Get the most out of legal file sharing

Index finger
File sharing and peer-to-peer technology have lived on long after the demise of the original Napster. In order to do so, they have evolved.

As Napster kept an index of the music on its service, it was relatively easy for the courts to shut it down: by simply ordering the company to shut off its servers, Napster could be stopped in one fell swoop.

In order to avoid this, the next generation of networks, such as Gnutella, Limewire and Kazaa, did away with the centralised index altogether.

With the networks harder to shut down, and no one company to focus their efforts on, groups representing the music industry turned their attention to the people who used these networks.

In the US, several members of the public found themselves being sued. In 2004, the RIAA is estimated to have filed more than 13,000 civil suits against individual music downloaders and uploaders in the US, including college students, single mothers and trainee nurses.

Here in the UK, the British Phonographic Industry appears to have, thus far, targeted only organised music piracy and so-called ‘serial uploaders’ who make thousands of music files available over the internet. Most famously, an unnamed postman and father-of-two from Sussex was ordered to pay a fine of £1,500 by a court in 2006.

Newer, more sophisticated file-sharing technologies have since come into wider usage, the most well known of which is Bittorrent. First developed in 2001, Bittorrent makes it possible to share large files without putting all the strain on the owner of the original copy.

Where Bittorrent differs from previous techniques is that it splits each file into pieces. Rather than downloading the whole file from one location, the program downloads these pieces from as many different computers as possible, and once pieces have been downloaded to its disk these are also shared with other users. As more and more people download the file, it becomes quicker for others to follow them.

Download dangers
One of the obvious drawbacks of peer-to-peer downloading is the issue of security. When downloading files from a file-sharing network, you are effectively downloading them from other users, who make no guarantee as to what those files may contain.

It is quite common for downloaded files to include viruses, Trojans and other unpleasant surprises hidden in an otherwise innocuous-looking file. What’s more, there’s no guarantee that the files you download will contain the music, video or file that you expected.

Equally, the fact that peer-to-peer programs provide other users with access to the contents of your hard disk can potentially leave your PC open to abuse. This is rarer, but in September last year the first person to have allegedly used file-sharing software to commit identity theft was arrested in Seattle, USA.

Gregory Thomas Kopiloff was indicted for allegedly copying personal records that were inadvertently shared by peer-to-peer users, then using these details to buy an estimated $73,000 worth of goods, which he then sold.

Despite these security risks, and the threat of possible legal action, many people continue to use
file-sharing networks to unlawfully distribute and download copyrighted music, movies and software.

Indeed, systems like the Bittorrent model make it even easier to share larger files, such as entire DVD-quality movies or disc images of illegally copied computer and video games, and the increase in these areas of piracy has seen a corresponding rise in action taken by relevant bodies in both industries.

The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), for instance, has gone as far as to provide American universities with software to track and report on student file-sharing activity on campus networks, raising some interesting questions about online privacy in the process.