Downloading Music & Copyright Protection

The downloading of music has been given considerable attention by the media recently because of the lawsuit against Napster, a company providing a means for music fans to share MP3s over the Internet without paying royalties to the copyright owners. Napster is a file-sharing program used on the Internet which allows computer users to connect through a central entity so that they can swap music files, primarily in the MP3 format. The Napster company began as only a facilitator for this process of swapping by enabling people to register and link to one another, and Napster says that it is not responsible for what people swap. The music industry disagrees and sees Napster as making it possible for people to evade copyright laws by redistributing music files without paying royalties. However, the downloading of music is only one aspect of the changed environment that the spread of the personal computer and the development of the Internet have brought about, and there are many areas of intellectual property that may have to be rethought in a world where copyrighted material can be transmitted around the world electronically in a matter of seconds. Many copyright owners such as the large music publishing companies have taken the position that such downloading is simply a crime and must be stopped, while some artists have taken the position that what is happening is a major shift in the economics of publishing so that the artist can have more control over his or her works and

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ere, the music industry will have to find ways of distributing music online itself, and even then will not be likely to be able to stop other forms of music sharing. Indeed, the millions who have been sharing music already constitute a political and economic force. In fact, the music industry may have ignored the fact that millions of those sharing music are also among the largest customers for music industry products: While Napster and record moguls battle in court, copyright owners are weighing action against others in the filesharing movement, including individuals who post large quantities of music on their personal Web sites. By continuing down the road of litigation, the recording industry may create more righteous indignation among the sharers, including some who are "already spending the larger part of their disposable income on CDs," says Peter Jaszi, who teaches copyright law at American University in Washington (Sloan and Lardner 54). While it is becoming clear that the music labels will have to institute some form of downloading of their own, they have resisted not just out of fear of losing control of what they have but because they waited so long to do it at all: The biggest stumbling block for music labe

Category: Government - D