File Sharing In Radiohead's Album Kid A

File sharing distributes mass quantities of copyrighted material and, therefore qualifies as an infringement on private property. Copyright owners argue that file-sharing is essentially; and end users are obtaining files that they did not pay for (MIOT, 2005). In order to prevent original creations of intellectual property from being used by others without permission, these works require protection in the form of a copyright. The 1976 Copyright Act states that musical works, including any accompanying words and sound recordings, ones are types of work that require copyright protection. Music copyright owners include the recording companies, composers of lyrics, performers, and composers of music and tunes. Recording studios own the rights to

Metallica, tracking users through an independent firm over one weekend, collected the names of 335,435 people who copied or allowed others to copy Metallica's songs. Dr. Dre also tracked users several weeks later, identifying over 239,000 alleged infringers (Honigsberg, 2002). Metallica and Dr. Dre started to sue every single person who infringed their music. The better than expected sales of Radiohead’s album Kid A can be attributed to the premature release or “leakage” of the tracks on Napster. A study conducted by the Pew Internet & American Life Project surveyed 3,000 musicians and songwriters about their views about file sharing. Surprisingly, they found that 35% of the subjects agreed that file sharing was not necessarily bad because it helped market and distribute the artist’s work and twenty three percent agreed that file sharing was harmful. When asked about the effect on their career, 37% were indifferent and 35% report that free downloading has actually boosted their reputation (MITO, 2005). The one major problem that bugged the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) was physical copies of music, such as CDs started to fall, when Napster came onto the scene. But studies suggest that, in fact, record sales had actually increased before Napster shut down. In 2000, when Napster was at its peak, record sales increased by 500 million dollars.2 7 FromJanuary to March 4, 2001, sales of CDs were up 5.7% from the same period in 2000,28 but after Napster was shut down, record sales dropped. Napster claimed that overall CD sales actually went up due to the exposure of the music as a result of its service and that it caused no harm to the market. (UCI, 2004). Napster's