If rock ‘n’ roll is considered the traditional opening salvo announcing music as the line in the sand between kids and adults, file sharing has turned the battle into a war. Since the late 1990s, peer-to-peer file sharing has become the hottest and most controversial way to obtain music and Recording Industry Association of America has responded with lawsuits that have only added to public confusion on the issue.
Paul Rapp is an attorney practicing in New York and Massachusetts. He is currently representing at least 20 people who have been slapped with an RIAA lawsuit and has consulted on the phone with dozens more. Rapp also is a musician who has found file-trading works for him and his band. Rapp is the drummer for the Albany, N.Y., area band Blotto, which may be best remembered as one of the earliest MTV stars with their song "I Wanna Be A Lifeguard."
Rapp first began to look into file sharing in 2000, when he downloaded Napster and typed in his band’s name to see what the big deal was, sarcastically interested to see how much the band might be losing through downloading.
"As the search thing was flashing, all of a sudden I got this chill of ‘What am I going to be if we’re not on there? How much would that suck?’" said Rapp. "It came up and there were half a dozen files of ‘I Wanna Be a Lifeguard’ up there to be traded and I was relieved. Here’s a song that’s 20 years old and it’s still got viability, people are still listening to it, and that’s when I realized the real beauty of the file-sharing services."
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