Music Piracy
...ed with Napster was “Guilty Conscience” by Eminem. Easy enough. I was hooked. I was constantly connecting to the Net and collecting more and more music. I had enough patience for only one song at a time though. We used dial-up Internet and our computer was not quite high-end. Each song took twenty minutes or more depending on traffic. It was okay for me at the time. At that time I knew very little about computers and the Internet. I was totally unaware that colleges and universities were using super quick Internet connections on their entire campuses. I visited my sister at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and she was connected with a T-1 or T-3 speed Internet line. Talk about fast. Just surfing the web was much more enjoyable. Sites loaded and opened practically as you click the mouse. Then I downloaded some songs. I was blown away! The songs I was waiting around twenty minutes for at home, she could own in two to three seconds. I hardly had time to watch the “Download” bar reach 100% before I already had the song. Before I knew it, I downloaded forty songs… In five minutes! My sister introduced me to some of her floor mates. I would say, between four of the guys, they had over ten-thousand songs. No joke. One guy had a library of over three-thousand songs himself. He told me about how he could download peoples’ entire libraries at a time. The time to download somebody’s entire library was very comparable to me downloading one song. I started to see the bigger picture and what the record labels had been complaining about for some time. Sam Costello, author of the online article, “Universities Refuse to ban Napster,” wrote in 2000 that many U.S. universities such as Princeton, Duke, UNC, Michigan and Purdue were all refusing to ban Napster from their students. The universities claimed they were concerned over censorship and academic freedom. Duke University said it was “committed to fundamental principles of academic freedom and access to information; and that there were other uses and educational benefits of Napster.” The only approach some of these schools took was e-mailing its students information and rules regarding copyrighting. Dr. Dre and Metallica were two of the main artists leading the way in the fight against Napster and the distribution of royalty-free music. They were also backed up by media empires such as Universal and Sony records and BMG Music. The Recording Industry Association of America filed a suit against Napster charging them with tributary copyright infringement. In other words, Napster was accused of facilitating others’ violation of copyright, not violating copyright itself. After a few months in court, Napster was forced to shutdown the network. Messages were sent to all its users to stop sharing files by any other means. Millions of people were upset by this, but there was nothing they could do. Since Napster, ill...