Criteria A:
In April 2007 a survey was conducted amongst college students nationwide on the issue of illegal downloading, an estimated 67 percent of the student body do not care about illegal downloading. Even if the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) gets involved. (Hynes). It seems this problem does not just arouse with college students, a large number of people world wide are not bothered with illegal downloading habits, though a survey conducted by Microsoft shows that students between seventh and 10th grade are less likely to download illegally if they are informed of the laws about sharing and downloading content online.(Redmond) A report done by the International Federation of Phonographic Industry (IFPI) stated that ninety-five per cent of music is illegally downloaded online. (BBC)
In the past when people still bought vinyl records at record stores, piracy and illegal downloading was not a problem, and even if people though of copying them it would have been hard to achieve. A few bootleg records were made from live performances but that was as far as it went and therefore record companies were not worried. When sound were made digital by CDs record companies began to become worried since this gave people the opportunity to rip off tracks by CD burners and then put them onto personal computers and give them to their peers. Over the internet people were quickly able to reproduce and illegally share music with an unlimited amount of people.
Then came the problem of copyright, the digital revolution that gave users the chance to use digital content in creative new ways has made it impossible for copyright holders to control the distribution of music.
Criteria B:
The Internet has become widespread around the world, and therefore a large number of people have access to it. The Internet has become a utility and so has music, it no longer is a product (Kusek). The change in the Music Industry came through the impact of technology; advances were made in digital technology that have caused this rapid change. Personal computers, digital recorders, the Internet and illegal p2p (peer to peer) services are the cause of this change. P2p networks and other computer based systems, allow individual computers to connect to and share music files over the internet, for free illegally. Proxy servers are used to access web pages created by other computers, and since proxy servers store information from a web site you have already accessed on the proxy server the next time we access the page it does not have to load again since the information has already been cached.
There are both legal and illegal ways to download music through legal and illegal digital distribution services. The recording industry is trying to figure out a way to stop the music leakage, since CD sales have dropped a great deal. The industry has attempted to boost the sales by dropping CD prices and filling-lawsuits against Internet users who share music files. (Kusek) The problem with p2p file-sharing programs is that there is no central server where information would be stored to indicate what files are commonly downloaded and shared.
The p2p market plays a large role in changing the music industry it has a large variety of music that is available for music fans on the Internet database. This fast file- sharing software has been embrassed by millions of people regardless of its legality. It has been supported faster than any other technology even the telephone, personal computers and even the Internet.
Illegal downloads continue to be made on a daily basis, files are being downloaded through p2p file sharing programs in a month, more than what the music industry makes in a year. People are willing to pay for music if it’s the right price over the Internet and therefore for that very reason legitimate downloads are still being made (Kusek).
Bit Torrent is a program which is different than any other peer-to –peer method of downloading. It has a tracker which is it’s central server where all the file tracking works, in order to be able to download files from its server you have to share this principle is referred to as ‘tit-for-tat’. Bram Cohen’s who is one of Bit Torrents developer found a way to stop the trafficking and to make the transmission easier the way he did this was to increase the speed of downloading for users so in order to receive files you have to give them the more files you share the faster your downloads are likely to complete. Once the download has completed onto your computer it becomes a seed which means that when another user begins to download the same file it is seeding off of your computer. Another way to increase the speed of the download is to have a mass storage on your computer becomes when space runs out files that you are attempting to download gets blocked.