With the recent judgment against a woman who shared 24 songs on the Kazaa peer-to-peer (or P2P) network to the tune of $1.92 million, we thought it was time to look a little closer at music downloading.
In October of 2007, Jammie Thomas was ordered to pay the record industry a mere $222,000, which comes to $9,250 per song shared. At the time, many said it was excessive.
But now, after a retrial, the price has gone up to $80,000 per song. She says getting their money would be like “squeezing blood from a turnip,” but an article from Ars Technica (Latin for “the art of technology”) tells us about her options from here.
We suppose the point is to make an example of her to stop people from so willingly sharing music freely.
She used Kazaa, a peer-to-peer file sharing application commonly used to exchange MP3 music files over the Internet, though it can also be used to exchange other file types, such as videos, applications, and documents. Peer-to-peer allows internet users to transfer files directly, rather than through the use of a website or directory. So even though Jammie only shared 24 songs, any number of people could have downloaded them to their computers for free, making the cost of a 99-cent song rise exponentially, which may be why Kazaa has been the target of many copyright-related lawsuits.
Other P2P networks include Bit Torrent, Gnutella, and Napster, and since none of them go through official channels sanctioned by the music industry, there is no way to properly pay the companies for their products—which they don’t like.
In future posts, we’ll look at other ways to utilize internet speed for music downloading in ways that are less dangerous.
Tags: Downloading Music, Internet Speed, P2P, peer-to-peer