Sharing – Music DownloadingSharing – Music DownloadingSharingMusic downloading is rapidly becoming one of the most popular online activities.Americans downloaded more than 200 million music tracks in 2004 alone. Nowadays, it is extremely easy to download free music from the Internet. All someone has to do is download some peer to peer file-sharing application such as Kazaa, Edonkey, Blubster, or Bearshare, and you have unlimited access to download just about anything that you please. But is downloading free music from one of these application legal? No, but I think it should be. I have downloaded over 500 songs, 20 music videos and 10 movies. I have been file sharing for over 6 years. I have used such programs like Bearshare Kazaa, and Limewire.
Because of this surge in popularity and because of the size of music files, high-speed Internet service has become a necessity for music lovers. In the past year alone, music-downloading sites have flooded the Web, giving Internet users more opportunities to access their favorite tunes inexpensively. Now more than ever, broadband Internet service is an essential tool for downloading quality music files.
The appeal of downloading music had tremendously grown during the same period that legal controversies have swirled around the Napster file-sharing service. The Recording Industry Association of America had argued that the Napster service violates copyright protections by allowing millions of Internet users to swap copyright protected files without compensating the artists who created the music.
In March 2001, San Francisco District Court Judge Marilyn Hall Patel, following a February ruling by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, issued a modified version of an earlier injunction ordering that Napster filter all copyright-protected songs from its index.
Patels ruling required that record labels claiming copyright infringement provide Napster with a listing of copyrighted songs that should not be swapped through Napster.
The court struggles have had an impact on the number of music files that appear to be available on the Napster service. In April 2000, regular spot checks by the Pew Internet Project showed that the average Napster user sharing files on the system had about 100 songs on his or her computers hard drive. As the case filed by the recording industry against Napster came to a climax in late July 2000, Napster users began to increase the number of songs they were making available. Pew Internet Project spot checks suggested then that the average number of shared files grew to between 120 and 130. When the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals was hearing Napsters case in January 2001, the average number of shared files per user jumped to between 180 and 200. In an effort to comply with the U.S. District Courts ruling, Napster claims it has blocked more than 1.7 billion song files from its directory as of
1. The Napster case raised new issues at a time that Napster was still seeking court orders requiring that downloading music from its service be allowed as a form of copyright infringement. The legal actions of many copyright holders and the Napster lawsuits has been used by Apple to challenge the U.S. Copyright Act (USCRA). A court issued a ruling in March 2004 to resolve the legal concerns of various Napster users and allows them to file new copyright claims or seek relief. The majority opinion issued in 2004 noted that certain music files are made available through a software client which could prevent a violation; however, Apple may be able to block these files through software or other means as the trial continues. The court held that some song files contained within Apple’s own files would be exempt from these laws if the files were made for public use outside the Apple client. However, that the song files could contain sensitive information or metadata (such as “f-borders”) was not specified under the Copyright Act and would be subject to §1.4(d)(1)(ii) of the Copyright Act. An Apple lawyer filed an appeal of the 2004 ruling in order to resolve the legal issues.
The new issues in the Apple case could cause Napster to ask the U.S. Copyright Office (USCOW) for a warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) before it is able to search the account of individuals for communications in the United States. This will increase uncertainty about the extent even of surveillance of the public Internet as the government can obtain warrantless telephone calls, and it could also be possible to ask for the location of phone callers to access the Internet. Napster could seek further investigation of the new claims and seek a search warrant under the USCOW. In an appeal of the 2002 ruling, many of the United States’ original content creators expressed concerns over that decision. For example, at one point in 2003 the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office asked the DOJ to review Apple’s case, which was going nowhere. On August 1, 2004, several news organizations revealed the scope of the DOJ review process under which Apple infringed on the American citizens rights of an earlier case. There were many more such cases pending in the U.S. Copyright Office in late June 2006.
U.S. Courts of Appeals have continued to hear and decide disputes with the Federal Circuit over U.S. Copyright law. The Court of Appeals may eventually decide that a claim to copyright infringement is a violation of the statute, but the extent of such action is unclear. The majority opinion states that the Copyright Act (Title 18, U.S.C. 512) allows the federal Government to compel or obtain “reasonable information” as required by law under the terms of sections 5 of the DMCA and Section 581 of the DMCA – so that the government can “deactivate, block, or alter certain communications on record in order to prevent unauthorized access.” The Court can also determine whether the government can obtain the right to share information on alleged infringement between different agencies under the terms of section 581 of the DMCA or over a public internet network outside the United States Copyright Office. This, in turn, can lead to a court order to block a particular piece of the software being used for distributing files.
An Internet service provider has sued to obtain the “Privacy Act of 1978”; which protects and restricts the right to privacy. The Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) protects individual’s rights to privacy, although it is a civil law