CopyRight Reform

We were given an option of essay questions to pick for our latest assignment, I decided to pick the essay question about Copyright reform. During my research, I read in John Alderman's book ‘Sonic Boom – Napster, P2P and the Battle for the Future of Music’ some interesting stuff about Napster. Now, when Napster was around I was too young to use it and at the time I had never heard about it as I was 9 and busy laughing at my feet (I don't know why I found them amusing, but it would kill several hours of my day). 


Here is an extract taken from my essay, these two paragraphs are explaining the rise of Napster and the change within the record industry: 

In the late 1990’s a peer-to-peer file sharing service was created called ‘Napster’. This service allowed users to share their MP3 files with other users easily, avoiding the market for receiving songs and most importantly it was all free. As Napster was user friendly, the popularity grew. By mid-2000, Napster had around 500,000 people using it every night, a third of the number that typically used AOL at any given time (Alderman, 2001). Songs and artists were rediscovered by listeners (Alderman, 2001) as many users would share files of classic songs to people who may only have the song on record or cassette. What understandably drove the labels, as well as many artists, crazy was that there was no mechanism in place for them to get paid for this frenzied consumption of music that they either created or held the rights to (Alderman, 2001). Napster was able to do what it did because the internet made it possible for the creator Shawn Fanning. It is bad for the music industry as they would be losing money because their songs are being transferred for free, thus making them lose out in potential buyers, however file sharing benefits the public because it is free and avoids consumerism.

As Napster was spreading with college students, it was clear that baby steps weren’t working for the record industry (Alderman, 2001). So each major label commenced efforts to reach out to consumers online, not just as experiments in community or fan sites, but in actual distribution of their prized catalogues, the music that was the base of each company’s profits (Alderman, 2001). Clearly the music industry recognised that they were missing out in a whole new market, as most consumers want the latest news and entertainment as soon as possible moving onto the Internet was the best move. Companies such as Bertelsmann purchased the failing CDNow service, which had tried to be the Amazon.com of CDs, while also joining with Universal to create GetMusic, another online distributor (Alderman, 2001). Other major companies, such as EMI began talks with Liquid Audio to digitize a chunk of albums (Alderman, 2001). Slowly, action took place and the momentum was there for a big industry move into a workable position online (Alderman, 2001). However large the move was for the music industry, Napster beat them to it and because they were so far a head they had an extremely large fan base, not to mention file sharing will always be popular as it is free.

The problem with the music industry was that they wanted to replace the CD format as it lacked copy protection and was so easy to burn a disc, at a very low cost, and potentially make hundreds of copies to sell. BGM tried to find a solution and partnered up with an Israeli firm Midbar to release two albums using its Cactus Data shield technology, which prevented owners of the CDs from copying them with burners (Alderman, 2001). 100,000 discs were released in this new format, however, the problem of compatibility meant that they received a high rate of return. Thus resulting in the cancellation of this experiment and replacing the returns with non protected disks (Alderman, 2001). These experiments were a great chance for the music industry to try and tackle the problem of people copying CDs and sharing files across the internet, however, as personal computers have the capability to rip CDs, store them on their memory and play it back; most people will want to use this aspect of their computer. So taking away the chance to put music from our CD onto our computers would not make people buy CDs as MP3 files were growing in popularity.

In the United States, MP3 files were growing vastly popular with devoted and enthusiastic users making Napster a very big hit. Free file sharing was growing at an exponential speed, and it wasn’t too long before a record label or artist would challenge the legality of Shawn Fanning’s creation.