Why Is Napster Illegal?
The original version of Napster was illegal because it violated U.S. copyright law by allowing people to trade and download music they did not own. The legal case surrounding Napster was one of the first of its kind and helped set legal precedents that hold services such as Napster responsible for copyright infringement committed using their software.
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History
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Napster was created by Shawn Fanning in 1999 while he was a student at Northeastern University in Boston. It was a free service that allowed individuals to share MP3s with anyone else who had the service installed and running. Although users took songs directly from other users computers, it ran on centralized servers that needed to be operational for the service to work.
Legal Issues
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Anyone using Napster to download songs they did not own was committing copyright infringement and possibly theft as well. The service quickly caught the attention of artists like Metallica, who saw Napster as nothing more than a way for people to steal music. In 2000, A&M Records and the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) sued Napster for copyright infringement.
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Court Ruling
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Shawn Fanning's defense of Napster was that it was not liable for what its users shared, and that users agree to only use the service for legal uses upon installation. The recording industry argued that Napster exists solely to trade copyrighted material, and that the vast majority of songs being shared on the service were copyrighted. Napster lost the case and per the court ruling was required to monitor what files were being transferred over the network. Instead of complying with this ruling, the service shut down their centralized servers, and Napster ceased operation in July of 2001.
Influence
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Since Napster was run on centralized servers, it was fairly easy to shut it down. Since then file-sharing technology has changed. Newer services such as Limewire and BitTorrent do not rely on a central server, instead they are run directly from the user's computers. This makes shutting down the service nearly impossible, even when they are found to contain copyrighted material.
Today's Napster
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The Napster of today has nothing in common with that original service except for the name, which was bought by Roxio in 2002 at a bankruptcy auction after the original service ceased operations. Since then, the service was sold once again and bought by Best Buy in 2008 for $121 million. This Napster is a subscription-based MP3 store, which allows subscribers to listen to unlimited music for a monthly fee. It also offers MP3s for sale, much like Amazon or iTunes. It is an entirely legal service.
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References
Resources
- Photo Credit US Supreme Court image by dwight9592 from Fotolia.com
