On the Edge: Napsters, Groksters, and StreamCasts Revolution

When 18- year- old Shawn Napster Fanning, then a freshman at Northeastern University, founded Napster, Inc. in 1999, he started a property revolution. Fanning developed software and a website that let users connect to each other through his website and then copy ( download) music from each others computers. By June 2000, more than 70 million users mostly college students were logging on to Napsters website and downloading for free the copyrighted music they had to pay for in stores. Many students felt the music they downloaded belonged to everyone and that copying was O. K. because it did not affect the original. Two industry groups sued Napster, however, claiming that Napster helped others steal their property and that if their property rights were not respected, musicians could stop producing music. Napster argued it was not responsible for what users did with its software, but on February 12, 2001, the courts ruled that Napster actively contributed to copyright infringement by maintaining the central website through which users connected to each other when they downloaded copyrighted music. By the end of 2002, the company folded ( to be reborn in 2003 as a website selling music). But now others developed programs that let users connect to each other without going through a central website, including Grokster and Streamcast. In 2004, several music companies sued Grokster ( www. grokster. com) and Streamcast ( www. streamcastnetworks. com) for contributing to theft of copyrighted property as Napster had. But in 2004, the court ruled that Grokster and Streamcast were different because their programs let users connect directly to each other without going through Grokster or Streamcast, so neither Grokster nor Streamcast could control what others did with their program. The music companies now sue individual users. One victim remarked, It scares me. You have no power against these people.

Have Grokster, StreamCast, or Napster done anything wrong? Have users of their programs?