"The Song Remains The $ame"

By Jose Reyes 5/10/03

           The timely combination of an intellectual accomplishment and break-through technological developments, culminated together, to produce the biggest Heist in history. The first and most important, was the source-code program created by an 18 year old computer genius, Shawn Fanning. The difficult program combined a music-search function with a file-sharing system, along with instant messaging. The program took him 60 straight sleepless hours to accomplish. In the summer of 1999, this college dropout, created a "public" community on the web, called Napster. This community would share, voluntarily, all different types of files within its members. The word spread rapidly on the information highway and the amount of users increased dramatically. The Napster community (everybody) proudly proceeded to share their music files and within one year, millions of "shared" music files were downloaded. The music industry realized the damage and proceeded to take Napster to court. With lengthy setbacks and trial postponements they finally achieved their goal, and Napster is shut down. "Too much, too Late". 

          The technological achievements were the CD-Rom, and the T1 line cable-connection. The CD-Rom, also known as a "Burner", gave the computer user the ability to record and in turn, create a custom-made music CD for personal use. The T1 line along with the Cable Modem gave the computer user "The Speed" to download files 100 times  faster than the conventional 56K Modem. The "Need for Speed" downloading concept and Napster, were the main reasons, why practically, every song ever recorded in history was duplicated (Copied).

              The music industry monopolizing  giants are Universal, BMG, EMI, Sony, and Time Warner. This five-headed  dictatorship controls all the different aspects of  music, that includes, copyrights, distribution rights, packaging rights, and promotional rights. That's a total monopoly! Now they want to take over the internet. They are using the file-sharing websites as their scapegoat. Instead of choosing the conventional way of indictments and lawsuits through the American Judicial System to settle their setbacks, they are using hacking tactics to control a problem they created in the first place. The economy is struggling and people cannot spend $14 to $17 to purchase a CD, that's the problem here. Now these vicious multi-billion dollar companies are hiring hackers to flood file-sharing websites with bogus files and garbled music files. This recent invasion of the internet is a calculated move to start charging for downloading music files. This is an outright scam, just think about it, their going to copy a simple music file over and over and then innocently charge the public 99 cents a file, what a rip off! People, " I beg of you", do not get suckered into this internet highway robbery. Let them continue with their futile  hacking tactics  and you'll see that in the long-run they will lose the stranglehold they have on music. This is their last meaningless attempt to recover the Millions of dollars they lost. There are 53 websites available to download music for free at the present time. Check the list out here: www.afternapster.com/# 

Comments:  Webmaster@cubanology.com