Napster's Impact On Society

With the introduction of peer-to-peer file sharing sites such as Napster, Kazaa, and Limewire, the music industry has never been the same. In the beginning of the millennium many people had predicted that these file sharing sites would be the end and to some extent the new beginning of the music industry. Within the first few years these predictions were somewhat true. You have a business that for the last sixty plus years has had few changes, if any, now trying to scramble to keep up with today’s new technology. In this paper I will dive into how Napster changed the way the music companies produce, promote and sell their property. I will explain how the music industry instead of embracing and excepting the new, what we call today the

Napster was the name that was given to two music-focused online services that at the time pioneered the way we peer-to-peer file share music and audio files in the MP3 format. Napster was not the originator of peer-to-peer file sharing, but they paved the way by making its seemingly easy to share and download music, with a very simple interface and a user friendly environment. Napster was founded by Shawn Fanning, John Fanning and Sean Parker. These three entrepreneurs will go down in the history books as either criminals or as heroes, depending on which side of the isle you are on. Napster started its service in June of 1999 and ended its service in July of 2001. Even though it was only online for two years, it at its peak had more than 80 million individual subscribers. It was the number one use of the internet in college dormitories. With the access to high-speed internet college students were using at the point 61 percent of external network usage. Thus with a frantic thinking that the colleges would be under fire for facilitating "illegal” file sharing they banned the site from there

In March of 2000 there was a lawsuit filed by the band Metallica, after they discovered a demo of their song "I Disappear" circulating across the internet before it was intended for release. This intern lead it to being played on radio stations across the world, which also showed them that their previous songs and albums were also being shared across the digital super highway. A month after the lawsuit was filed the rapper known as Dr. Dre followed in Metallica's footsteps by adding another lawsuit against Napster, after Napster had declined to remove his music from the website. This was just the beginning of Napster's problems. In 2000, the American musical recoding company A&M Records along with several other recording companies, through Recording Industry Association of America or the RIAA, sued Napster stating the company was violating a copyright law under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Specifically that its users were directly violating the "plaintiffs" copyrights. That Napster was solely responsible for contributing to the infringement of the "plaintiffs" copyrights. Napster first lost the case in the District Courts, but then appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. The Ninth Circuit upheld the District Courts ruling and demanded that Napster keep track of the activities of its servers and restricts access to the