MP3

            
             Digital technology has effectively changed the music industry almost beyond recognition.With the introduction of MP3's and the downloading of music, there have been many new impacts on society. While advances in technology are made everyday, MP3's are just one step further in the advancement of music. However, this new technology presents society with a variety of social and ethical issues. Record companies and music stores have seen a decline in record sales since the development of this new format of sound file, and countless copyright violations have taken place. To complicate matters even more, inventions in hardware that promote the use of MP3s has contributed to this loss in revenue.
             B : The IT Background of the Issue.
             MP3s were derived from MPEGs, which are audio compression algorithms developed as a standard for the high fidelity compression of audio. It is one part audio, two parts video and systems. The high performance of this algorithm is due to the exploitation of auditory masking. This is the technical term for the phenomena whereby whenever the ear detects a strong audio signal, it "masks out" a spectral neighbourhood of weaker audio signals. So by eliminating these sounds which would have been inaudible to the human ear anyway, MP3 compression can reduce the size of an original file to a ratio of up to 12:1 without any excessive loss of sound quality. It is this compression that makes MP3 such an attractive format for the transmission of music over the web.
             Over the past few years, there have been many trends and developments in this domain to encourage the continuance of illegally downloading music off the internet. The creation of illegal programs such as Morpheus , Kazaa and Grokster ( also called file-sharing, because they allow individual computer users to share their files), have gained popularity by making a plethora of music readily available to users from the comfort of their own homes.