by Armen Kaleshian.
"In 1909, Americans tossed music into that realm. The setup was pretty simple: The person who created a song owned it. Anyone else who wanted to use that creation had to pay for it." In the music industry, the artist who creates the song depends on that to make a living by selling it to the public. Society purchases the music that has been created, from the artist and defines a type of common culture with it. They use it to express their beliefs and ways of life. During the 60s and 70s, it was classic rock that defined a generation. During the 80s, it was pop music and rap that defined the general public of the time. Today, it isn't the music that is defining the common culture, but using technology to make music society's property without control. The fight for intellectual property is how we define the common culture of the 21st century. Napster and other peer-to-peer services brought the demise to music being an artist's intellectual property, because they supported the distribution of that property without proper compensation to the original creator.
Napster was not started to devalue music as intellectual property, but to fight against the organized manipulation of prices by the music industry. "Where the music industry has really gone wrong is that they've lost their legitimacy with consumers. ... They are training people to steal by giving them no legitimate alternative." By having a hold on all albums that are sold in the world, the music industry has control of the cost of a specific album. The common culture being frustrated with the situation, and seeing no viable alternative, introduced a type of technology that would enable them to fight against the regulation by the music industry. Peer-to-peer networking enabled the user to share whatever property they had, whether it was or was not their own, with someone else. With this technology, users could share anything without crediting the original creator of the property monetarily. Unfortunately, as quickly as the technology evolved, the law quickly became involved because of unhappy artists being swindled out of payment for their property. Therefore, Napster was shut down because of the capability it provided to the common culture. The common culture had made music theirs without any consideration to the artist, using technology that could have benefited every creative industry.
The technology behind Napster could have been a new method of delivery for the music industry. "We see Napster as a big amplifier for the music business. We don't see it as something that's incompatible with the music industry." After it was developed, Napster was supposed to be the alternate method that the consumer could obtain their music while giving the artist the proper credit. Napster would be a service, "Music- swapping company Napster announced a major deal with music publishers Monday, settling part of its outstanding lawsuit and helping clear the way for its planned subscription service." , which would benefit both the music industry, keep the consumer satisfied by fulfilling their desire for digital music, and keep the technology behind Napster protected from more lawsuits. Society would be able to access and collect their music without any hesitation, creating a common culture of their own which is defined not by what music they listened to, but how they changed the way to obtain their music.
Music is not a part of the common culture, because the public does not own it. The artists who create it own it. Copyright laws prevent the music from belonging to the public. With the invention of the tape recorder, and the compact disc writer, along with digital media being introduced to the computing industry, it has been more difficult for the government to enforce these laws. Therefore, the government created the Digital Millennium Copyright Act , which protects the rights of the artists and their property from being infringed upon. However, this act was purchased by the recording industry, and is now being used to regulate all acts of infringement of property. "The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which has argued that the DMCA is too onerous and is being used by big corporations to quash free speech online, is calling the 2600 legal battle "a landmark case about free speech and copyright on the Internet." The DMCA was created to protect the rights of the artist, and not to infringe on an individual's right to free speech, as the RIAA and its surrounding corporations have begun to do.
The government, the RIAA and those who enforce the DMCA are currently walking a fine line between infringing on society's rights, and enforcing a reputable and understandable set of laws. The common culture does not agree with this and will begin another movement is necessary, as they did with Napster, to fight against the regulation of their rights. Napster was created because there wasn't a consumer friendly method of obtaining music, and because of the technology that it involved and the way that it was handled, it became the target of lawsuits and regulation. The lawsuits and regulation were necessary to protect the property of the artists, but is not necessary to remove the rights of the individual, which the United States fought for hundreds of years ago. Society uses music to define a common culture, but it will never own it. The music that they listen to will always be the property of the artists that create it.