The History Of P2P Networking
...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...
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