The Ethics Of File Sharing

Luis Aguiar and Bertin Martens, researchers at the Institute for Prospective Technological Studies, conducted an extensive analysis of the clickstream data of more than 16,500 European consumers to determine the relationship between illegal streaming and sales of music. They found that the illegal streaming and downloading of music has no affect on sales at all. Contrarily, they discovered that those who illegally listened to songs online are more likely to then buy those songs (Aguiar & Martens, 2016). Aguiar and Martens’s findings directly contradict the claims made by Steal This Film that online pirates never even consider buying

In recent years, the file sharing of copyrighted material has come under fire. It is a topic that is becoming increasingly morally debatable, as people question whether downloading copyrighted material is to be considered stealing or not. The government and legal action has taken what is mostly harmless file sharing of pop culture and turned it into a very serious crime due to industry pressures. However, there are still supporters of file sharing like myself whom believe the act can be justified and is still ethically sound. In this essay I will explain how copyright, fair use, and public domain play a role in file sharing and also describe why it is not unreasonable for society to commit the crime of copyright infringement.

For many years illegal file sharing and music swapping has been going on. Two very popular cases are the MGM Studios, Inc. v. Grokster case and the A&M Records, Inc. v. Napster case. Both cases differ in many ways however they also have similarities. A lot of music and other sorts of entertainment are being distributed for free all over the internet. What some people do not think of are the consequences that will be faced if they get caught. Not only is the distributor at risk for getting caught but those of us that download the software illegally can be charged.

First, Online Piracy hurts many people but the most important are the downloaders. People tend to not talk about the fact that not only does it hurt others, it also opens the downloader's computer and sensitive documents to threat. As said in the Info Sheet, "When you participate in peer-to-peer networks private and sensitive documents on your computer

This paper is an analytical essay on global ethical issues on peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing. A history and background of peer-to-peer file-sharing will be given, as well as how it became an issue. This paper will explore what aspects of file-sharing are ethical and at what point it becomes unethical. An explanation of the laws will be described and whether the laws different from region-to-region around the world. The paper will include personal experiences with file sharing, as well as an in-depth analysis on the topic with high-quality industry and academic references to defend a particular moral/ethical position.

The music industry has undergone radical changes since the end of the 1990’s, largely a function of the internet and its effects on sales and copyright. Besides placing artists and their music on the world stage, the internet also permitted the downloading of music from free-file- exchange networks. A parallel and equally worrisome, phenomenon is record pirating, a practice made easier by the proliferation of CD burners and access to high speed internet. Unauthorized downloading and pirating circumvent intellectual property laws and result in reduced sales. “In Atlantic Canada, average annual household expenditures on CDs and audio cassettes dropped by 27 percent between 1996 and 2001, from $96.00 to $70.00.”

This report shows that digital piracy can reduce the growth of digital content. However it’s also encouraged many positives

Australia has begun to stand in favor of censorship by banning such things. Though Australia's efforts seem noble, they're so fundamentally flawed, it only increases the negative effect on the distribution of this malicious medium. The Electronic Frontier Foundation expounds on how this primarily valid idea is poorly constructed and will further increase the adverse consequences of this time of illicit dissemination: ".. filtering does little to curb the trade of child pornography, much of which is traded across peer to peer networks and VPNs" (EFF, 3). This same concept can be applied to piracy. Piracy is prevalent on the Internet, but by forcing regulations, people will only become more devious, and the effects of this will become more widespread. Furthermore, it can be argued that piracy helps small musicians and film studios gain recognition. David Blackburn, a PhD graduate of Harvard in economics did an extensive study on the projected amount of albums sold by indie artists in correlation to their piracy rate. Blackburn discovered that albums with a higher piracy rate sold more albums than those that didn't (Blackburn 21). Furthermore, artists that were not previously pirated resulted in up to a 10% sales increase when their content started being distributed illicitly (33). There is no

Imagine a musician who put their heart and soul into creating music that they can share with the whole world. He goes through the entire process of uploading his song onto ITunes. Except when he is done it appears that no one is buying his music. Everyone is buying his music for free off a piracy website called BitTorrent. Now he won’t be able to earn his money and he can’t get the official recognition he needs to become a top artist. Thousands of people are illegally downloading content of the internet. Websites like BitTorrent harbor and allow these people to basically steal other people’s work. This doesn’t only apply to the music industry though. Movie industry, software industries, and video games industries are getting hit from online piracy. One of the way industries compensate for their loses from piracy is by raising their prices for people who don’t download illegally. Which will lead

Record companies decided to embrace the profitable possibilities of using the internet and began working on legal pay services. These sites attracted customers by offering legal downloads of individual tracks for very low prices. As a result, millions of music lovers today enjoy downloading 99 cent tracks off of online merchants such as iTunes and Amazon. The music industry is also pleased with these legal pay services, because revenue is increasing again due to the ease, cost-effectiveness, and widespread popularity of buying and selling music digitally. While Fanning’s invention caused a lot of financial damage to the music industry, it also forced them to look towards the future and contemplate how it could adapt to the emerging internet age. Unfortunately, while the recording industry does make plenty of money from legal music downloads, Fanning and his legendary website have become the model for the dozens of illegal music file-sharing sites that have emerged over the past 16 years since Napster’s launch. The educational eMagazine, SchoolVideoNews, states that, “Software such as Gnutella, Limewire, Kazaa…and other free, open-source software used to trade any type of file…have been popular networks for pirating music since Napster” (Britt). These types of companies, and their users, are constantly discovered and sued by

In the year of 2005, there totaled 147 case files in the area of intellectual property crimes. (Weier) This number has risen exponentially throughout the 21st century, as more and more productions move to the realm of cyberspace. Hearing a coworker or peer bragging about illegally downloading films or music appears to be more common in the year 2016. The sudden advancement of technology appears to perpetuate a sense of virtual comfort in theft. Further, pro-piracy groups paint an argument that piracy composes very little potential to affect others negatively. Unfortunately, the resulting apathy cannot be easily targeted or terminated. End users may not have the experience or may simply not care much, as long as they possess the ability to easily get away with piracy. Laws should be pushed onto internet service providers in the case of formatting a response to suspicious client-server network traffic. The solution would be configured to allow privacy, while restricting the use of torrent sites that condone the distribution of illegal

The internet is an unregulated and chaotic environment that is only loosely governed by social norms that have been established by the more well-respected users leading the rest over many years. The anonymity of these billions of users allows them to break these rules and conventions with little risk of negative consequence. One of the biggest problems that stems from this is the pirating of media. Internet pirates will make media such as movies, television shows, and music available on websites such as The Pirate Bay, where users can download this content this free. This system takes money away from creators and designers and gives it to the advertisers on pirating websites.

“Hundreds of Internet users are suspected of illegally trading music using file-swapping services” (www.joelcomm.com, year). This surge in the illegal trading of music is having a major impact on the music industry this is why we should have harsher punishment of the illegal download of music .Many smaller and lesser known artists are suffering because they are not making any money form the downloading and illegal trading off their songs. The illegal download of copy righted music and the easy access to free songs from is affect many local businesses, many cd and music stores are closing down because off the illegal file trading and down loading of music. This calls for harsher punishment for the illegal down load of copy righted music. We

In response to this “epidemic of illegal file sharing” (RIAA 2003a), on June 26, 2003, RIAA redirected legal threats toward individual subscribers of these networks who, in the past, enjoyed anonymity in P2P environments. Prior to RIAA’s recent legal efforts, individual file sharers were almost completely immune from legal liability when violating copyright law. These recent legal developments have considerably altered that perceived notion (Graham 2003; Lichtman 2003). Owing to the impracticality of filing lawsuits against every individual file sharer, RIAA has chosen to focus on a relatively small group of individuals and maximize the publicity surrounding its legal action to discourage the overall participation in file‐sharing networks.

We all know that downloading pirated music and films is illegal, but what exactly is it? The term piracy refers to the copying and selling of music, films and other media illegally; in other words you are copying and selling copyrighted media without the permission of the original owner (NiDirect, n.d.). With the massive growth of the internet and its ability to store and capture vast amounts of data, we have become much more reliable on information systems in all aspects of life, but it does not come without the risk of information technology being used unethically. With the number of IT breakthroughs in recent years “the importance of ethics and human values has been underemphasised” often resulting in various consequences. Not surprisingly one of the many public concerns about the ethical use of IT is that “millions of people have downloaded music and movies at no charge and in apparent violation of copyright laws at tremendous expense to the owners of those copyrights” (Reynolds, Ethics in Information Technology, 2015). This essay covers the ethical issues of downloading pirated music and films and the impact it has on music corporations and recording and film companies.