Music piracy

In the contemporary legal environment, it is a form of copyright infringement, which may be either a civil wrong or a crime depending on jurisdiction.

Users of the web began adding media files to the internet, and prior potential risks and difficulties to pirating music, such as the physicality of the process, were eliminated.

Napster enabled users to exchange music files over a common free server without any regard for copyright laws.

[9] According to the internationally established Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development,[10] "Existing laws and regulations may be too broad and general to deal adequately with the rapid technological developments that facilitate digital piracy, and policy makers may need to consider enacting some specific provisions to deal with these infringements.

Such provisions should not unduly impede legitimate digital communications, nor unreasonably impact on the Internet as an effective communications platform, commercial channel and educational tool..."[10] There have been several means of free access to copyrighted music for the general public including Napster, Limewire, and Spotify.

[14] The RIAA, a powerful lobby for the recording industry, is responsible for carrying out most of the lawsuits against music piracy in the United States.

RIAA has been accused of outright bullying, as when one of their lawyers told the defendant in one lawsuit, "You don't want to pay another visit to a dentist like me".

The essential goal of the bill was to protect intellectual property of content creators by raising awareness of the severity of punishments for copyright infringement.

Black, president and CEO of the Computer & Communications Industry Association, who questioned the potential effectiveness of the bill by reasoning that the major pirate websites that SOPA attempts to eliminate could just as easily respawn under a different name if taken down as early as a few hours later.

[16] Additionally, strong protest attempts were made across the internet when numerous high-profile online organizations including Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter, and participating in American Censorship Day on January 18, with some sites including Reddit and Wikipedia going as far as completely blacking out all of their pages, redirecting the user to SOPA protest messages.

[17] Ultimately, as a result of aggressive protests and lack of consenting opinions within the congress, SOPA was tabled on January 20 by its creator, House representative Lamar Smith.

[9]University of Idaho professor Darryl Woolley, writing in the Academy of Information and Management Sciences Journal in 2010, shared an estimate of 12.5 billion dollars lost annually due to file sharing and music piracy, and 5 billion of that is profits lost from the music industry directly.

This article points out that technological development such as file sharing, MP3 players, and CDRs have increased music piracy.

This was consistent with the results of earlier research conducted in the United States, upon which the Open Music Model was based.

[21] In addition, the majority of filesharers in the survey preferred to get their music from "local sources" such as LAN connections, email, flash drives, sharing with other people they know personally.

According to a NPD survey, in 2012, approximately one in ten Internet users in the United States downloaded music through a file sharing service similar to BitTorrent or LimeWire.

This number is significantly less than 2005, the peak of the piracy phenomenon, when one in five users used peer-to-peer networks to gather music files.