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The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language defines copyright as “the legal right granted to an author, composer, playwright, publisher, or distributor to exclusive publication, production, sale, or distribution of a literary, musical, dramatic, or artistic work�. Copyrighted music usually comes in the form of Mpeg Layer 3 (Mp3). Groundbreaking, Mp3 is a form of compression which allows near CD quality sound files to be compressed down to 3-5 megabytes. This has allowed the transfer of sound files “ripped� off copyrighted CD’s to be widely distributed illegally throughout the internet (McCandless, 2001). Copyrighted music pirates are therefore anyone who partakes in this distribution of material.
Serious copyrighted music piracy began when digitising music onto CD’s became the accepted medium for the release of records, and this onset of file-sharing technologies into public access through the Internet turned past models for the distribution of digital creative content completely on their heads.
The process was cheap and tempting. With the invention of the CD burner, consumers could obtain exact copies of original CD’s only having to pay a few dollars for the blank CD (Napster, 2004). After this came Mp3, which spurred an explosion of pirating through trading forums and P2P netwoking programs like Napster. Indeed, Napster was the main driving force behind the massive increase in the online sharing of copyrighted materials in the late 1990s (Jones, 2003). Originally, Napster’s main use was for sharing Mp3 files, however soon after Napster was created, a rush of copycat programs such as Kazaa, Imesh and Morpheus emerged as alternatives. These programs were used for a wider array of content including images, movies and software (McCandless, 2001).
Understandably, the original Napster and it's spin-offs were and continue to be loathed by those affiliated with the music industry. To them, this digital creative content was not an opportunity, but a liability. Issues of contention broke out within multi-million companies like Sony, who, in effect, was a threat unto itself with Sony Music (albums') profit being seriously thwarted by Sony Mp3 technology. The irony was clear. Anger wasn't just confined to the companies either. In conjunction with record companies, well-known band Metallica decided to take action. They had the original Napster shut down its central index, thus rendering the program useless (Schumacher-Rasmussen, 2003).
Nowadays such networks like Kazaa are fighting on where Napster was legitimised. Decentralised so effectively, in order to shut down one of these programs' networks one would need to delete the program from every one of the millions of user’s computers. An impossible task by anyone’s standards. There is no way to tell how many copies of Kazaa exist, however one study suggests that an average of 3.5 million users are connected at any one time (Schumacher-Rasmussen, 2003). Therefore it would be literally impossible to shut down a decentralised network such as Kazaa. The only way record companies have combatted these programs is to degrade the integrity of the content available by flooding the network with bogus songs filled with loops and digital distortion. This was pioneered by Madonna (BBC, 2003).
The future is unclear. When faced with such a history, it is possible to assume that shutting down Napster has had little, if any, effect on the amount of music being stored and swapped on the Internet (McCandless, 2001).
Subjects like the ‘New Napsters’, substitute indexers, separate centralised and decentralised networks, systems that swap files via instant message networks, lone websites that host pirated MP3s and discussion groups such as Usenet and IRC are all a threat, and, as previously discussed, if a court wanted to really shut down Napster or a similar program in the future, it would have to remove all the files from all the predicted 3.5 million computers connected to Napster and allother affiliations with those networks.
Some organisations are in place, such as The Recording Industry Association America RIAA. Determined, they aim to combat and overcome the legal cat and mouse game that is copyrighted music piracy. In the USA the RIAA have pursued individuals, particularly college students, hoping that making an example of the day-to-day offenders will act as a deterrent to the nearly 61 million users of peer-to-peer file-sharing technology across the country. Additionally, many undercover Internet detectives of Novell's Internet Piracy Unit IPU, a global group of "technical investigators" who scour the Net 24 hours a day, are searching for bigger music pirates and Warez traders who trade in unlicensed software products - and busting them. IPU detectives spend their working week infiltrating warez world, gathering evidence, pretending to be a trader, a courier, a cracker, a newbie, a lamer, a lurker, and a leecher. Finally, hard and tight laws are being rapidly introduced to block file-swapping technologies such as Napster, Gnutella, Freenet and others and allow copyright owners to protect their music and software on the Internet with heavy duty encryption.
But new anti-piracy technology, encryption and laws will not stop copyright music piracy and the thrill of downloading 100 megabytes of illegal 'Warez' to the public every day. The battle will simply continue (Ward, 2001). The Internet is by its nature lawless and designed for the free exchange of information - with emphasis on the 'free'. As long as there's a market, there will be a black market(McCandless, 2001). With hope there will be more and more legitimate sites opening up, but it is suspected that decentralised networks will continue on for a long time to come. As Napster has proved a million times over, as long as there is information with value, there will be people willing to take it for free. When faced with the ever-replenishing hi-fi shop window that is the Internet, where they can take and not hurt anyone nor be caught, people will take and keep on taking.
Copyright © 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company.
Napster (2004) 'What Is Napster.' [Retrieved 12 Aug 2004]. Available:
http://www.napster.com/what_is_napster.html
Victoria Cole 22:45, 7 Sep 2004 (EST)
