Mp3S Friend Or Foe Essay Research Paper

Mp3.S: Friend Or Foe. Essay, Research Paper

MP3’s : Friend or Foe.

MP3’s, a breakthrough in technology or are they just another bomb waiting to explode on us. Some say they are good while others argue that they are not just bad, but horrific to musicians that want to make it to the top. MP3’s are used widely by teenagers on their home computer, usually illegally and are constantly being threatened by the producer of the music. Billions of dollars are being lost due to the Internet craze of the MP3 technology mainly because no one is buying the legal music from record stores anymore, its like a style gone dead. Now that the problem is out, Internet police are on the loose to find these illegal distributors of music and put them to a stop. When all the smoke is cleared, it is apparent that the producer of music will have eventual victory over the users in the MP3 battle.

MPEG Audio Layer 3, which is what this anarchic instigator of war file format is known as, but to us it is a MP3 which is a part of the MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 specifications which could be used for movies. MP3’s compresses CD-quality sound by a factor of 12 or more while still providing a great high quality sound to it. A MP3 is now becoming mainstream format for music like records, tapes, and CD’s which are currently being used, but to play MP3’s a program is needed like Winamp or Microsoft’s Windows Media Player. The MP3 has become the most commonly used but unofficial file format to encode digital music for downloading off the Internet. The Internet is the heart of the MP3, without it, this new format would never survive because the Net allows surfers to download songs in a matter of minutes without cost or legal implications. This compressed MP3 technology is popping up everywhere on the Internet. There is no music site that you can go to where a MP3 of some sort is not being offered, just log on and download.

A lot of people believe that MP3’s are breaking copyrights and is a part of online piracy. Online piracy is playing or downloading from the Internet songs and lyrics without authorization and without compensating the artists. Downloading even one song without permission or compensation is considered online piracy. Pirate recordings are the unauthorized duplications of copyrighted recordings, the packaging of the recording, art, label, title, sequencing, etc. are all a part of piracy. When people download MP3’s from the Internet, they fail to recognize the copyrights that are in place because they are written in font sizes under 10pts or are skipped by the user. Though it is the fault of creator of the site, the creator knows that if people stop going to the site, money stops being made so the creator must hide all items that might deterrent the user from leaving the web site. The RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) has two copyrights that apply to MP3’s.

1. Copyright in musical work – That is, lyrics and musical notes as they’re written on paper. This copyright is typically owned by the songwriter or music publisher

2. Copyright in the sound recording – Which is a recording of a performer singing or playing the particular song. This copyright is usually owned by the record company.

Therefore the only legal way to copy, download, upload, a piece of music is to get permission first which every user forgets about or doesn’t even bother. This the primary cause for the war of legal rights that goes on every day because free is good right. Wrong!

It isn’t just that people are taking music for free or that fans of every musical taste have turned to the Internet to satisfy their need for music, its because millions and millions of dollars are being lost everyday to the people that make the music all possible. The Canadian Recording Industry Association reports that there are around 80, 000 infringing MP3 sites on the Internet and each one is carrying around 300 or more recordings , and that’s just counting plain MP3 sites excluding pornographic sites with MP3’s, Wares applications and game sites with MP3’s etc. Major money is being lost here. The RIAA calculated that there are 120 million downloads from MP3 sites weekly and climbing, representing an annual loss of $5 billion (US) to the recording industry and around $1 million a day in the United States alone. It isn’t stopping there when these numbers increase higher and higher just in one day. This major concern has the recording industry going frantic on how to tackle this problem and hardly any solutions have come around on their part. Brian Robertson, president of the Canadian Recording Industry Association spoke at a conference and said “There’s tens of thousand of sound recordings that are basically sitting around in a virtual record store with the door wide open and everyone is helping themselves” and concluded by saying “Everyone using MP3’s feels they have the inalienable right to use the product” . That’s true, as people download freely, not knowing that they are breaking any of the copyright laws and without paying royalties to the artists or the record companies. Before it was just individual songs but since an increase in hard drive capacity is increasing, whole albums are being traded back and forth on the net. It is mostly the younger generation involved in this. Statistics prove this theory because the sales industry went up 8% last year, but the teenage demographic went dow