MUSIC DOWNLOADING AND THE LAW

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

. . .
ignite legal proceedings if the web cafT's proposed GBP50,000 settlement to the British Phonographic Industrya.fails to moderate a long-0simmering music-download row (VanDusseldorp 2002 1). So, just where does copying some music from the Internet make one break the law and be considered, politely, a thief? After all, millions of college students merely download MP3s for their own listening pleasure. But, as early as 1999, some (music industry) executives proposed that 'a student or other individual found downloading illegal MP3 tracks (should) go to jail as a clear signal that piracy will not be tolerated in the U.S. (Allen 2003 1). MP3 is just a file format, so one cannot say that all MP3s are illegal. What is illegal is unauthorized copying of commercial musica.To put it simply, you may make a copy of your own CD for your personal usea.You may not, however, give this copy to another person. Many people believe that if no money is involved, then no law has been broken. This is false. Whether you give the copy away or sell it, this is still a violation of copyright law (Allen 2003 2). As more and more artists, authors, and musicians feel ripped off by the Kazaas of the world, the more suits will be filed. Sol, as Ste
. . .

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Approximate Word count = 1322
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page)

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