High-Tech Versus Society

High technology is pushing the rules of society. Consider what MP3s are doing to the music industry. MP3s are a method that works very well for digitizing and compressing high-quality audio. Players for MP3 music are now commonly available. MP3 compression reduces an average song from a CD from 55 Megabytes (MBs) down to 5 MBs without loss of song quality. You can't send a 55 MB file through an email message yet, but you can easily send a 5 MB one.

Copying and sharing music is much easier than ever before. Sites like Napster, Aimster, Gnutella, and Kazaa sprang up to allow users to easily trade or share MP3s. However, these services don't really facilitate trading or sharing. They facilitate copying of songs. As you can ...

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