MP3 is a coding format for digital audio developed largely by the Fraunhofer Society in Germany under the lead of Karlheinz Brandenburg. It was designed to greatly reduce the amount of data required to represent audio, yet still sound like a faithful reproduction of the original uncompressed audio to most listeners; for example, compared to CD-quality digital audio, MP3 compression can commonly achieve a 75–95% reduction in size, depending on the bit rate. In popular usage, MP3 often refers to files of sound or music recordings stored in the MP3 file format (.mp3) on consumer electronic devices.
Napster was an American peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing application primarily associated with digital audio file distribution. Founded by Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker, the platform originally launched on June 1, 1999. Audio shared on the service was typically encoded in the MP3 format. As the software became popular, the company encountered legal difficulties over copyright infringement. Napster ceased operations in 2001 after losing multiple lawsuits and filed for bankruptcy in June 2002.
Warez is a common computing and broader cultural term referring to pirated software that is distributed via the Internet. Warez is used most commonly as a noun, a plural form of ware, and is intended to be pronounced like the word wares. The circumvention of copy protection (cracking) is an essential step in generating warez, and based on this common mechanism, the software-focused definition has been extended to include other copyright-protected materials, including movies and games. The global array of warez groups has been referred to as "The Scene", deriving from its earlier description as "the warez scene". Distribution and trade of copyrighted works without payment of fees or royalties generally violates national and international copyright laws and agreements. The term warez covers supported as well as unsupported (abandonware) items, and legal prohibitions governing creation and distribution of warez cover both profit-driven and "enthusiast" generators and distributors of such items.
Free music or libre music is music that, like free software, can freely be copied, distributed and modified for any purpose. Thus free music is either in the public domain or licensed under a free license by the artist or copyright holder themselves, often as a method of promotion. It does not mean that there should be no fee involved. The word free refers to freedom, not to price.
The Marshall Mathers LP is the third studio album by American rapper Eminem. It was released on May 23, 2000, by Aftermath Entertainment and Interscope Records. Production on the album was handled by Dr. Dre, Mel-Man, F.B.T., Eminem, and The 45 King. The album spawned three hit singles: "The Real Slim Shady", "The Way I Am" and "Stan", and features guest appearances from Dido, RBX, Sticky Fingaz, Bizarre, Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, Xzibit, Nate Dogg, Paul Rosenberg and D12.
Karlheinz Brandenburg is a German electrical engineer and mathematician. Together with Ernst Eberlein, Heinz Gerhäuser, Bernhard Grill, Jürgen Herre and Harald Popp, he developed the widespread MP3 method for audio data compression. He is also known for his elementary work in the field of audio coding, the perception measurement, the wave field synthesis and psychoacoustics. Brandenburg has received numerous national and international research awards, prizes and honors for his work. Since 2000 he has been a professor of electronic media technology at the Technical University Ilmenau. Brandenburg was significantly involved in the founding of the Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Media Technology (IDMT) and currently serves as its director.
MP3.com was a website operated by Paramount Global publishing tabloid-style news items about digital music and artists, songs, services, and technologies. It is better known for its original incarnation as a legal, free music-sharing service, named after the popular music file format MP3, popular with independent musicians for promoting their work. That service was shut down on December 2, 2003, by CNET, which, after purchasing the domain name, established the current MP3.com site.
Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity is a 2004 book by law professor Lawrence Lessig that was released on the Internet under the Creative Commons Attribution/Non-commercial license on March 25, 2004.
A music download is the digital transfer of music via the Internet into a device capable of decoding and playing it, such as a personal computer, portable media player, MP3 player or smartphone. This term encompasses both legal downloads and downloads of copyrighted material without permission or legal payment. Music downloads are typically encoded with modified discrete cosine transform (MDCT) audio data compression, particularly the Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) format used by iTunes as well as the MP3 audio coding format.
PressPlay was the name of an online music store that operated from December 2001 until March 2003. It was created as a joint venture between Universal Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment in response to the popularity of Napster.
An MP3 blog is a type of blog in which the creator makes music files, normally in the MP3 format, available for download. They are also known as musicblogs, audioblogs or soundblogs. MP3 blogs have become increasingly popular since 2003. The music posted ranges from hard-to-find rarities that have not been issued in many years to more contemporary offerings, and selections are often restricted to a particular musical genre or theme. Some musicblogs offer music in Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) or Ogg formats.
The Warez scene, often referred to as The Scene, is an underground network of piracy groups specialized in obtaining and illegally releasing digital media before their official release date. The Scene distributes all forms of digital media, including computer games, movies, TV shows, music, and pornography. This network is meant to be hidden from the public, with the files shared only with members of the community. However, as files became commonly leaked outside the community and their popularity grew, some individuals from The Scene began leaking files and uploading them to file-hosts, torrents and EDonkey Networks.
Rabid Neurosis (RNS) was an MP3 warez release organization which was founded in 1996, following in the footsteps of Compress 'Da Audio (CDA), the first MP3 piracy group. In 1999, the group claimed to have released over 6,000 titles a year. RNS occasionally used the tagline "Rabid Neurosis - Spread The Epidemic." RNS were best known for releasing highly anticipated albums by hip hop, pop, rock and dance artists weeks and sometimes months before their official release date. RNS is known to have greatly contributed to the mp3 scene.
The free-culture movement is a social movement that promotes the freedom to distribute and modify the creative works of others in the form of free content or open content without compensation to, or the consent of, the work's original creators, by using the Internet and other forms of media.
The open music model is an economic and technological framework for the recording industry based on research conducted at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It predicts that the playback of prerecorded music will be regarded as a service rather than as individually sold products, and that the only system for the digital distribution of music that will be viable against piracy is a subscription-based system supporting file sharing and free of digital rights management. The research also indicated that US$9 per month for unlimited use would be the market clearing price at that time, but recommended $5 per month as the long-term optimal price.
Copyright infringement is the use of works protected by copyright without permission for a usage where such permission is required, thereby infringing certain exclusive rights granted to the copyright holder, such as the right to reproduce, distribute, display or perform the protected work, or to produce derivative works. The copyright holder is usually the work's creator, or a publisher or other business to whom copyright has been assigned. Copyright holders routinely invoke legal and technological measures to prevent and penalize copyright infringement.
MusicDNA is a music file format developed by some of the key figures involved in the development of the MP3 format.
Music piracy is the copying and distributing of recordings of a piece of music for which the rights owners did not give consent. In the contemporary legal environment, it is a form of copyright infringement, which may be either a civil wrong or a crime depending on jurisdiction. The late 20th and early 21st centuries saw much controversy over the ethics of redistributing media content, how much production and distribution companies in the media were losing, and the very scope of what ought to be considered piracy – and cases involving the piracy of music were among the most frequently discussed in the debate.
Inkle is a video game development company based in Cambridge, United Kingdom that specialises in interactive narrative, i.e. text-focused computer video games. They have created games such as 80 Days and Sorcery!, a recreation of Steve Jackson’s Sorcery! gamebook series.
Participants in an online music scene who rearrange spliced parts of musical pieces form mashup culture. The audio-files are normally in MP3 format and spliced with audio-editing software online. The new, edited song is called mashup. The expression mashup culture is also strongly connected to mashup in music. Even though it was not originally a political community, the production of mash-up music is related to the issue of copyright. Mashup Culture is even regarded as "a response to larger technological, institutional, and social contexts".
