The Global Ethical Perspective of Peer-to-peer File-sharing Essay

The Global Ethical Perspective of Peer-to-peer File-sharing Introduction 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. Background The Internet is a shared resource, a cooperative network built out of millions of hosts all over the world. In the year 2000, the network model that survived the enormous growth of the previous five years had been turned on its head. Through the music-sharing application called Napster, and the larger movement dubbed â€Å"peer-to-peer,† the millions of users connecting to the Internet began connecting to each other directly, forming groups and collaborating to become user-created search engineers, virtual supercomputers, and file systems. The original Internet was fundamentally designed as a peer-to-peer system. Over time it became increasingly client/server, with millions of consumer clients communicating with a relatively privileged set of servers. Current peer-to-peer applications are using the Internet much as it was originally designed: as a medium for communication for machines that share resources with each other as equals. The Internet was originally conceived in the late 1960s as a peer-to-peer system. The goal of ... ...erspace: Dealing with Law Enforcement and the Courts. November 1999 in Proceedings of the 27th annual ACM SIGUCCS conference on User services: Mile High expectations. [8] D. K. Mulligan, J. Han, A. J. Burstein: Copyrights and Access-Rights: How DRM-based Content Delivery Systems Disrupt Expectations of †Personal Use†. October 2003 in Proceedings of the 2003 ACM workshop on Digital rights management. [9] D. Clark: Future of intellectual property: How Copyright became controversial. April 2002 in Proceedings of the 12th Annual Conference on Computers, Freedom and Privacy. [10] N. Garnett: Digital Rights Management, Copyright, and Napster. March 2001 in ACM SIGecom Exchanges, Volume 2 Issue 2. [11] J. Evers: File Swapping Fight Goes Global: Recording industry says P-to-P users in Canada and Europe could face legal action. March 30, 2004 in IDG News Service.