MP3

How does the Law Pertain to Trading MP3’s?

For a period of time in the early twenty first century and late 1990’s, MP3’s had a sort of black mark of piracy about them.

This was owed mainly to Napster, the program which allowed users to freely trade MP3’s, free of charge. People downloaded thousands and thousands and thousands of MP3’s, and the artists and record labels never saw a penny.

Metallica was probably the band or artist most famous for making a big stink about this. Members of the band even took to suing their own fans. This whole incident kind of marred Metallica’s reputation, perhaps permanently. The once proud kings of heavy metal had become “corporate jerks” in the eyes of many of their fans.

Keep in mind, Metallica was well within their legal rights to press charges against anyone who downloaded their music illegally. Certainly, trading copyright protected music in MP3 format is completely illegal, unless that music is considered open source or free content, meaning that it can be traded at will by anyone, so long as no money changes hands. However, as Metallica’s fanbase started to shrink due to the negative image this incident gave them in the eyes of many fans, pressing charges may have actually wound up being a poor decision from a financial viewpoint: People still download Metallica songs illegally, but Metallica lost a number of their most devout followers.

Basically it broke down like this: When MP3’s were still a relatively new format, and the internet was a very new form of distribution for information and art, most record companies were slow to catch on. It wasn’t until after the whole Napster scandal that the record industry started to capitalize on the possibility of distributing a song in mere seconds, and at a greatly reduced price in comparison to selling CDs in a “brick and mortar” record store.

Distributing music online allows listeners to only buy the songs they like, to listen to an entire album through official websites before making their purchase, and to have the music sent directly into their computer. Without any actual CDs to produce, there’s no real “cost” to distributing music on the internet besides maintaining a source for listeners to download and so on.

It’d be foolish to say that legitimate MP3 distribution has completely destroyed piracy as a means of getting music, but ten years ago, someone who wanted music on their computer had to either go to the record store and buy the CD without knowing if most of the songs on it were any good, or else they had to take the music online without authorization (most of the time… some record labels were pretty quick on the uptake regarding internet distribution, but honestly, the vast majority were not, and it wasn’t until the whole Napster situation kind of kicked them in the butt that they even began considering it).

It’d be equally foolish to say that music piracy is going away anytime soon. For many people, the lure of getting something for nothing, downloading hundreds of songs free of charge, is just too tempting to pass up. Honestly, it’s human nature, and there’s nothing we can really do to put an end to it.

Most music pirates aren’t completely bad people, to be honest, and certain, jail sentences and steep fines are a little excessive. Steep penalties like hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines were placed on some of the first wave of Napster downloaders, so as to make an example of them and discourage pirating music, but this only served, really, to vilify the record companies, and to force pirates to get sneakier.

Most music pirates actually have some sort of rationalization in place to justify their piracy, but to be honest, most of those arguments don’t hold an ounce of water. What it boils down to is this: Stealing music online is theft. Whether you’re swiping a CD or downloading without authorization, ethically, it’s the same thing, and legally, it just isn’t allowed.

Honestly, the vast majority of music pirates are never caught. There are millions of people around the world who steal music online, and only a handful of them have ever been punished. Many take this as proof that you can get away with it, but… even if you can get away with it, there is no law on the books that says “It’s only illegal if you get caught”. The legality and ethicality of the situation remain the same, whether you get found out or not, and if you do get caught, the penalties can be pretty serious.