Copyright Infringement regarding music
Lichtman, Douglas, and William Landes. "INDIRECT LIABILITY FOR COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT: AN ECONOMIC PERSPECTIVE." Harvard Journal of Law & Technology 16.2 (2003).
STERN, RICHARD. "Napster: A walking copyright infringement?."
Ray Ku, Raymond Shih. "The Creative Destruction of Copyright: Napster and the New Economics of Digital Technology," University of Chicago Law Review vol. 69, no. 1 (Winter 2002): p. 263-324. HeinOnline, https://heinonline.org/HOL/P?h=hein.journals/uclr69&i=275.
One of the main questions I asked myself regarding this topic was “What is it about Spotify that music companies are willing ro work with them; however, when Napster came out, long before Spotify, it was forced to shut down due to consumers constantly listening to music online and downloading music from the service more than purchasing and listening to the traditional methods, such as CDs?” I plan on looking more into Napster as it really has not been discussed previously.
· Original Napster was established 1999 and it was a peer-to-peer file sharing network, specifically sharing digital music files in the form of MP3s
· Multiple people had access to a large amount of free audio files that members could share amongst each other (80 million users were registered)
· Colleges had to block Napster on their network because it was overbearing the network as so many students were using it
· It was very “bootleg” but definitely great for those who were searching for rare or discontinued albums and chart toppers
· It didn’t last long because of copyright infringement
· The RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) filed a lawsuit against them for the “unauthorized distribution of copyrighted material)
· At the very end, Napster was forced to shut down in 2001, only 3 years after its establishment
· Rhapsody is now in control of Napster and in 2013, Napster has opened up to 14 more countries.
· 2016, “Rhapsody rebranded its service internationally as Napster”
· 2018, they are a music-on-demand source for other services such as iHeartRadio
· So Many artists hated Napster because so many of them were not getting paid
· Founders were Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker
· When Napster was forced to shut down, “its creators eventually forced to pay millions of dollars to artists and copyright holders”
· Napster “deserves credit not just for being the first, but for revolutionizing a new frontier in music consumption. Even today, its legacy and its effect on the industry are still very much in play”
· In this article, multiple music journalists and editors commented about their thoughts on Napster
· Kurt Loder was a former MTV News anchor who pointed out that the service was a major marketing service for new artists. “Consumers who had long resented being forced to buy whole albums just to get one or two tracks were empowered to make their own choices. Now there was a way to obtain old music that the record companies had allowed to drift out of print”
· Steven Hyden is a Staff Writer for Grantland who said “why … bother storing all that data now that you can just stream music for free on YouTube” àHe has a point but it’s the idea of having just the music and not a video that you have to search for every time you want to listen to just the song
· Chris Molanphy is a music critic and a contributor to Pitchfork and Slate. He talked about finding this one song that he really liked, but it took him forever to find it and download it. “Several weeks’ searching wasn’t instant gratification, exactly, but considering that this single had been my white whale for more than a decade, I considered that a perfectly reasonable time investment”
· Brian Hiatt is a senior writer for Rolling Stone. He noted that RIAA missed their opportunity for making Napster into a paid service just like Spotify. Spotify was one of the major services that changed the course of business and music industry history, and Napster could’ve been the first one. “The mutli-year gap between the death of Napster and the birth of iTunes was extremely damaging for the music industry – too many years went by with few decent legal options to download or stream music”
· Dan Reilly is a freelance journalist who was also a former editor of AOL Music’s Spinner. He said that Napster was one of the first to see the Internet’s potential for sharing and people’s love for easy accessibility. “To blame Napster for all the industry’s ills is a reflection of people’s unwillingness to let go of the status quo and not admit to a lack of foresight of how the digital universe would change music, not to mention other ‘dying industries’ like print news and book publishing”
· Robin Hilton is a Co-Host of NPR’s All Songs Considered. And he said that they were the step towards our online stores and streaming today.
· Carl Wilson is a music critic for Slate and he pointed out that Napster pushed the music industry into a new era. Although it was the ones who risked its life for the future, Wilson also mentioned that “Napster was one of the first big music controversies where the story was about software, not about songs or performers”
· Many of the youths were being threatened with potential fines and lawsuits, but what are the odds that people can find them will all those people committing the same acts?
· In this article, Lamont wrote how Napster started the digital music revolution with just a simple file-sharing service created by two teenagers in 1999
· Getting music was fairly tricky before Napster came along (and it sort of still was even with iTunes and other services)
· Napster is part of a computer software that one of the two teens were working on.
· When Napster was established in late 1999, so many people jumped on that train immediately because people didn’t need to pay for music anymore.
· Major record labels were complaining to the RIAA and said that Napster was breaking the copyright infringement laws and that they needed to be stopped
· When Napster was in full action, labels saw that their physical sales plummeted for the first time ever and that just pushed them over the edge
· Many artists including Metallica and Dr. Dre participated in a court battle with them and the results were that Napster had to be shut down and the creators had to pay artists and labels millions of dollars
· When iTunes came along, they started to grow, as it also came from the famous company.
· A lot of digital services, not just musical, came along after Napster, and they were more successful in their efforts, such as Facebook and iTunes.
· Looking at the new and improved Napster financially, I personally believe that if Napster was not forced to shut down, their revenues would be much higher (potentially) àpersonal opinion
· Rhapsody bought Napster in 2011, from its previous owner Best Buy when it was sold to them by the creators after that sad lawsuit
· Looking at the first image in the article, their revenues actually grew from 2011 to 2016
· This article also revealed “Napster’s strategy to continue competing in the global music-streaming market, finding a niche (including white-label streaming for other brands) to co-exist with the giants of space”
· And when they say “giants of space,” they are referring to Spotify, who has been way more successful than them even though the original Napster created this new era
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