Jason

Jason Garcia

WRC 1023

Alyson Martin

March 24, 2005

File Sharing: Good or Bad?

Napster, Kazaa, Audio Galaxy, Aries, Win MX, Imesh. All these companies are the cause of a great deal of talk in not only the media, but between people all across our country. Everybody is asking questions. How does it work? Who is behind it? What are the laws behind all these court cases? They are all file sharing communities, for music, on the Internet. Quite a few of the major music companies are suing the music sharing communities, like Napster, claiming copyright violations. They say that this is damaging to music sales. These allegations against these companies are far from the truth. Person to person file sharing communities such as Napster, are neither unlawful nor harmful to the music industry. Downloading music on the Internet has been going on for quite a few years. When it first started people would search the Internet and illegally download music files from web pages in a format known as MP.3. MP.3's are just a compressed form of a song, which makes it faster and easier to download from the Internet. The websites came out that you could download music for free and easily find it. Almost immediately there were many court cases that were won by the record companies against websites such as MP3.com and Scour.

The trading of MP3's or digital music over the Internet is all ways going to be an important part of the music industry, and is an unrealistic goal to try to control. The cost of controlling the piracy issues over the Internet would cost record companies more money than what they are losing due to MP3 trading. The record industry is trying to fight the major sites and companies in court with copyright suits. Quinlan states "Although downloading music over the Internet and playing it back on computer or portable digital music players has become increasingly popular, major record labels have been slow to embrace distribution over the Web because of the difficulty in preventing unauthorized - and unpaid - copying of songs." MP3 is a file format which compresses audio files to efficiently store the