CastaedaIntroduction:What I call the "Napster dilemma" is a problem that involves new technological concepts and redefinitions of old ideas. This is the case for many legal and moral conflicts that are arising with the outcome of new possibilities and options made accessible by informatics and telecommunications. The importance of these problems has caught so much attention that in 1998, President Clinton signed the new Digital Millennium Copyright Act, where a good attempt of addressing these issues was done. By now, just after two years, some of its content already lost actuality.Since many people is not really acquainted with Napster, what is it and how it is work, I find important to give a quick definition of how it works, even thought it goes a little beyond of the limits of this paper.What is Napster?Napster is a software program through which users can swap songs over the Internet. Computer users visit (using their internet browsers like Explorer, Netscape, etc and an internet connection via modem like pilot or an Ethernet connection, like the ones we have on campus) napster.com where they download the free Napster program. Once the software is installed on the user's hard drive (which is an extremely simple procedure), the user can locate songs stored on the computers of other Napster users by title and artist. Once a specific song is located, the user double-clicks the title and the song starts to download to his/her hard drive in MP3 (MPEG audio layer 3) format, a fairly efficient audio file form which compresses original CD data by 12 times without any discernible loss in sound quality, as long as the file is played in a mp3 player. There are no expenses involved. It is important to notice that the act of locating a song is performed by connecting to a main server that belongs to Napster. This server does not contain the music. It only contains the name and location (in internet terms) of the computers with the music file...
