Your Mp 3 Files example essay topic

Napster Under Glass Online, you can find a digital version of any song that your heart desires from classical to hardcore to country in less than 10 - 15 minutes. Terabytes or 1000000000000 (a trillion) bytes of Mp 3 files can be found online at peak times, which roughly translates to 330,000 songs in 3100 different collections. A Mp 3 is an individual song converted into a digital format and playable on computers. A popular program easily accessible on the Internet is called Napster. After you download it from Napster's site, you basically tell it where you keep your Mp 3 files and when it connects it cross-references everyone's files and lets you search through them all and download as you please. 90% of the files that are traded daily are illegally "ripped" from CDs.

Napster has a blurb at startup that states "Copying or distributing unauthorized Mp 3 files may violate United States and / or foreign copyright laws. Compliance with copyright law remains your responsibility". The RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) is charging the site with copyright infringement and alleges that Napster has created a base for music piracy on an unprecedented scale. Napster contends that they provide the platform, not the actions, and that as the blurb states it's up to the people. Napster is not at fault because the RIAA has overstepped their boundaries and infringed on first amendment rights online. Should the owner of the gun shop be charged with murder if a man he sold a gun to decides to shoot another man in cold blood?

Of course not, if the shop owner followed all of the laws that govern him. Should the car dealership be charged with vehicular felonies every time one of their vehicles is involved in a crime? Certainly not. So why should software's originator be responsible for what their software is used for?

They shouldn't, but the only reason the RIAA is jumping all over the Napster community is that they can't just go out and arrest everybody who decides to trade Mp 3's online. The real people that the RIAA should crack down on are the people who use the rippers. A ripper is a computer program used to convert (rip) a musical track off of a CD and into a Mp 3. They can be found on public shareware sites fairly simply with a search engine. The problem here is that the public in general uses them and can download them just like any other software. It all comes down to a subject of prevention.

Until the music industry can prevent the ripping of the tracks from CDs using some type of encoding, then people can freely copy tracks around and write them onto CDs with a CD burner. However, if you own the CD, it is not illegal to remix the tracks on a new CD. This battle has set the Internet community on its ear because of the free speech rights at risk. If they limit our file transfers, what will be next?

Email postage? Maybe, but as most of us hope, that will never come about. Piracy happens every day on the Internet, and currently there is no really effective way to deal with it that hasn't already been compromised. If the RIAA strikes down Napster, then another platform will start up. If the big music labels come up with an encoding technology to compromise rippers, then an enterprising hacker will crack it. When the DVD industry came out with DVDs, it was feared that users with accelerated CD burners would try to copy DVDs.

They developed a scrambler so that if you tried to copy the data then it wouldn't transfer over. Recently, a progressive hacker cracked the algorithm and spread it around the Internet prior to being arrested by some of the large DVD companies. Someone will tear anything down that is put up. The Internet is a free ground for all people universally to share ideas, no matter how unpopular they may be, and anything else they deem wanting. If Napster goes under, then the same trading will be happening, just in a much slower format on internet relay chats and instant messengers. Friends will still exchange zip disks full of Mp 3's.

And there is nothing the RIAA can do about it but come out with new encrypted CDs that CD players can still read, but that hackers can't record. The RIAA has overstepped their boundaries by treading into the Internet. Napster is not at fault that there is such a big trade in Mp 3's. The designers of Napster were just a bunch of college students trying to do something for the community of friends that they possessed.