Piracy: Crime or Expression? As of 2012 there have been 15 Anti-Piracy laws enacted to protect Intellectual Property copyright in the form of media. There is an ethical debate which tests the barriers of copyright and the greater purpose for the time old ability to reproduce media for personal enjoyment or artistic creation. Should copyright holders be able to hold people accountable for making mixes or anthologies of their favorite media? Or should people be allotted free expression by the government and continue to be able to create mixes and anthologies? Since the early 2000s the RIAA (Recording Industry Artists of America) has sued thousands of Americans on behalf of Intellectual Property copyright holders. People that had used person to person file sharing software applications (p2p) were paying thousands of dollars in damages and an unfortunate few have been found liable for up to several hundred thousand dollars worth of damages. The argument is that these “pirates” cost the music industry millions of dollars, which may be accurate. However there is a growing number of computer supporters for free expression such as corporate lawyer Lawrence Lessig, which believes constrictive laws which punish young people are infringing on our societal growth from free expression. If readily available software has the capacity to create burned CD’s and take a movie and manipulate it and make it your own, why aren’t the software manufacturers held liable for what people are using it for? The reason is that there is a freedom of choice and there are clauses in user agreements that state they are not responsible for any violation of law. The Piracy and Counterfeiting Amendments Act of Increased the criminal penalties for the transportation, sale, or receipt of phonograph records bearing forged or counterfeit labels. Increases criminal penalties for the willful infringement of a copyright for commercial advantage or private financial gain involving a specified number of phonograph records, motion pictures or audiovisual works, or sound recordings. There is little debate that redistribution for financial gain generally infringes upon copyright. IntroductionThe First Assault on Illegal Redistribution Napster Napster was the company that took peer to peer file sharing and brought it from the depths of the computer nerd underworld to the main stream. It was birthed from a network of hackers and coders that were tired of transferring music via bot. Before Napster, people would go into underground chat rooms that were actually "server rooms", connected to a server with a bot that accepted simple lines of code to transfer files to people's IPs (ie people were able to download files from server to pc). The founders of Napster were Shawn Fanning, a teenage technological enthusiast with the handle Napster, 20 year old securities programmer Jordan Ritter, and Sean Parker. The idea was birthed out of the old chat room, where computer nerds would digitally gather to share banter and complaints. At this time there was a collective of programming hobbyists which were pioneering software for the current household term "internet piracy". But in those days the majority of individual users saw their investments into home computers as investments which gave them the right to share information and files without charge. Upon development, Napster set up a corporate structure for commercial use. Napster exploded upon release, gaining tens of millions of users within the first year and still holds the Guinness Book of World Records record for fastest growing business in history. However within 3 years it was bankrupted, as the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and A&M Records, as well as Metallica, Dr. Dre and Madonna, sued Napster for profiting off material in which copyright was held by other parties. In 2001 Napster was ordered by the courts to begin charging for downloads. Eventually Napster folded completely as its innovators branched out into other areas. After a long process involving litigation and bankruptcy in 2011 Napster was sold to Best Buy and absorbed into the music service Rhapsody. Conclusion People should pay for their media. However there are certain forms of duplication that still serve a purpose. Exorbitant damages and imprisonment stifle the artistic growth and even halt media from gaining exposure that it would not receive normally. People still pay for media and they will continue to. Do you believe it is criminal to create a mixed CD for a friend? References