Napster Wars Essays - Metallica, Intellectual Property Law, Napster

Napster Wars Fifth Amendment ?A young Shaun Fanning, attending school in high school in Harwich, Massachusetts had two loves: 1) Sports ( baseball, basketball, and tennis ) and 2) computers. As his curiosity grew for computers, he decided to stop his sport playing, and spend most of his time working with computers. He primarily focused on two aspects of the computer, programming and the Internet. His computer fascination grew into an obsession throughout high school. His freshman year at Northeast University in 1998 was spent trying to enter computer science classes higher than the entry level. Not finding anything challenging about the courses, he decided to start writing a Windows based program in his spare time. He started spending time in IRC chat rooms with experienced programmers who knew the tricks of the trade. Shaun's roommate loved MP3's, but disliked the unreliability of old sites, and having to search endlessly for songs that were usually not even available. With this in mind, and his developing skills as a programmer and his curiosity for the internet, Shaun decided to write the Beta for Napster. He used the idea of all users being connected to one central computer server, yet all having access to each other's music files. He wanted a continually updated list of songs to choose from. He wrote a small version and distributed it to friends and family. The results were all positive. He had fellow programmers detect bugs, and perfect the program. Napster got its' big break, when it was featured as Download.com's featured download. The system would be revolutionary, he thought. A sharp contrast to the traditional search engines, this community would be user powered, based only on what t he users want to share with other users. After the advertisement on Download.com, Napsters' user count sky-rocketed. Shaun was on the right path. How creative! This creativeness would soon turn to turmoil (Fanning p.1).? ?On May 8, 2000, the Recording Industry Association of America sued Napster and its' founders for music piracy(Borland p.1).? It is really a battle of individual rights and ingenuity, as opposed to copyrights. It has quickly moved its' way up to the US Supreme Court and has the media as well as the public hungry for the latest reports. Napster can be downloaded and installed for free on your computer. When setup, Napster serves as an online music community, where you can conduct a search through all of the other users songs that are currently online. ?There are consistently 800,000 people using the Napster service, limited only by their resources?(Fanning). This should give you an idea of the large music variety you have to choose from. The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has decided to take it upon themselves to sue Napster and its founder's for promoting the illegal reproduction of copyrighted music, and not giving any royalties to the owners of the songs. ?Napster argues that it is not directly responsible for the distribution of songs, because it doesn't provide the songs for the users to download (Borland p1)?. The users download songs off of each others computers, thus they cannot control copyright matters. They also argued they should have the same leeway as Internet Service Providers (ISP) do, when it comes to copyright issues. ISP's are not held liable for copyright infringements if they do something about it. If they do not do anything about it, then they can be held liable. I have chosen to view this issue in perspective of the Fifth Amendment. In order to better understand what is going to be talked about, I will explain exactly what the Fifth Amendment entitles American citizens to. ?A concern struck people in early America of a strong central government. Too strong. To ease concerns like this, a Bill of Rights was proposed, which gave individuals certain rights, which was understood by the government not to infringe upon. Basically it gave humans some rights that the government could not touch. The Fifth Amendment is part of the Bill of Rights and it holds that individuals cannot be required to give the government information which may be used against them in criminal cases. Subsequent case law has applied the Fifth Amendment in civil cases, too, when there