Napster
...ave them to friends or family. It is essentially the same process. You are taking a finished music product and making a copy of it. The tape is not being sold to anyone, just being given away or kept for ones own personal enjoyment. The same also applies to the VCR and recording movies off the television. When you record a movie and then proceed to watch it again without having to pay for it no one is complaining about it. You can make copies of the movie regardless of the FBI warning just as long as you don’t sell the copies of the tape. The lawyer defending Napster in their lawsuit agrees with everyone else that uses Napster. He states, “When you think of Napster, you think of music. But the first thing that struck me was that this was an important case not only for the music industry but also for the whole Internet. Here you have a new technology – in terms of peer to peer sharing information and if that technology is going to work, you must allow people to provide central indexes of the data. Somebody’s got to maintain those indexes. I mean, it’s just like a newspaper that publishes classified ads. You’ve got to have a place where people can go who want to participate in that kind of activity. And if you, in effect, impose on the directory-service provider liability to investigate, monitor, and control what the users are doing, it is very difficult to see how that kind of technology is never going to work.” Mp3’s are shared over what Napster calls the Napster Community. This is all done over a network, which links thousands and thousands of computers together. The setup is quits simple. You simply go to the search tab and you then click on one of two ways to search. You either type in the name of the artist and you will get a list of songs by them. Or you can type in the name of a particular song and find what you want that way. Once you have found your song you will select the file you desire out of all the listed and you begin to download it. The transfer process then begins and finally when it is done you have a complete song stored on your computer in MP3 format, which you can now burn onto a CD if you wish. According to the Recording Industry Associates of America this is illegal an illegal activity. They disagree with the fact that people should be able to trade songs freely over the Internet. To them it is considered to be piracy and copyright infringement, although, they did lose a lawsuit against Diamond Multimedia Systems in 1999. The statute read that all noncommercial copying by consumers is lawful. It is recognized as noncommercial consumer copying under the Supreme Courts criteria. Napster itself had just recently been sued for copyright infringement. In the suit, the RIAA is seeking damages of $100,000 for each copyright-protected song sw...