Music Piracy

Justin Saucerman
Professor Mansfield
English M01C
11 May 2009
All Aboard the Battleship of Music Piracy
In the past few years our society has seen more traffic on the Internet than on our freeways. This is due to the overwhelming amount of people using the Internet for downloading songs instead of going to a store to buy them. Internet sites such as Napster are opening a whole new gateway in how society gets their music. This is now a culture war between the powers that were (record stores) and the future powers (Internet). Because of financial loss of revenue to the music industry affecting: Stores, artists, and record labels, the pirating of downloading music is unethical and steps must be taken in order to protect the arts.
The year 1999 was the year the music industry would forever be changed due to one man with a single program. Shawn Fanning, an 18 year old Northeastern University drop out created the world famous Naptser on his own with no support from anyone. This program would go on to stir the biggest commotion and change the music industry forever. Fanning was your average kid growing up, “he excelled at basketball and baseball, hitting .750 as a shortstop on a state championship-winning team” (Greenfeld 115). In his college years, Fanning had an idea for a program, “that would allow computer users to swap music files with one another directly, without going through a centralized file server or middleman. Little did Fanning know but this idea would explode in his mind. Soon there was nothing else that mattered, “He was just hunched over his Dell notebook, writing the software and crashing on his uncle's sofa or the floor. Then he'd shake off fatigue, scarf a bowl of cereal and sit back down. He worked feverishly because he was sure someone else had the same idea” (116). The urge to be the first to release a program of this kind was enough of a driving force to “work 60 hours straight writing code on his notebook computer” (115). All of Shawn... [continues]

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