Internet Music Downloading

Internet Music Downloading

In today’s world music is a core part of being a college student. You 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. Thousands of cases have been filed against “music pirates” and in many cases the criminals are college students such as you or me. In fact, college students are one of the prime targets of the RIAA (Graham 2004). Since 1999, CD sales have gone down 26%; a trend the RIAA attributes to illegal downloading (Abbott 2003). Even with the threat of a law suit, more shareware programs emerged, at least until Apple provided a solution, a legal solution. In 2003 Apple released its own music program, iTunes. iTunes provides users with the opportunity to store their music and buy tracks for $0.99 each. Since its launch, iTunes has been wildly popular and successful and has spawned other legal downloading companies. Napster re-emerged in 2004, this time with legal rights to selling music. Also in 2004, $330 million was generated from legal music downloads and the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) expects that number to double in 2005 (Legal Music Downloads 2005).

Though there are still ways to obtain music for free illegally, some people are beginning to turn to solution like iTunes. ITunes still offers deals to its customers such as discounted albums or the opportunity to buy single tracks instead of an entire record (Shapiro 2005). They also have a music store where customers can purchase a song for .99 cents. Apple provides news on up-and-coming artists as well as exclusive acoustic and rare tracks.

Students today don't understand that downloading music over computer networks without purchasing copyright permission is both unethical and against the law. At colleges around the country, the ritual of downloading free music using illegal file-sharing programs has become as much a part of campus life as football, frat parties and, oh yes, studying. Some Universities, however, are taking matters into their own hands. They are charging students a small fee, and offering them legal, licensed online music services (Hanthorn 2005). In January of 2004 Penn State University was the first college or university to launch its service agreement with Napster. The University provided this service for free as a part of the students overall information technology-related services that are partially funded by the University's Information Technology Fee. Many colleges have since followed in their steps, including Hampton University. Some local universities, Including Christopher Newport University, have taken a different approach by installing hardware that will significantly slow down a student’s internet connection when they download music (Hanthorn 2005). Andrew Crawford, assistant director of information technology services here at Christopher Newport says, “"If [students are] very determined, [they] might be able to get a song or two per week, But not the massive amounts of downloads that students expect. A lot of them have given up."

William and Mary