Music has always been the world's universal form of communication. The Recording Industry Association of America implies that "it touches every person of every culture on the globe to the tune of $40 billion annually, and the U.S. recording industry accounts for fully one-third of that market" (RIAA). As technology rapidly increases, file sharing amongst consumers becomes faster and easier to do. The new phenomenon of the MPEG Layer 3 encoding (MP3) and the peer-to-peer (P2P) networks present a challenge to the traditional recording and distribution methods of music. …
