The Benefits of File Sharing Technology :: Internet Online Communication Essays

Napster The Benefits of File Sharing TechnologyNapster. neer before has one word brought so much controversy and debate over engineering science and peoples rights to information. Napster was co-founded by Shawn Fanning, a college student with a gazillion dollar idea. His idea was to provide people across the world the major power to download information from other users computers. Although this technology was already available by local networks, Shawn envisioned a way to make this network technology possible for the average college student like himself. What Shawn didnt envision however, was the lawsuits and court injunctions that at once plague his participation. These lawsuits have stemmed from Napster allegedly violating copyright laws set forth by the music industry. Seeing that Napster has approximately 64 million users worldwide, the comp both is being charged with allowing rampant music piracy (Evangelista 2001). Although this may be true, I believe that Napster is d oing more good to our society than bad. Its use of lodge sharing technology and expression is allowing new standards to be set for the future. A great misconception is that Napster provides its clients with illegally pirated music softwargon known as MP3s. These MP3s are compressed CD quality music accommodates that can be stored on any computer for easy listening, or can be copied onto an real CD for listening on the go. In actuality, Napster does not provide any pirated MP3s rather they act as a catalog for users to find genuine songs (Magid, 2001). When you run the Napster program on your computer, Napster candids a direct link from your cusp with MP3s files in it, to the catalog on the Napster server. Since Napster has over 60 million members, at any given time during the day hundreds of thousands of people have their files catalogued through Napster. So when I want to search for a song, Napster searches though the thousands of open directories of its users. When I find th e song I want, I download the MP3 file directly from that particular Napster users computer. Napster as you can see is just acting as a search directory for MP3 files. Now that you know how Napster works, let me recognise you why the program upsets so many people. Napster first made guinea pig news when many universities, including IU, started to ban the file-sharing program. College students having access to Ethernet and large bandwidths could not escape Napsters service.