Lucas Dennison
             Subject: Proposing a solution to make both sides of the Napster debate happy.
             We request to conduct research concerning the feasibility of having advertisements on Napster to pay royalty to the artists of whose music is downloaded from the web site.
             Since 1999, people using the Internet, have been able to download free music from a web site called Napster. The web site has become very popular due to the large selection of music available and the fact that is free. Currently, Napster has over 800,000 users downloading music at any given time.
             The problem with the free music, and the sharing of the free music, is that the artists who created the music are not getting any royalties. The music industry, in particularly the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), has filed suit against Napster and has been able to force the web site to ban songs, by certain groups, from being swapped. However, people are still able to bypass the ban by using different methods, one is by changing the names of the groups by one letter.
             We propose to conduct a research to determine if paid advertisements on Napster's web site will pay the royalties to the artists. We will use how websites pay for their business costs, as well as how radio stations pay for music, as the basis for our concept.
             Upon acceptance of this proposal, we will have the completion report submitted by May 4, 2001. The report will contain the results of our research and our recommendation of solving the problem between Napster and the RIAA.
             Napster, a nearly 2 billion dollar network consisting of over 70 million users, is being sued based on the fact that it is providing the means for it's users to copy illegally the copyrighted music of many musicians, without giving royalties to the owners of the songs.
             Throughout high school, Shaun Fanning split his time between sports and computers. After graduati...