ill protect the music industry, and the morality of the public does not hold much promise for existing copyright issues. The difference between the industry losing "billions" in audio CD sales from the illegal recording of radio songs on Memorex cassette tapes, and the "billions" it loses in lost sales from the recording of MP3 files is this. MP3 files are easier to copy, distribute, share, and collect. The copies are digitally exact, and the selection is greater to choose from because there are thousands (and soon to be millions) of MP3 broadcasters on the Internet, instead of the limited selection of songs that are played on the local radio stations. Many believe there is no moral difference between pressing "Record" on a cassette player, while listening to their favorite radio or cable TV music channel, and hitting the "Save to Disk" button on any MP3 file that they run across.
             A CD stores songs as digital information. The data on a CD uses an uncompressed, high-resolution format. Specifically here's what happens to create a CD:
             „h Music is sampled 44,100 times per second
             „h The samples are 2 bytes (16 bits) long
             „h Separate samples are taken for both the left and right speakers in a stereo system
             Therefore a CD stores a huge number of bits for each second of music:
             44,100 samples/second * 16 bits/sample * 2 channels = 1,411,200 bits per second
             1.4 million bits per second is 176,000 bytes per second. If an average song is 3 minutes long, then the average song on a CD consumes about 32 million bytes of space. 32 Mbytes is a lot of space for one song, and it is especially large when you consider the bandwidth most people have available for their Internet connections. Over a 56k modem it would take something close to 2 hours to download one song. The MP3 format is a compression system for music. The MP3 format helps reduce the number of bytes in a song without hurting the quality of the song's s...