Christopher Sabec frequents the Trichordist blog, a public posting site for people who care about developing a functional and trustworthy world wide web that protects Artist property rights in the age of online piracy.
The year was 1999. The place Northeastern University in Boston. One student, Shawn Fanning, created a software that forever would change the digital media industry. This software was the first the first Peer-to-Peer (P2P) file-sharing program that let users to share mp3 with each other for free. They called it Napster. Prices of CD purchases online dropped from $15 to $0. In 2003, Apple attempted to fix this issue and revealed iTunes, which charged their customers 99 cents per song. This only marginally helped the music industry because free was still less expensive than basically a dollar. In the ten year span from 1999 to 2009, the music industry was cut in half from $14.6 billion in sales to $6.3 billion in sale. 90% of the music industry came from illegal downloads. Big music stores were dropping out now that CDs could only be sold at the big-box stores. Musicians had to switch gears in order to obtain income, so they had to focus on performances and merchandise.
According to the US Copyright Act, there is still retribution to be collected from musicians from online piracy, thus entertainment lawyers like Christopher Sabec are here to fight for musicians and collect money from illegal downloaders back into the pockets of the rightful owners.