Instant Access To 100,000+ Essays!

Ed Miller Carrissa Griffith English 112-078 5 March 2004 Tittle Internet peer-to-peer file sharing has resulted in a battle between ligament music providers there illegal counterparts, and the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America). In May of 1999 Napster started to show up on college campuses all over the country. Napster, a small peer to peer music sharing application, allowed users to easily share music files in the Mp3 Format. A peer-to-peer application connects computers across the internet so that they can share data easily. Napster users shared data in the form of Mp3 files (Moving Picture Experts Group Audio Layer 3) a compression format that turns a music file into a small, easily shared file that maintains most of the songs quality. By December of 1999 the RIAA, on behalf of the record labels it represents, sued Napster in the U.S. District Court in San Francisco on grounds of copyright infringement. At this time millions of people had started using Napster. Hundreds of t