Internet Security
In the recent past a well known and widely used internet utility known as Napster was ordered to discontinue all of their activities due to copyright violations. Napster was and still is an internet music sharing service and was one of the most popular such services. The company existed to allow people across the country and even around the world to share .mp3 files with each other. However as the company became more and more popular they came more and more into the eye of the record companies and artists whose music was being traded freely across their web service. This attention resulted in a court case and eventually the temporary shutdown of Napster. It also has lead to the future state of the music service, as they will reopen for business later in this year, however will now be charging for access. This entire dispute came about due to copyright infringement laws and the breaking of them over the net, however, as can be easily seen, Napster had existed for a long time before these charges were brought up, and even now many alternatives exist. The only difference is the relative size of the alternatives compared to Napster. Yet these other alternatives continue to exist without punishment. The question that I will an
However, the introduction of an Internet policing bureau would effectively be the introduction of a group of people whose job it is to snoop around in the private information of citizens all over out country. Of course, many people believe that it is a good idea to police the internet to an extent, however, they usually draw a line somewhere, expecting the enforcement of laws to extend only to a certain point, which the enforcers would then stop at, leaving all those who did not violate the certain laws before the line but did violate the laws after it free and without penalty. The list of issues concerning Internet privacy could go on and on. However the answer to this is not simply to give a group of people the right to break the law and intrude upon the privacy of the citizens of the United States (or any country/government for that matter). The second difficulty is that, if we allow this bureau the power necessary to enforce these laws, how can we expect a government to be so hypocritical as to specifically enforce only certain laws while ignoring others when it is clear that they have the power to enforce those that are being ignored just as easily as those that are being enforced. While conversing with friends and brainstorming for this very essay I was faced with a person who believed strongly that the government should ban access by children to pornographic sites, or perhaps ban pornographic materials on the internet totally. First and foremost of these, however, is a very obvious reason, the issue of privacy. I have many reasons for the answer that I have provided to this very controversial question, however, I will only be able to address a few of those reasons here. Privacy is the reason that warrants are required for a search of someone's home. However, this same friend, when approached moments later concerning the use of copyrighted materials (notably mp3s) the reply "but they don't hurt anyone" was given. swer here has a powerful bearing on the lives of these sites, as well as on the lives of most people in this country. A notable example of this recently occurred in my personal conversations.
Common topics in this essay:
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person's computer,
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