to admit that they felt it was immoral to share music online. Similarly, females were the only ones that showed any sign that they felt these programs were hurting the music industry. These feelings did not come out of their responses on the survey, but in the brief discussion that I had with them after they finished the survey. None of the males that took the survey said that the felt guilty or immoral for downloading music. They all felt that the industry was rich enough as it is and that they were not hurting it by downloading several songs a week.

Ever since 18-year-old Shawn Fanning created Napster in his Northeastern University dorm room in 1999, downloading and sharing music online has become one of the most popular things to do on the Internet today. But why wouldn't it? Getting all your favorite songs from all your favorite artists for free, who wouldn't want to start sharing music? The answer to that question are the people who feel that stealing from the music industry is not morally right, because that is exactly what every person who shares music is doing. People who download music think it's something they can get away with but now it might be payback time to a lot of those people.