File sharing has been making big news in the US ever since the advent of Napster in June of 1999. While file sharing technology is legal, the vast majority of multimedia files being exchanged over peer-to-peer (P2P) networks are copyrighted, making such exchanges illegal under intellectual property right laws. Since Napster’s heyday, album sales are down by thirty percent and the film industry is losing an estimated $5.5 billion to movie piracy annually. Since 2003, the recording industry has sent thousands of cease-and-desist letters to illegal file swappers the nation over and has thus far filed suit against over 17,000 people, including an estimated 1,000 students.
This year, the Supreme Court took up the issue, unanimously ruling in the case of MGM v. Grokster that creating new technology that enables copyright infringement is not illegal, but that actively encouraging it is. It comes as little surprise then that sharing copyrighted files is also still certified illegal. That being the case, hardly anyone seems to have noticed. Billions of files are being exchanged over P2P networks every month and while a new crop of paid services like iTunes and Yahoo Music has emerged over the last several years, the fact remains that ten times as many songs are downloaded illegally through P2P networks than through all the paid services combined.
It seems that while many file sharers would openly acknowledge that their activity is illegal, few would describe their activity as unethical or morally troubling. While the recording industry (RIAA) has equated downloading copyrighted files with lifting a CD from a musician’s rack, such a connection is often lost on even the most casual downloader. This seems to be a measure of two things.
First, many independent musicians have begun openly distributing their music on the Internet. According to some copyright experts, the large majority of artists lose very little from copyright infringement; it is the corporate labels and big name acts that lose the most. In the face of rising album costs, few file sharers have expressed sympathy for the handful of superstars and record execs that stand to lose a small share of their millions.
Second, the Internet has, over the past decade, revolutionized popular perceptions about what constitutes intellectual property rights and how intellectual property should be distributed. In 2000, Charles C. Mann, a writer for the Atlantic Monthly, referred to the P2P phenomenon as the “heavenly jukebox,” a “vast intellectual commons [where] nothing will ever again be out of print or impossible to find; every scrap of human culture transcribed, no matter how obscure or commercially unsuccessful will be available to all.”
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