A teenager named Tom walked into a music store last week and went straight to his favorite music section. After looking around for a while, he spotted the CD he wanted. Tom then tore the magnetic sensor from the front of the package, stuffed the CD into his pants and then walked through the front doors of the store, stealing the CD. Most people would say that what Tom did was against the law and that he should be punished for the crime. What if I said this crime happens thousands of times every hour every day, in a slightly different way, and the people who commit it run away? with it almost every time. The type of crime I'm talking about is Internet file sharing. Especially music files otherwise known as MP3 files. MP3 is short for MPEG audio layer three, which is an audio compression file that allows you to download high-fidelity music from the Web by reducing the file (Goldsborough 21). This was made extremely popular by a program called Napster, which allows people to share music over the network in MP3 format. One can imagine why this type of program might be loved by some and hated by others. Napster was designed in 1999 by a college dropout named Shawn Fanning. According to Larry Graham in an article written for IEEE Software, Fanning originally designed Napster so he could exchange music files with his friends but once he posted it on the Internet, thousands of others began using it (18). “In terms of users, the Napster site is the fastest growing in history, recently surpassing the 25 million mark in less than a year of operation” (Taro 1). You might ask, why has Napster become so popular? The answer is that simple people love to receive things for free (Graham 18). What also helps is that the average price for a new CD is around eighteen dollars and most teenagers or adults, for that matter, don't have that amount of money to spend every time they like a song. The other side of this argument comes from the people who absolutely hate Napster. Musicians, record companies, and anyone who makes money from selling music are Napster's biggest enemies, and the reason why is money.