The History, Benefits and Complications of Mp3s and Piracy

The trading of MP3's or digital music over the Internet is all ways going to be an important part of the music industry, and is an unrealistic goal to try to control. The cost of controlling the piracy issues over the Internet would cost record companies more money than what they are losing due to MP3 trading. The record industry is trying to fight the major sites and companies in court with copyright suits. Quinlan states "Although downloading music over the Internet and playing it back on computer or portable digital music players has become increasingly popular, major record labels have been slow to embrace distribution over the Web because of the difficulty in preventing unauthorized - and unpaid - copying of songs."
MP3 is a file format which compresses audio files to efficiently store the audio data in files that can be easily downloaded on the Internet. MP3 files are identified by the file extension MP3 and require specialized players which decompress the files and then play the audio files like a regular CD.…