Hi. My name is Tony Yu, and I am part of a piracy service known as Napster. I am a frequent user, an addict, if you may. I am one of 20 million users who shares music without proper consent of the artist or the music industry. The question that has befuddled the industry, representatives of Napster and the public, is the legality of this process. I say Why not?
(For all of you who arent with it, I will define the trite buzzwords that float around this issue.)
First, Napster- The former way that music thieves originally searched for songs was through chat rooms and choosing songs from a single server or list. The songs were then e-mailed, allowing the music thieves to download their precious booty they pilfered. The fault to this method is that you cant get the songs you want, but merely get the songs that you can get on that list from that particular server. Napster is a music community with free membership that allows members to share music files. Napster itself does not distribute any music files, or mp3s, nor actually has any mp3s in its system. It merely holds a constantly updated list of mp3s of each user and allows any user to access these files via search engine. In truth, Napster basically made searching for mp3s unbelievably easy.

Next, MP3- a file format which is ten times smaller than a CD audio file, while still retaining the same sound quality. With CD audio files, files that come standard on CDs, you can fit 15-20 tracks on a CD averaging about 3.5 minutes per song. With MP3s, you can fit up to 500 full songs on that same CD and still have the same quality. Though you cant actually listen to these MP3s on a conventional CD player, technology is moving to the direction of MP3 CD players.
The real core of the issue, however, is the cross over from MP3 to CD. The real pirates, armed with a CD-Burner drive, are those, who convert MP3s onto CDs and then sell the CDs. The angry metal band Metallica was more upset with this issue and used Napster as a scapegoat and the cause of this type of piracy. The question comes to mind Who would want to buy a copied CD that is accessible through the Internet? Stupid people. People who think they are getting a deal by buying copied CDs for half the price of retail. And the people who make these bootleg CDs? Hungry capitalists taking advantage of the so many suckers who buy CDs. The rest of us users are simply music lovers, who cant get enough music
.
I admit Im addicted to Napster simply because Im addicted to music. I used to listen to all my sisters tapes and spent every last cent on CDs because I could not get enough. Iաve made hundreds of tapes to listen to from the longest road trips, to trips to a market.
My music taste went from anywhere from the Beatles, to Prince, to the late great 2Pac Shakur and more. It was my passion and it also made huge dents in my savings. I have to admit that Napster, along with a new CD-Burner, did curbed my ridiculous spending on music, I still buy CDs that I find to be truly great. Albums that didnt have just one good hit, or CD mixes that present a certain flow or atmosphere while you crank it up on the freeway. These CDs that are truly worth purchasing, where downloading all fo the tracks would just eat up too much time or come out bad for some odd reason or another.
There are far worse piracies that go on over the internet that are unknown because they cannot equal the effieiency and popularity of Napster. People swap full-length movies and video games for all systems and people wil continue to do this. There is no true way of regulating the internet other than precautions and admonitions, and evenstill, pirate activities will always occur.
The best bet for the music industy would be to use Napster and MP3s as vehicle for distributing music for increasing popularity an demand for the artist and perhaps bringing back the days where an album was full of songs that were number one singles, and raise the quality of music albums in general, by eliminating those one-hit one good song albums.
And lastly, to report the shut down of Napster, has brought an inundation of users making their last 48 hours on Napster, a productive time period as the end of an era, but in reality, it is only the beginning.


Tony is a freshman at the University of California, Davis.