Entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurship

Introduction

Not too long ago, a college student created a computer program that would change the world. This computer program is called Napster, and it has been terrorizing the music industry since it's conception in August of 1999. Napster is an internet program used to download mainly copyrighted songs. Napster calls it trading, but the record companies and artists call it stealing.

Discussion

The re-discovery of the MP3 format was the first step in the birth of Napster. Prior to Napster, the only way you could get MP3 files were through friends or getting them off the internet. Downloading songs off of the Internet was not much of an option though. They were available, but MP3's were very hard to find. Most of the MP3's found were not anything that people wanted to download. Basically, the only songs that could be found were uncopyrighted ones. These uncopyrighted songs were from unheard of bands mostly, and people did not want to have these songs. Most students tried to find a way to transfer songs from one computer to another, but their attempts failed(Greenfield, 2000).

he stealing of intellectual property is on the rise and there are very few copyright laws and regulations out there to prevent these things from happening. Since we are now living in the digital age it is very easy for anyone to get a hold on intellectual property and spread it around to whoever is online. The hard thing is to track down who these people are. More government regulations are needed on the Internet to protect intellectual property. Without more laws and regulations, there will be more Napster imitators in the future.

The Internet is a relatively new thing and very unpredictable at this point. New things are being discovered everyday, both for good and not-so-good reasons. Of course ...