If you're under 35 and own a computer with a high-speed Internet connection, chances are you've indulged in a very 21st Century vice: sharing and downloading music (on services like Kazaa, Morpheus and LimeWire) without the music industry's permission (Taylor 2003 71).
Without permission represents one thing: it is against the law. The fact that millions do it does not make it right. And, the ones complaining within the music industry are artists, losing their royalties, as well as the recording companies who are out millions of dollars each week. It is, simply put, stealing.
The end of January saw some action:
a federal judge ordered Verizon, a fast-growing telephone company and Internet service provider (ISP) to answer a Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) subpoena for the name of one of its customers, a heavy Kazaa user (Taylor 2003 71).
As the article points out, if Verizon loses its appeal, the door could be opened to many subpoenas.
The problem of downloading began in the 1990's, when
it took a 19-year old named Shawn Fanning to revolutionize this phenomenon and to bring the world's attention to this trenda.Napsteraduring its two year operationaattracted between fifty and seventy million users, and billions of files were transferred from user to user (Anon 2003 1).
Fanning was very clever in the way he positioned Napster:
The genius of Napster was its reduction of the bandwidth issues that traditionally plagued file-sharinga.no such files existed on the site itself.
Napster was merely a forum where people could log on and view each other's hard drives (Anon 2003 1).
The laws are not concerned with the technology, however. It is the evasion of copyright laws that provides impetus for current lawsuits.
Copyright laws in the United States and elsewhere operate from the principle that if creators and authors are not compensated for their efforts, there will be a los...