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Are The Measures Taken Against Illegal Music Downloading Effective?

Introduction
When a commercial about the release of a new album is seen or heard, most people run to their computer to download it, instead of run to the store and buy it. According to a Belgian broadcasting company, VRT, the profits of music sales fell worldwide by 4% and this only in the first 6 months of 2006. In the opinion of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, this decline is due to a sale decrease of CD's. ("Inkomsten van de muziekindustrie blijven dalen", 2006)
The purpose of this paper is to examine the measures taken against illegal downloading and to investigate their effectiveness.
The paper consists of three main sections. Firstly, a brief overview of the existing illegal downloading programs is given. The second section will explain why measures need to be taken. Finally, this paper discusses the measures and their effectiveness.

The Illegal Downloading Programs
A brief overview of the 5 most popular downloading programs will be given in this section, based on the websites of "Napster" (2006), "Kazaa" (2006), "BearShare" (2006), "LimeWire" (2006) and "Morpheus", (2006). An enumeration of all the websites, weblogs and programs, with which music can be downloaded, would stray from the actual subject. The subtitle announces that the programs are illegal; however this is not completely the truth. There are numerous illegal providers of music on internet, but most of them try to skirt around the copyright laws and therefore try to build a legal site or program.
The first online program that could be downloaded for free from the web was Napster. Shawn Fanning created this peer-to-peer music sharing service in 1999. Now music fans could easily share MP3 files with each other, free of charge. In July 2001 Napster had to shut down because it violated the copyright laws. However, Napster went back online in 2002, but the music lovers now had to subscribe and pay for the music that they want to download.
Napster was barely...