P2p File Sharing Of Copyrighted Material - 1952 Words

Dylan Crees Iowa State University Philosophy 343 - Dr. Tsou May 4th, 2016 P2P File Sharing of Copyrighted Material Introduction Anyone who owns a computer that has a reliable internet connection can potentially download a torrent client and participate in peer-to-peer file sharing. Using a web browser to download files from websites is a lot different than downloading files from peers because instead of obtaining the files from a web server you are obtaining the files directly from ordinary computers like your own, hence the name peer-to-peer (P2P). A lot of people use P2P file sharing as way of sharing and obtaining copyrighted material. In this paper I’ll go over some of the details of P2P file sharing, why it’s such a big issue for†¦show more content†¦Often times popular television shows will be shared less than 24 hours after airing and this availability plays a crucial role in the amount of people who are actively downloading and sharing. As of May 4th, 2016 approximately 35,000 people are actively sharing Season 2 Episode 20 of The Flash television series which aired the previous day on May 3rd. On top of that another 10,000+ people are downloading the same episode, and that’s just a single torrent. Screenshot taken from Kick Ass Torrents homepage (https://kat.cr/tv/). All of these people are sharing/downloading a single episode of a television series. There are thousands upon thousands of people sharing and downloading copyrighted material every second. This includes movies, music, television shows, e-books, computer software, video games, etc. From 2008 to 2014 file sharing in North America increased a substantial 44% (Steele) and since 98.8 percent of all P2P file sharing data is copyrighted, this implies that the illegal sharing of intellectual property using torrents and P2P file sharing has been climbing steadily. One of the reasons I think that online piracy is becoming more popular is because it’s extremely easy to do and a lot of people don’t even think they’re doing anything wrong when downloading copyrighted material from the internet. There are also an outrageous number of people who participate in online piracy and it’s