Music Revolution

The first thing that comes to mind for me when referrying to copyrighting infringements on the Internet is Napster and music downloading. When Napster came on it experienced great sucess. Like many new revolutions in the Internet it started from the brilliant ideas of a college student and soon became a huge business. According to Wikipedia, this technology enable people to share MP3 format song files quickly and easily. Unfortunately people in the music industry were not happy and they accused Napster of massive copyright violation. 

The music industry was so upset because Napster enable people to download song for free eliminating the need for people to actually buy their albums and singles. Their argument was that artists and the recording industry owned the music and Napster was giving away their property for free.  When I herd about this I honestly felt like musicians were being very greedy. Most artists make more moeny then doctors and layaers and they were having a tantrum over a 99-cent music download. Meanwhile, most of the users of Nebster were college students who you use and thing to save a buck and their idols were trying to take this away from them. The American heavy metal band Metallica brought the situation to the next level by bring Napster to court. According to FreeAdvice, the Ninth Circuit Court reviewed and uphealth the Norther Disrick Court of California ruling on the injunction, which shut down Napster. The courts ruling stated that Napster was guilty of contributory infringement because the company knew that infinging activities were taking place and the system comtributed to the infinging activities by enabling them. Napster was forced to shut down but it still operates, not with nearly as much popularity and success as before, under a different title that charges its users for the downloads. 

In 1998 the Digital Millenium Copyright Act became a law. Copyright Infringement Lyability Limitation is the one of five titles that make up this law which applies to file-sharing dowloading. The act creates limitations on a liablility of online service providers for copyright infringement when engaging in certain types of activity, such as downloading music. 

Since then, many more different providers have been established to perfrom that same task. Two of the more popular of all the providers are Limewire and DC++ which still enable users to download music and movies, which is the new big thing, for free. However, everyone knows a friend or a friend of a friend that has ben arrested or gotten into some kind of trouble for excessively downloading materal from these serivce providers. If you are one of the unlucky few, you are contacted and sued for an astronomical amount of money. This is the music industry's way of using fear in the hopes of prevending others from accessing their music without paying for it. 

However, I dont think the reason why people use these providers is out of fear of being cought by the goverment, no one think this would actualy happen to them. I download music every day without the feeling that I'm doing some sort of crime. These programs slow down your computer and sometimes give you computer a virus. That is why most stay away from these programs. However, new providers liek YouTube have provided users with the ability to listen pretty much any music track or music video for free without having to the worry of downloading something onto your computer abd without the fear of being prosecuted for it. YouTube accomlishes this through their Copyright Infringement policy. The policy requires all users to confirm that they own the copyright or have permission form the copyright holder to upload content. If a user violates these regulatons the content they upload is immediately removed, and repeated violater are bared from accessing YouTube.