Persuasive

Sharing

Music 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.

Patel's 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 computer's 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 Napster's 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 Court's ruling, Napster claims it has blocked more than 1.7 billion song files from its directory as of