Seatbelt

Dan Miller

Ross O. Wagner

English 101-G70

8 June 2005

Internet File Sharing and the Music Industry

Imagine millions of songs accessible in one place. Today songs are just a few clicks away since the introduction of the internet and file sharing. File sharing is simply taking a file and allowing other internet users to download and use the file permanently. The accessibility and use of file sharing programs has devastated the music industry financially. The fact that almost every song recorded today is accessible through a free program encourages most consumers to download rather than buy. This is why illegal file sharing programs are driving the music industry's profits down.

The making of MP3's allows internet users to share and distribute songs quickly and easily. The letters MP are short for MPEG, which stands for Moving Picture Experts Group. The 3 stands for the third compression method that Dr. Karlkeinz Brandenburg, at the Frainhofer Institute, developed. "Ripping" or "Burning" is taking an original song or songs from a CD or other music source and compressing it to the small MP3 format. This method ingeniously removes all of the sounds and frequencies that the human ear cannot hear to eventually end up with a file that is about one tenth of the original size yet lack no noticeable quality (PC Complete 688-693). Now that the file is compressed, it is ready to do many new things that it could not do before. One of these is to be transferred over the internet. The conflict that arises from this is when people compress copyrighted music into the MP3 format and make it available to anyone on the internet (PC Complete 694). This is called "file sharing", and it is a major topic of debate among the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), who seeks total control of its copyrighted material.

The most popular form of exchanging music on the internet is known as file sharing. File sharing occurs after the music has been converted to smaller MP3 format. The smaller format allows the files to be downloaded, transferred, or copied in just a matter of seconds. The most popular file sharing program until a couple of years ago was Napster. Napster was a file sharing program that essentially gave birth to the file sharing industry. A federal lawsuit was filed against Napster for copyright violation. The federal court ruled Napster must remove any copyrighted material that had previously been available. Other programs, such as Kazaa and Limewire, are currently running on the internet allowing copyrighted songs to be downloaded illegally. These programs, while convenient and easy to use, are causing the sales of music CD's and the music industry's profits to decrease