The Internet, Moral Judgment and Respect :: Free Essays Online

The Internet, Moral Judgment and RespectThe Internet has changed the way that many multitude go about their everyday lives. People are trading stocks, gainful bills, checking weather reports, buying cars, and even lining up their Friday night dates via the Internet. It has sure as shooting proved to be a convenient tool for many, but for whatsoever practice of medicineians it has created a void in their pocketbooks that may take some term to fill. Is the sharing of music files on the Internet our God given right, or is it a simple case of theft?As the 1990s gave us Seinfeld, Grunge Rock, The Clinton Administration and the Macarena, they also introduced many people around the beingness to the Internet. The Internet allows clusters of computer networks to be linked together piecewide bighearted people the ability share nurture virtually anywhere. Among that shared information includes music files known as MP-3s. The MP-3 ( MPEG Audio Layer 3) feces hurtle a music file to a fraction of its original CD file size with only a slight loss of quality. 1 These files can be sent as attachments to e-mails and played back by the recipient role just as if they were listening to the original recording. This seemed like a grand way of distributing music over the Internet until a 19-year-old college freshman named Shawn Fanning released a computer program he had just written. He called it Napster -- his own name (apparently Fanning had issues with shampoo, so his hair was kind of . . . well, you know). 2 This site allowed its users the ability to search for music and download it to their PC from any other user who happened to be logged on to that site. Imagine millions of files, readily available from your own home with the simple photograph of a mouse Youll never have to purchase another new(a) CD againor will you?Musicians and record companies around the world became growingly concerned with the drastic decline of album cut-rate sales. How coul d copyrighted music created by an artist be taken and distributed without the permission of its owner? Isnt this thieving? One would surely think that a department store would coerce charges if an individual were caught shoplifting CDs. A musician makes his/her livelihood from the sale of their music the same way a store makes money from merchandise sales.