ase of Napster, nobody is making a profit. Even Napster at this point, is a start-up company that has not generated income, does not charge their users for accessing the server, and it does not post commercial spots. It is still owned privately. Napster had get some offers for using their technology to organize the sharing of some other types of files (e.g. insurance policies, medical records, police reports, etc.) that would give them lucrative gains in some completely different lines of file sharing. It is also possible that in the future Napster would adopt some money maker schema, like selling commercial space, charging access to their site, charging for downloading, etc. but at this point it does not. It is fairly accurate to say that users of Napster are not making a profit with the music files that they download. The professional use of music demands high quality records and formats that are different from the mp3 format that is used transmitting electronically music files. Most professional music playing devices require the use of wav format files. A 99% of the files shared on Napster are mp3 files created by converting wav files taken from a commercial CD. In order to be used in a standard music player, they have to be converted again to wav. Each time a file is transformed from one format to the other, quality is lost and the file is not good enough for a professional, in the same way as a photocopy of a photocopy will have lower quality than the original. If anybody want to use this files in anyway beyond a personal computer or a home music player device, it would have to go to painful technical procedures that would be deceiving the "for free" acquisition of the files. This user would rather buy a copy of the music file in a standard commercial CD. The use of files copied from Napster resembles the use that people did of tape records made out of records, some years ago.In conclusion the entity that is providing the forum fo...
