Ever since the days of Napster's glory period, from 1999 - 2002, the issue of sharing copyrighted music has become a huge and very controversial one. For some reason though, it seems to be the music industry that is complaining the most and taking the biggest steps towards preventing it. Software and movie companies don't seem to be taking quite as big an impact and are not complaining anywhere near as much or taking as much action. However, the sharing of music via the internet is no different to how it used to be years ago when people just borrowed and recorded each others music tape cassettes. The only difference now is that they have the internet to blame, not school and college students copying each others tapes. The truth is, though, that if peoples computers weren't all connected to each other then we wouldn't have the internet.

With regards to the actions and steps taken by business industries in their attempt to deter music piracy, it all seems to be a bit of an unnecessary farce when governments could just take one simple little step to help the music industry out. For example, I currently pay £10 (uk) per month for my broadband connection. If governments ordered internet service providers to add a surchage of say £2.50 on top of the original broadband fee, this could pay for the privelige of being able to use peer-to-peer filesharing applications. The extra collected money could then be collated into one huge sum of money from all service providers customers forming a blanket license payment scheme. The money could then go to a copyright protection society such as mcps-prs alliance and the be distributed evenly between all registered recording artists. That way, the artists / record labels would still get paid for internet users free downloads therefore solving the problem of music piracy. It is a simple solution that could help the licensing of p2p software and music alike aswell as ensuring that artists still get paid. There are many other simple solutions like this that would be much more effective than their current efforts which are proving to be hugely costsly and very ineffective, therefore costing the music industry even more money than if they didn't try to take this legal action. In effect, by trying to take legal action, they are costing themselves a lot more money and losing out in the long run.