Music on the Internet

Paper Summary:

This paper examines how for the last several years, the recording industry has been battling to stop on-line music-swapping. It looks at how the battle began over Napster and has expanded to take on Napster's descendants. It evaluates how despite the abundance of evidence suggesting that on-line music-swapping actually boosts record sales, the recording industry feels that this practice robs them of potential profits. It looks at how client-to-client file-swapping software already exists and how in many cases it is open source. It shows that shutting down individual sites is only a temporary set-back to the overall music-swapping community, which can quickly move on to another site with the same basic code. It discusses how the battle for control continues because the recording industry continues to attempt to control what it sees as its rightful domain (recorded music) without realizing that it is mistakenly battling for control of the uncontrollable (the advance of technology in general and the internet in specific).

From the Paper:

"However, the recording industry quickly found that killing Napster did it precious little good. The time they had spent in court, and the apparent impending demise of Napster had already spawned numerous look-alikes such as AudioGalaxy. The recording industry began to go after those as well. However, not all of them were susceptible to the sort of lawsuits that brought down Napster. Napster had functioned through a centralized server that catalogued the MP3 collections of its users, and then put them in contact with other users who wish to copy something from that collection. However, many of Napster's descendants were either decentralized or less centralized file-swapping programs. Gnutella, for example, does not keep a centralized library, but rather maintains a spiderweb of networks through which a request is sent by individual users to individual users. Programs such as this, which have no centralized "command" and are not affiliated with a single company are almost impossible to sue or shut down."

More papers on Music on the Internet:

• Analytical Essay # 138716 : "Downloading Music from the Internet"
• Research Paper # 23883 : "Music Piracy on the Internet"
• Analytical Essay # 132452 : "Counterfeit and Pirated Goods on the Internet"

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