Thursday, September 23, 2010

What copyright challenges are raised by Internet music technologies?



            Technology has brought up many positive things into the music industry, like making it easier for artists to be ‘discovered’ or even as means of promotions, but it has also brought up several issues concerning legalities and the constant exchange of music files. Technology has made it so easy for the users to obtain music without actually purchasing a CD, which is why recording companies and managers are constantly on top of Internet radio and other several legal music programs in order to collect royalties and give them to their owners. This has been the most real and difficult issue to handle, the fact that there are several other programs that are illegal or allow you to download music and share it for free. Ares, Kazaa, Limewire and Vuze are just a few of these many programs that users constantly access in order to download and share music and even movie files amongst peers and not pay at all.
            Many forms of keeping track of files have been developed but none of them have really been that precise, since there is a lot of music piracy still going on. Although some regulations have also been implemented and users know that law penalizes copyright infringement, people continue to do it with the thought that they might not get caught. The AAC and RIAA are a few if the many ways that have been developed to protect music files. Apple uses the AAC or Advanced Audio Coding. Apple’s fair play digital rights management system lets users make a certain limited number copies of a song that has been directly bought and downloaded form the itunes store. This format permits sharing among a reasonable and small number of digital music players and computers. By encoding files this way they also make it very hard for users to share music online. The RIAA or Recording Industry Association of America has also been developed to keep track of online music piracy. It uses a library of digital fingerprints that can uniquely identify MP3 files that have been traded on the Napster service. 

No comments:

Post a Comment