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Porn O Graphy

The Internet, as well as being a vast repository of useful information, is a vast repository of smut. Porn is everywhere. Searching for the term ?sex? yields millions of results. Governments are pressured by parents to clean up the Net, but due to the global nature of the Internet it?s all but impossible to block content from appearing. The solution that is most often implemented is software that ?filters? the content appearing on the computer screen. Programs like Net Nanny and Cyber Sitter are designed to prevent young eyes from seeing graphic images or dangerous information. This tends to work quite well, but in some cases too well, blocking legitimate sites about sex education, or controversial sites like Planned Parenthood.

The intrusions into personal freedom don?t end after childhood. Adults who use the Internet to download Pornography are under the illusion that the Internet is a completely anonymous forum. This is far from the truth. Users on the Internet leave their IP address, essentially a digital fingerprint that identifies their computer, at every site they visit. This information can easily be used to track down all sorts of data, including a users name, address, phone number, social security number, and possibly even credit card numbers.

Who could be doing all this snooping, one might be tempted to ask? The biggest snoops, perhaps not surprisingly, are those who are mandated to protect us: the police. Recently a great deal of controvercy erupted over the admission by the FBI about the existence of a system called Carnivore, which can be used to monitor emails, downloads, web site visits, and other information about a specific user of the Internet, without that person?s knowledge or consent. Although the FBI assures us that this system will only be used in cases of criminal investigation and only with a court order, the possibility for abuse is glaringly obvious.

While the intentions of the censorship advocates may be good, the restrictions of personal freedom that they propose are unbearable. Preventing the dissemination of hate literature, child pornography, bomb making recipes is all fine and good, but there is little evidence that any of these types of information are particularly prevalent on the Internet. The measures that governments and employers propose to prevent the spread of this material would entail leaving a small group of people, probably lawyers or software programmers, to decide what is and isn?t appropriate for our viewing.

The Napster Debate

One of the main issues concerning control and the Internet is Napster. Napster is the world’s leading person-to-person file sharing community and the fastest growing community in the history of the Internet, with over 38 million passionate music fans. Napster’s software application enables users to locate and share music files through one easy-to-use interface. It creates a centralized system that allows people to log on and use the Napster search engine to connect with individual computer hard drives anywhere in the world and share music?(much of which is stolen according to Napster?s critics). A very simple search mechanism is used where you plug in the name of any artist of any song, and all of a sudden you’ll get multiple choices where you can click on and download that song easily for free. It also provides media fans a vehicle to identify new artists and a forum to communicate their interests and tastes with one another via instant messaging, chat rooms, and Hot List user bookmarks. Napster will, in the future, use their technology for other file sharing purposes. Napster’s membership is already expanding faster than such high growth Internet application companies as Hotmail or ICQ. This astonishing growth has taken place without advertising or promotion. Shawn Fanning, an eighteen year-old freshman at Northeastern University, founded napster, in 1999. Over four million individual users access the Napster service each day, as defined by unique IP addresses. It is this kind of interest in file-sharing that has inspired such industry experts as Andy Grove, the founder of Intel, to state: “The whole Internet could be re-architected by Napster-like technology.”

The remarkably rapid growth of Napster and MP3 technology scared the Recording Industry Association of America and some of its artists greatly, and resulted in numerous lawsuits filed against Napster and other similar sites. Napster was charged in court by the RIIA under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which stipulates the way that a service provider who receives notification of alleged infringement from a copyright holder must take action. The Recording industry was of the belief that Napster facilitated the illegal downloading of music, without any royalties going to the artists or record companies. In fact, recent studies have shown that 78 percent of online music users don?t regard the practice as theft, and another 61 percent say they don?t care if the music they are capturing is copyrighted. However, it is important to point out that Napster does not itself make available any MP3 materials over the Internet. Napster merely provides computer software that allows its users to choose which files to make available to each other, and which files to download.

Despite the fact that the RIAA publicly asserts that Napster hurts the music industry by giving away music for free, the RIAA?s own figures for the first half of 2000, show that CD sales were up six percent from the same period the year before, an have in fact reached an all-time high (about $5.9 billion). Napster believes that CD sales are rising in America because ?Napster helps cultivate,

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