• Teens' and preteens' eagerness to download music has been a major contention.listening to music. image by Anna Chelnokova from Fotolia.com
  
  Fearing widespread revenue losses from the downloading of its product, American media companies have pushed hard for crackdowns against the practice. These efforts are mainly guided by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, which is the major legislation that addresses the subject. Without such enforcement measures, piracy would be even more rampant, proponents like the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) claim. Critics have cast these efforts as fears of a new medium--one that remains resistant to lawsuits.
  
  

Digital Millennium Copyright Act

• Adopted in 1998, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) remains the major law addressing illegal downloading and file-sharing of music files. From the American standpoint, the law was meant to implement treaties signed two years earlier at the World Intellectual Property Organization conference in Geneva, Switzerland. For listeners, the most relevant portion is the maximum penalty, which peaks at $150,000 per act of copyright infringement, as the law defines it.
  
  

Time Frame

• Fears of losing civil suits have convinced most music downloaders to settle them.powerful red courthouse image by Barcabloo from Fotolia.com
  
  Armed with the legislation, the RIAA began an enforcement campaign in 2004 against 30,000 people that it claimed had illegally downloaded music. Most settled out of court for amounts of $5,000 or less. In 2009, a federal jury issued a record $1.92 million judgment on Jammie Thomas-Rasset, a single mother of four, for downloading 24 songs. At roughly $80,000 per song, the verdict would surely leave Thomas-Rasset in debt for life, Wired magazine reported.
  
  

Considerations

• Legal scholars like Tara Wheatland denounced the Thomas-Rasset verdict as "wildly disproportionate" to the harm allegedly suffered by the entertainment industry from the downloading of its product. Supporters of this view are pressing to revise the DMCA, noting that no other law gives such open-ended discretion for high damage awards, with little burden of proof. Other critics saw the verdict as excessive, yet consistent with Congress's intent to stop copyright infringement when it originally passed the law.
  
  

Significance

• Unlike the United States, Canada allows the copying of music files for private use, but uploading them is still illegal, Internet legal columnist Michael Geist told the "Toronto Star" in 2009. Geist also dismissed claims that Canada has the highest percentage of illegal downloaders worldwide. He noted that the source was a nearly six-year-old study of 30 countries. However, the study made no distinction between illegal and legal downloading--making it a questionable information source, Geist said.
  
  

Potential

• Limiting file-sharing is the music industy's strategy for containing its alleged income loss.laptop connection to internet world black bg image by patrimonio designs from Fotolia.com
  
  Claiming success in educating the public about file-sharing, the RIAA is ending its widely-criticized tactic of sending pre-litigation letters to housewives and young children. However, the RIAA has vowed to continue policing areas where it sees persistent problems--notably, peer-to-peer networking sites like BitTorrent, or LimeWire. Conceding that some piracy will always exist, the RIAA claimed that it only wanted to see "a level of manageable control so a legitimate marketplace can really flourish."