Downloading is Killing Music: Napster and The Recording Industry’s Piracy Panic Narrative

Abstract

Beginning in the late 1990s and the arrival of the file-sharing program Napster, the recording industry used a “piracy panic narrative” in an attempt not only to prevent file-sharing, but also, to change the basic parameters of copyright law. In this piracy panic narrative, major record labels and their representative trade associations made the argument that file-sharing is piracy, piracy is stealing, and this stealing hurts recording artists. In this paper, I argue that the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) used this narrative in the United States to change public opinion on file-sharing with the ultimate goal of changing the copyright policy regime. By placing the recording industry in the position of a victim, the piracy panic narrative appeals to the average person’s common sense understanding of the political economy of the music industry while advancing a predatory plan to extract profit.