The terms ‘file sharing’ and ‘peer-to-peer networking’ have some pretty negative connotations.

In the press, they’re more often than not associated with legal wrangles over copyright infringement, but you might be surprised to learn that there’s actually nothing illegal about the peer-to-peer networks themselves and, in principle, nothing unlawful about using them to share files.

It’s certainly true that many users of peer-to-peer networks continue to exploit this technology in order to illegally distribute large amounts of copyrighted material over the internet, but you’ll also find the exact same technology being used for a great number of perfectly legitimate uses, too.

In this feature we’re going to find out precisely what file sharing is, how it works and how it can be put to good use, and explain what’s legal and what’s not.

Caught Napping
At the end of the last millennium an 18-year-old student at Boston’s Northeastern University created a computer program that would eventually turn the music industry on its head and pave the way for music and films to be sold online. The student was Shawn Fanning and the program was called Napster.

At the time, digital music files and players were just beginning to take off. More and more people were converting their CD collections to a collection of MP3 files on their computer.

Fanning’s reason for creating Napster was simple: he wanted to develop a network that would link together every user’s digital music collection so that people could easily share songs, albums and artists’ entire back catalogues with one another free of charge.

Unlike a traditional website making files available for download, Napster didn’t actually store the music files itself ­ the files all remained on their respective owners’ hard disks. Instead, all it did was provide an index, showing who had a copy of each song.

By installing the Napster program, its users allowed others to download the songs they had. At the same time, they could search the service for songs that they wanted, and download them from the other users’ computers.

Share alike
This is the basic principle behind peer-to-peer networking. In simple terms, peer-to-peer networks don’t need to transfer files and other information through a central server. Instead, they create a network of direct connections between individual computers.

And, since the internet is basically a huge number of computers connected together, file-sharing programs are able to make the connections they need to transfer music, video or anything else quickly and easily.

This is a great idea, since it means that no single person or organisation needs to take responsibility for storing the files that users are sharing, and virtually all the power, bandwidth and storage space involved is being supplied by the users themselves.

In Napster’s case, however, this technology had some interesting legal implications. One of the reasons that the service wasn’t shut down straight away was because, while the act of freely distributing copyrighted material like digital music files in itself is undeniably illegal, there was no precedent at the time for deciding the legality of Napster’s involvement in the process.

Since Napster didn’t own, store or distribute the files itself, it was initially hard to implicate it in any crime.

Since digital copies of copyright-protected records were exchanging hands for nothing, however, people in the music industry understandably became extremely worried that the growing practice of file sharing would soon put them out of business.

It wasn’t long before everyone, from the rock group Metallica to the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), was on Napster’s back. After a series of high-profile court cases, Napster was forced to close its network in 2001, though it resurfaced in a completely different guise some years later (see ‘New Napster?’ below for details).