The internet and digital music took people by surprise. Napster was created as a website for trading music mp3 tracks between user to user. Napster was looked at as a site for illegal music sharing. This pirated music sharing on the internet was a problem for record labels which in turn went into legal issues. In the documentary about Napster’s existence, “Downloaded”, it was said that Napster did not stop the share of ‘illegal’ music sharing once the government tried to shut down it’s system. After the people went to other music sharing software such as LimeWire or Music City to download their music. The government and RIAA thought that tackling Napster wold change the norm of downloading music, but it just showed how inevitable of getting music tracks were in the society. The record labels weren’t ready for the changes digitally which took them by the biggest surprise when they found out their music that was unreleased and released was being shared on this site. The legal issues came about because these record labels wanted full control over the delivery and monetization of all their records.
Napster was a free popular website which gave people the upper hand to receive any track they wanted through sharing from desktop to desktop. John Perry Barlow stated, “They were saying it’s just a matter of copyright is going to be fixed and maintained by some combination of both enforcement and education, this sounds like the War on Drugs, I don’t think this is gonna work…” The fact that the United State of America always tries to find a way to enforce and capitalize off of the problems in the society is pretty twisted. The idea of there being an education created and enforced to everyone over the very new digital world where there are millions of ‘pirates’ and hackers that can code their way to continuing the norm of downloading was a militant idea. Downloading music became a huge problem which made the government start creating lawsuits for copyright and infringement issues regarding mp3 tracks which can cost at least $1,000 fine. Being that I was born in 1998 and was more worried about a bottle than downloading my next mp3 track, I didn’t know that Napster was the founder of the mp3 track sharing world.
I personally grew up downloading music from LimeWire and loved music to the point where I created a YouTube lyric video from my Windows Movie Maker app for Mariah Carey’s ‘All I Want For Christmas Is You’ song. I listened and watched my lyric creation while gaining a few views for a couple weeks before it was taken down. Little did I know then, that copyrighting was a huge problem for the digital world. Do you think we will be able to create YouTube videos with our favorite music on it without getting sued or having the video taken down in the future?
Here is an episode of “The Proud Family” rendition of the illegal downloading of the music era. This is one of the ways I found out about it being a problem. This can be watched clearer if you have Disney Plus (S01 E05).
SOCIAL MEDIA & SOCIETY 
You must be logged in to post a comment.