Many significant cases dealing with copyright have been filed over the years. Copyright laws continue to help protect the artists of creative works by helping to determine the legal rights of how such works can be reproduced, distributed, displayed, or performed. To help ensure digital ownership, artists are required to register and copyright their works. Through past cases, important precedencies have been established.
Napster
Developed by programmers Sean Fanning and Sean Parker in 1999, Napster was a website that used peer-to-peer (P2P) sharing to allowed users to trade copyrighted music files stored on Napster’s servers without any payment necessary. P2P networks enable computers to connect directly to each other and utilize specialized
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Napster was found guilty and ordered to stop allowing sharing of copyright-protected material without adequate compensation to owners. Napster lost the case largely because it used a central server that provided transparency to its operations and the ability to control the flow of music (Chandra, Goel, Miesing, 2010). The court found that since the names of songs and masters resided in an index on Napster’s server, and gave users the opportunity to research which songs they wished to download, Napster was under the duty to police it. (Gordon, …show more content…
This objective is promoted by discouraging infringement as well as by the successful defense of copyright infringement actions (2001).
Eminem vs. Universal Music Group
One of the more recent cases filed was in 2007, where Eminem sued Universal Music Group over the way royalties are computed for digital music, which comes down to whether an individual song sold online should be considered a license or a sale. The difference is far from academic because, as with most artists, Eminem’s contract stipulates that he gets 50 percent of the royalties for a license but only 12 percent for a sale (Sasario, 2011).
In the end the Supreme upheld a lower court’s decision that digital music should be treated as a license. This case was significant especially for older artists because record companies didn’t start revising their contracts to include digital sales among an artist’s record royalties until the early 2000s. Artist such as the Allman Brothers, also followed Eminem and sued both Universal and Sony BMG Music Entertainment over similar contractual issues.