Piracy
...see proof of this on a daily basis by the thumping bass from your neighbor's room or the headphones visible from an MP3 player on students while walking to class. But where are all of these students getting all this music from? Another core part of being a college student is being continuously broke. With CDs costing upwards of ten dollars for as little as eight tracks of music, it's commonsense that college students would make up a large percentage of illegal downloader's. As a result of the massive use of free peer to peer programs the record industry has suffered greatly. They are working hard in trying hard to put a stop to it, but they can't do it alone.
Shawn Fanning brought the first example of illegal downloading to us in the summer of 1999 (Abbott 2003). Fanning provided the public with downloadable tracks of music using a program known as Napster. At its prime, there were over 80 million registered users downloading from Napster (Lam 2001). Only 6 months after operation, the RIAA (the Recording Industry Association of America) filed a lawsuit against Shawn Fanning and Napster for $100,000 per each downloaded song. The legal problem with Napster was that downloaders were not paying the due royalties to the artist and producers. Napster and its contemporary, Audiogalaxy, were not exact forms of shareware, so the RIAA was able to sue them as companies. The people who were actually doing the downloading got off scotch-free with thousands of free downloaded music tracks. As a result of the case Napster was shut down. Today we are introduced to subsequent forms of downloading, like KaZaA and Bearshare, would create a whole new kind of trouble for individuals getting free music.
KaZaA is not a centralized company; therefore it cannot be shut down (Abbott 2003). Because of this the RIAA turned to targeting the users downloading the music....
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