Saturday 23 April 2011

What has NAPSTER Done..?

NAPSTER, as we all know, is a very famous online music store. They are known for being the pioneer of peer-to-peer file sharing internet service that specialized sharing audio files with MP3 format. They were one of the company which ran into legal difficulties over copyright infringement, besides website such as Gnutella, Freenet and many others. Therefore, the federal judge has ordered Napster to stop the trading of copyrighted materials. Napster was said to have created a monster. However, the judge's order does not directly affect the estimated 20 million people who have used Napster's website to download a lot of MP3 encoded songs since last year because it is unlikely for the recording industry to to file separate lawsuits against individuals. I'm attaching a useful link for your further reading on what has been discussed during the case.
http://news.cnet.com/2100-1023-243698.html
In my opinion, in this case of file sharing, especially audio file sharing and downloading, we can't just blame these websites for providing this kind of services. Although these website hosts are guilty, awareness of copyright infringement issue should come from everybody. They should know how does it feels when their piece of work is being widely spread in illegal way. Internet is like a very big playground that allows everybody to come and 'play' with it. These Internet users are like kids who enters the playground. Its very hard to control them when they are at the playground. Only when they are given a sufficient knowledge and a good ethical teaching, maybe these 'kids' can behave better and they will know what are the limits in everything they do in their daily live.

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