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Online Guide
- Talking to Your Children About Downloading Music – A Parent's Guide
- First, Figure Out What Your Kids Are Doing Online
- What to Expect and How to Address the Issue
- Explaining the Underlying Reasoning to Your Kids
- Understanding Music and the Internet
- What should you do if you receive a letter or subpoena from the RIAA?
- So, what can you do to stay on the right side of the law and off the RIAA's subpoena list?
- And Now for the Really Boring Stuff…the Law
- Criminal Copyright Infringement and Children
- A message from Jennifer, age 14, New Jersey
- Ask Parry! Excerpt
- Frequently Asked Questions
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You are here: Home > Law > Copyrights > Talking to Your Children About Downloading Music – A Parent’s Guide > Understanding Music and the Internet
Understanding Music and the Internet
The Web was first launched in 1993. Since then, it has been getting faster and faster, allowing us to download bigger files in shorter periods of time. This is particularly significant when dealing with large audio and video files. Downloading them took forever until MP3 and other compression-technologies were developed. When the music was put into these compressed formats, transferring music files became much faster and therefore more practical. Broadband access (cable and DSL) has speeds of up to a hundred times that of dial-up access. When coupled with MP-3 compression technology, broadband has changed how we access and enjoy music and videos online. What was an hour download only a few years ago now takes minutes or even seconds.
The earlier music sites, MP3 and Napster, allowed people to upload music files and store them at a central site. Then others could search for a particular song and download it from the site. These sites were sued by the music industry, and were shutdown for facilitating copyright infringement.
Around the same time, the large recording industry members began cooperating on sites that charged subscription fees for listening or downloading music. But the consuming public had already begun to expect free music downloads and resisted paying for music online, in any form. In seeking new technologies that were less vulnerable to copyright lawsuits, users turned to P2P.
P2P (or peer-to-peer) allows your computer hard drive to act as a server for someone else to access files stored on your computer. It bypasses the need for a centralized network that stores the content for all users by connecting your computer to someone else’s directly. MP-3 and Napster met their doom by allowing their users to upload music to their site for others to download. Since they hosted the content, much of which was being infringed, they had direct liability to the copyright owners of the content they hosted. They also were deemed to be contributing to the infringing activities.
When P2P is used, there is no central host. Each individual computer is the host for a particular download. When the software is installed, each user can choose whether they will only download from others, or allow others to also reach into their computer and download from them.
Our children need to understand that downloading and sharing music files online is against the law. Even though everyone is doing it, we should be teaching our children to respect the property of others. Our children know that we would react strongly to their shoplifting something from the department store. They need to know that, in most cases, downloading and sharing music online are no different from that shoplifting example. Stealing is stealing.