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Dustin Orner March 14, 2003 Working Musician Digital Downloading I’m going to look at the Record labels side of the issue first. I can understand why the Record Labels would be very upset about Napster and files sharing. Obviously, they are stealing music and taking money right out of the pockets of them and their artists. The main contributors to this infringement case are EMI, Sony, Universal, A&M Music and Warner music. They, with the help of RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America), brought up a copyright infringement case against the infamous Napster Company (www.RIAA.com). They claim that Napster is ‘secondarily’ responsible for over 60 million users worldwide who share roughly over 30 billion files over the past 4 years since its inception in 1998. Each single infraction of copyright infringement is worth about $25,000. This means that Napster might half to pay $25,000 per file shared throughout its history. If each of the 60 million members had only one file shared, Napster would be held responsible for over $1,500,000,000,000. WOW! I don’t think that Napster is prepared to pay that much money for copyright infringement. The other side of this case is Napster. Put yourself in their shoes. Their argument is that they shared files between small groups of friends. Then it continued to get out of hand. It is not their fault that people went overboard with the file sharing.
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