Almost everyone has heard of Napster and its long debated issue's of file swapping and sharing. Considering Napster's short-lived existence of about a year and a half, they have certainly opened many people's eyes. Some say the file swapping that Napster allows everyone to do is illegal; others says it's just another thing to do on the internet. Napster has done much good for the internet, adding one more good thing that the internet can do for us. Napster has raised several intense controversial issues in the music industry of copyright infringement laws. Although shutting down Napster is not the solution; some agreement between the plaintiffs and Napster should come about.

Napster is a medium for trading and/or swapping of music files over the internet. Napster has about 20 million users worldwide (Grimaldi Online). This phenomenon called Napster has taking the entire internet by storm. Just think all Napster is, is a program designed by a nineteen-year-old kid, a college dropout. Who would have thought that it would cause so much excitement in the music industry (Online)?

Napster has allowed millions of people to be able to share their music over the internet. In these

any money from these trades of music. They claim that using Napster as an exchanging medium for music is exercising one First Amendment rights as a United States citizen. The U.S. District Judge Marilyn Hall Patel said that the only reason Napster was created was to be able to traded copyrighted music, pirated online from other people. There has been an estimated 3.6 billion downloads of illegal, copyrighted material through Napster, this is the biggest of all copyright infringement cases ever in the history of the United States. On July 26, 2000, the end of the hearing against Napster, the judge had ruled Napster to be shutdown; an injunction against Napster was enforced (Grimaldi Online).

After much discussion Napster wants to stay running, and all of its members want to keep on using the service too. One of the people suing Napster claimed that if the Napster would let Bertelsmann buy into a piece of Napster, it would drop its lawsuit against Napster. The biggest debate going on now is how to keep Napster running and trying not breaking any more copyright laws. There has been a great amount of talk of Napster users having to pay a membership fee to use the service. This membership fee would go to the record companies to pay a portion of the royalties owed to the musicians. The fee would be minimal, like $5 a month; this would make

With all this commotion

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