Napster was the first major peer-to-peer file sharing system, launched in 1999, allowing users to share MP3 files. It grew to over 20 million users but faced legal issues for copyright infringement. The Pirate Bay, founded in 2003, is another major torrent site that has faced repeated legal challenges and raids over the years for facilitating copyright infringement. Limewire was a popular P2P program that distributed music and was shut down in 2010 due to a court injunction. These systems helped spread digital piracy but also faced major legal backlash from the music industry.

1. How has the internet (digital) piracy
developed?

2. NAPSTER

3. HISTORY
• On June 1st, John and Shawn Fanning
and Sean Parker developed the site
‘Napster’. The website was originally
created as a ‘P2P’ site- which meant
peer to peer sharing of files online,
mainly audio files of songs encoded in
MP3 format. However the original
company ended up in legal difficulties
regarding copyright infringement,
ceased operations, and was then taken
over by Roxio. However, prior to this,
Napster had over 20 million users
worldwide.

4. SO, HOW DID IT WORK?
• In 1998, Shawn Fanning (using the name ‘Napster’) announced on an internet
chatroom that had been working on a project which would fix the problem of
being unable to download decent quality tracks. It would allow them to dip
into each others hard drives, and share MP3 Files. Although everybody
laughed at him, Sean Parker, an aspiring entrepreneur who had seen his
announcement became interested, and suggested they collaborate.
• Fanning spent day long programming sessions setting up ‘Napster’ (the name
the pair had decided to go with), whilst Parker had managed to gather $50,000
from investors. The pair then moved to California, and hired friends from the
internet chatroom as staff, and Napster launched in 1999. By the year 2000,
Napster had over 20 million users.

5. THE PIRATE BAY

6. HISTORY
• The Pirate Bay was first founded in September 2003 by Swedish pro-culture and
anti-copyright organization Piratbyrån, which translates as "The Piracy Bureau."
This organisation was ran by Gottfrid Svartholm and Fredrik Neij , however,
originally the site had no structure. At the time, BitTorrent was an up-and-
coming file sharing technology, and The Pirate Bay wanted to start its own file
sharing site. The site was first launched in Mexico by Svartholm on a computer
for the company he worked for, however was then moved to Sweden, where it
was hosted on Svartholms 256 Mb of RAM.

7. LEGAL TECHNICALITIES• The website soon outer its server capacity, and in 2004 had over a million
users and over 60,000 torrent files. It was around this time where the team
realised they had begun to attract some international attention. By the end of
2005, the site had over 2.5 million users and the traffic volume was attracting
some serious attention. Some of this attention was form copyright holders,
telling them to take certain material down citing copyright infringement,
however the ignorance of these requests led to Swedish Police raiding the site.
• On May 31, 2006, 65 police officers entered the company's Stockholm data
center with the goal of shutting down The Pirate Bay. While the raid did bring
down the site, within three days it was back online.
• In 2009, the four founders of The Pirate Bay were found guilty of assisting
copyright infringement, sentenced to one year in jail and faced fines of
$3,620,000. The decision was appealed in 2010, with the jail time being
reduced but the fines were increased to $6.5 million. It also spurred the site's
owners to make some technical changes to avoid law enforcement issues going

8. …
• On December 9th 2012, there was a second
raid on by Swedish police. Law enforcement
once again seized servers and computers. The
issue, though, is that likely what was on those
servers and systems is backed up in the cloud,
far out of law enforcement's hands.

9. • Founded in 2003, Pirate
Bay has been in the legal
crosshairs for years, but
has managed to stay afloat
despite efforts by
governments, anti-piracy
groups and the music and
film industries to close it
down.

10. LIMEWIRE

11. HISTORY
• Limewire, again, was a p2p
sharing program created
by Mark Gorton which ran
on Windows, Mac, and
other softwares which
were supported by Java.
Limewire used the
Gnutella network (p2p) as
well as the BitTorrent
protocol.

12. LEGAL TECHNICALITIES
• On October 26, 2010, U.S. federal court judge Kimba Wood
issued an injunction forcing LimeWire to stop "the searching,
downloading, uploading, file trading and/or file distribution
functionality, and/or all functionality" of its software in Arista
Records LLC v. Lime Group LLC.
• As a result of the injunction, LimeWire stopped distributing the
LimeWire software, and versions 5.5.11. However, version 5.5.10
and all prior versions of LimeWire remain fully functional and
cannot be disabled unless a user upgrades to one of the newer
versions.

13. MOST PIRATED 2014
• Film: Captain America 2: The Winter Soldier
• TV Show: Game of Thrones
• Song: Taylor Swift- Bad Blood

18. IMPACT OF PIRACY ON THE
MUSIC INDUSTRY

19. WHO DOES IT AFFECT?
• songwriters, recording artists, audio engineers,
computer technicians, talent scouts and
marketing specialists, producers, publishers,
etc…

20. POSITIVE ARGUMENT
• In regards to smaller, not very well established
music artists, piracy can increase their popularity,
therefore resulting in them becoming more
established within the music industry, and
extending their fan base to reach to larger
audiences.

21. THE NEGATIVE IMPACT
• Financial Losses- The RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) reports
that music sales have dropped 47% since the release of Napster in 1999. The
availability of free music has cost the music industry $12.5 billion in economic
losses. In order to make up for these losses, the music industry has filed lawsuits
against individuals responsible for illegally downloading music.
• Layoffs- Singers and bands are the public face of the music industry, however
there are a large team of people behind the work. As record companies have
seen their profits decrease, they have been cutting people who they can’t afford
to have. The RIAA has revealed that more than 71,000 jobs have been lost as a
result of illegally downloading music.

22. ATTEMPTS ON
COMBATTING PIRACY

23. ALTERNATIVES TO PIRACY
• - Spotify
• -Apple Music
• -Amazon
• -Soundcloud
• (All of which are legal streaming sites)

24. FREE MUSIC GIVEAWAY
• On September 9th 2014, U2 released their new album ‘Songs of Innocence’.
However, instead of charging, they offered it to all 500 million Itunes users for
free.
• In October 2007, Radiohead pre-released their new album ‘In Rainbows’, and
let their fans decide how much to pay for it.