Several websites have offered services for locating and downloading digital music, particularly since the advent of the MP3 format, which provides fairly high compression and yet retains nearly the same quality as a standard music CD. The website mp3.com provides searchable access to a massive number of MP3 format songs. It also provided a service called myMP3.com, which allowed users to record music from standard music CDs that they owned into MP3 format and store the songs on the website, allowing the users to retrieve their own songs from anywhere they had Internet access. However, several of the largest corporate players in the recording industry brought a lawsuit against mp3.com, claiming infringement on their copyrighted music.
Another Internet service, Napster, offered users the ability to trade music anonymously from one user's computer to another user's computer. The service did not actually store music, but merely indexed the music, allowing users to quickly locate songs and download them from another user's hard drive. However, it turned out that the service really was not anonymous. Several artists, including Dr. Dre and the group Metallica, brought a lawsuit against Napster, claiming to have electronically detected millions of illegal downloads of their copyrighted work through the Napster service. They also threatened to expose and possibly sue the individuals they had identified. Later, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and the National Music Publishers Association (NMPA) sued Napster over copyright violations. Napster eventually lost in court and was forced to filter all access to its services in an attempt to prevent downloading of copyrighted music.
In the days leading up to significant court decisions, Napster and similar services experienced extremely high volumes of traffic; presumably, users recognized that Napster might lose in court and were attempting to download large quantities of music before it and other services were shut down. This has ethical consequences, since if users believed the service might be shut down because downloading copyrighted songs was a violation of the law, then their heavy download activity before the legal decision was also a violation of the law (note a similar argument used by the apostle James in his epistle: "So whoever knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, for him it is sin" [4:17, ESV]). That technicality apparently did not stop millions of users.
Large legal costs, coupled with a financial slump across the Internet business world, led to a buy-out of both Napster (by Bertelsmann) and mp3.com (by Vivendi Universal in May 2001). Many Internet users claimed these financial takeovers were nothing less than the recording industry using their monopoly power to stamp out a new technology that threatened their hegemony. Others claimed it was a legitimate defense of the rights of the artists and their distributors. The legal landscape itself is shifting as courts try to determine how to adapt existing laws to new technologies. For example, the 1992 Home Recording Act allows users to make personal copies of music they own as backups in case of media failure. However, the law did not envision the possibility of using a computer to digitally record music and does not mention the computer hard drive as a recording medium.