The History Of P2p Networking

I. Introduction

For many centuries, music has been a form of art and entertainment for the world's population and it has shaped our lives in many different ways. However, just like shoplifters who steal from stores, there are people out there who want to steal or receive music from artists at no cost to them. There have been artists that attempt to steal ideas from other people and use it as their own, which would be considered an act of copyright infringement. There have also been smugglers who stole albums from many artists and sold them to the public, causing the artist and record companies to lose money. However, the one that tops all of these cases is the fact that many artist's albums and songs are available online and can be downloaded at no cost to the user, which is known today as modern day piracy.

Music Piracy has become a major issue in today's society, but without it, the music industry wouldn't be so diverse and many artists would not have as many listeners as they do today. Without the ability to distribute and share music with others in the world, there wouldn't be a surge of fans for the artists and the music profession would be meaningless. Even though it is a major help to the artists, there are still many who formed lawsuits about the fact that their songs were being freely distributed on the Internet without compensation, which is why many consider it unlawful. However, not only is it important to know the origins of this musical sharing movement, but also the fact that not all music piracy can be considered an unlawful act.

II. The Napster Controversy

The beginning of the modern day music piracy era began when an 18 year old college dropout known as Shawn Fanning decided to create a program that would simply be able to swap files between users through an Internet connection. This program source code only took sixty hours to make and was proposed to be a solution of finding easy access to music between each user throughout the World with little hassle in downloading the track. Once the program was completed, it was released to the web and millions of users began to use it as a way to "trade music easily through a network of users", but then there also came many angry people who would file suit against the program creator.

The Recording Industry Association of America, better known as the R.I.A.A., filed suit against Napster for tributary copyright infringement. This means that Napster weren't the ones committing the copyright infringement; but was facilitating the act by creating and managing the program for public use, which was being used for swapping music illegally. Napster refuted this argument by stating that the actual songs were not in Napster's possession, but within each user's possession and swapped between the users themselves. This statement was used to prove that Napster was not acting illegal in any way, but the R.I.A.A. construed this statement as a "guilty-by-association" case and Napster was still liable for the illegal trading of songs without the artist's consent.

On top of the R.I.A.A. who filed lawsuit against the fifty person company, there were also several major musical artists who followed with lawsuits of their own. The most famous lawsuit that came from the music industry was filed by an 80's heavy metal band known as Metallica. As they were writing songs for a new album, the band noticed that all of their music was available for free trading on the Napster system, which upset them, especially the bassist Lars Ulrich. It upset Lars Ulrich enough that he filed a lawsuit that would eventually be taken to the U.S. Supreme Court. His claim was that their music was "hijacked" without permission or consent of Metallica and simply became available on the Napster system.

Lars Ulrich stated that if music is free for downloading, then there should be no music Industry as there would be no money and no jobs in music as musicians would work for free. He also stated that the only way that people could get the music without computers is stealing the album itself. The only difference is that you'll more likely hear "You're under arrest" instead of "File's Done". However, his argument could be rebutted as over 70% of the money that is made by musicians is through their live concerts and merchandise sales, not through their actual sales through albums and online downloads. Nevertheless, the Supreme Court sided with Lars Ulrich, Metallica, the R.I.A.A. and many other artists who filed lawsuits and demanded that the program's operation be terminated.

The outcome of the Supreme Court case also caused thousands of other R.I.A.A. lawsuits that were filed against individual users on the Napster system for illegally sharing songs with other users without the consent of record labels or artists. However, the beginning and end of the Napster system started a legacy that would remain for several years to come.

III. Other Programs Arise

Due to the creation of the Napster program, this caused many others to emulate the program and continue the free trading of not only music, but movies and free versions of paid programs as well. One of the major programs that arose after Napster was an emulation known as iMesh. This program came later in 1999 and was originally a very small community with only 10,000 users on their servers. They were able to survive many years until the R.I.A.A. decided to shut down their system and that was mainly due to the company creating the software hard to connect to the Internet. This was done as they did not want to grow too quickly, which their ally program Scour did and was shut down by the R.I.A.A. before iMesh was going to join forces with them. However, the iMesh program was the first to create a multi-source download system, which created faster downloads and became the pioneer of this type of connection. After several years, they were told by the R.I.A.A. to either rid of the copyrighted material of force termination.

Another program that was formed after the Napster revolution was a program known as Kazaa. This program was able to implement multi-source download and started the popularity of video and paid program downloading. The program created a major base of users, which exceeded well over 5 million users connected to the network at one time. However, this program became vastly unpopular quickly due to an ad causing virus program that came along with Kazaa known as Bonzo Buddy. This program caused many popup ads to be placed on computers, which then started the revolution of popup ad blockers on web browsers. Even though the program had the virus, a number of users still used