MP3's Morally Wrong?

There's tons of press on MP3's as Napster and RIAA battle over whether or not the unrestricted sharing of MP3's should be allowed on the net. For those of you who aren't familiar with Napster, it's basically a file sharing community. Users are able to trade multimedia files without any restrictions. It brings up strong debates over where we should draw the line when it comes to the pirating of songs through the MP3 format. Should we do it once someone is caught sharing a controlled piece of music or should we stop people from sharing information in general? RIAA claims that Napster should create such a database to monitor this entirely and avoid the problem altogether. Well the reality of this is that users will change to another Napster-like program or develop new name architectures to avoid these "monitors" of sorts. Sharing of the files will not stop and I personally see no sense in what RIAA is trying to do. The people trading or sharing the music in question should be the one's responsible for their actions, not Napster or anything like it.

Conclusion

With the strong interest in MP3's, the industry has picked up the ball and is moving forward at a rapid pace to keep up with the demand. Typical players like home CD/DVD players, car stereo CD players, and portable CD players (like the Voyager) will soon begin to ship with MP3 playing capabilities as a standard feature. Not only hardware but also software is on the move as newer audio formats are being explored that offer even more than we have now. All in all, MP3's have charged up what was becoming a rather bland audio industry.