Mp 3 Files example essay topic

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 MP 3. com and Scour. The trading of MP 3'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 MP 3 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". MP 3 is a file format which compresses audio files to efficiently store the audio data in files that can be easily downloaded on the Internet. MP 3 files are identified by the file extension MP 3 and require specialized players which decompress the files and then play the audio files like a regular CD. For all practical purposes, MP 3 files can be exact, near-perfect digital copies of the original recorded material. In other words, an MP 3 file is a near-perfect copy of a CD and can be stored on someone's hard drive in a very small file.

Music is a creative process, that should be shared and enjoyed by as many people as possible. However record companies around the world believe that they should get money for every single song (or album) released, either online or offline. This has caused a big battle with music-buying consumers and greedy record companies and artists. The controversy started in early 1999, when a program called Napster appeared on the Internet. The program allowed various online users to search and trade files called MP 3's. MP 3's are small sized, computer files which are songs that can reach sounds up to CD-Quality.

At Millions of people traded songs daily. While lesser known acts and bands supported Napster, many superstar acts were angry about Napster. Rock band, Metallica, were so outraged that hundreds of their songs were being traded online, that they sued Napster in spring of 2000. Many lawsuits followed, and in early 2001 Napster finally shut down.

However, with it's "death" other peer-to-peer services were created, the most popular being WinMX and Kazaa.