An Examination of File-sharing on the Internet Essay -- Research File

An Examination of File-sharing on the InternetNapster and its break dance held the promise of everything the new medium of the Internet encompassed youth, radical change and the unloosen alter of information. But youthful exuberance would soon give track to reality as the music industry placed a bulls-eye forthrightly on Napster. I. Introduction Today the use of a computer has provided some(prenominal) another(prenominal) privileges to its users, and among those privileges the main and largest one is the distribution of information across the internet. Through the internet, the clean person has the ability to access millions of databases of information at no cost. This is the tendency that the internet was founded on that all people could come together to exchange ideas freely, without fear of rebuke or prosecution. However that time seems to be a small scratch on the long wall of history, for a few years ago a simple file-sharing program cal direct Napster sprung up on the internet, and in doing so opened up a whole apprize of controversy . File-sharing became such a complicated issue as many files are, at their root, simply information. However that information has copyrights and ownership attached to it, a fact that cannot be overlooked by the world no head how much they would like. Thus, those users around the world who choose to share files are instantly being pursued by huge corporations with ridiculous threats of a $15,000 first-rate per song downloaded (and they havent even began to pursue the infringements of movies or software product yet). But are these companies justified in their actions? Does the basis for file-sharing really mug such a harsh rebuttal? To determine this, lets take a look at the long road that led us to the junction of chaos we now f... ...er Died, May 2002, Wired News, 16 Nov. 2003.vi Approaching Ethics Markkula Center for Applied Ethics, Santa Clara University, 2000, 3, .vii File communion package get s the Legal OK, 2001, Amplifier, 17 November 2003, . viii Grossman Hasnain Holton Morrissey Roston Taylor Chu. ITS ALL FREE Time. May 200318.ix Ernesto Damiani. Managing and Sharing Servents Reputations in P2P Systems, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge & Data Engineering 15 (2003)1x Berdichevsky & Neuenschwander, Ethics of Persuasive Technology, Communications of the ACM, 15 November 2003, .