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Metallica Wireless
Illegal Filesharing – Law Vs. Privacy
For years, file sharing has been a big story in the news. It seemed to be triggered by the legal battle won by the heavy rock band Metallica against Napster which rose awareness of the potential illegal downloading. In these current times, it is more or less common knowledge that one can download the latest blockbuster or album by their favourite artist but now the government are wanting to tighten up and stop this for good. A few sites have all ready been taken down such as PirateBay and the site Mininova is now only making legal content available. The reason they are not all illegal at the minute is because from their point of view, they are simply a directory – a list of links of where you can download files from. They don’t actually store any illegal files.
The peer 2 peer technology is actually a brilliant concept and very useful although it is mainly associated with illegal activity and therefore gained a bad reputation.
It works by using ’seeders’ and ‘leeches’. Seeders are those who have the file (or who have downloaded some of the file) and uploading it to the leeches. Leeches are those who are downloading the file from all the seeders getting different parts of files from different people which is managed by the torrent program. Leeches can also seed some of the file as they download and can limit the amount of data/the speed of data they send.
The plans by the government is to introduce a ‘three strike rule’ that must be stuck to by Internet service providers with hefty fines if they are not stuck to. It is believed that in the first instances of someone being caught, they will be warned via an email and/or a letter. In the second instance, their Internet speed/access may be reduced significantly for a temporary period. Finally, the ISP (Internet service provider) can disconnect the client.
Talk talk, a leading broadband supplier doesn’t believe this is fair as it is not only an infringement of our privacy (being able to see what we are downloading) but there could be instances where a customer’s wireless router is accessed and used to download an illegal file, the customer would then be contacted without any knowledge of the person outside using their router which is also illegal.
What are your thoughts?
On the one hand, statistics show that most illegal music downloaders purchase more music online than those who don’t and some believe that the enforcement of Internet disconnection abuses our privacy rights. On the other hand, this is damaging all the artists financially that have created the content and a lot of the contents quality is compromised anyway making the material not how the artist wanted it to be. Who would want to spend hours downloading a film only to find it is out of sync, with Swedish sound track and Spanish subtitles – not how the creator wants you to experience the film. Some artists have used it to their advantage however, and offered whole albums for free to promote their music.
About the Author
Daniel Moore is an IT expert at Insight (http://uk.insight.com). He has worked in the Technical Services department giving both pre-sales and post-sales advice. He can now be found giving pre-sales advice on the Insight’s on-line chat facility and is often working on new projects for the web.
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