The ability to store music and data onto storage mediums has made them accessible to and available to the mass audiences. Soon after the invention of a new storage medium came the need for duplication, be it for the reasons of mass distribution, or economics; people have found way to get around the system to bring inexpensive, or even free music, to themselves. The newest medium, MP3, has caused the highest levels of impairment to the music industry as of yet. The easily conceivable data format has trigger extensive piracy, despite congressional measures taken to control it, preventing the distribution of MP3s has been highly a challenge.
             To understand why MP3s have been so popular, we must understand what they are. MP3 stands for MPEG1 (Motion Picture Experts Group) Layer 3 format, an audio codec; a highly developed compression algorithm system which compresses the sound byte by a twelve:one ratio, without significant sound loss. MP3 format was first created for the matter of convenience and transport. Not anticipating the bloom in the Broadband market, they were leading the music industry into a bottomless pit. The entire Compact Disc (CD) could be compressed, uploaded onto the Internet, downloaded, and copied onto a blank CD by someone else across the globe in a matter of minutes. This brought many smiles to the music enthusiast but for the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), it was the nightmare no one wished for. RIAA was not intimidated immediately by this, because at the time, it was still cumbersome for people to transfer files to one another, despite having an established infrastructure, which conducted filesharing on a worldwide basis. At the dawn of the technology in the early 1990's, digital piracy was on a miniscule scale that it allowed for only the power-users to gain access to these files.
             In 1999, an unsatisfied computer science student from Northeastern University set out to create...