ABSTRACT
In 1999, a nineteen-year-old college student launched what was to become a revolution of sorts in the recorded music industry. Napster, the first music file-sharing service, had become a way to download music from the Internet without payment. What must have at first seemed to be a benign event, the recording industry in the United States soon took notice as its revenues began to fall. Since Napster's inception, unit sales of recorded music have dropped more than 26 percent and the recording industry's revenues have fallen 14 percent—a $2 billion decline. The industry responded by suing the Internet pirates for theft of intellectual property.
