Reprinted from Renfrew-Collingwood News,
January/February 2003 Edition
Eve, a typical college student logs on to one of the many popular file sharing networks on the Internet and begins to download her favourite music, movies, software and e-books. Eve, like many of her peers, is your typical techno-pirate. Everyday, on one very popular file sharing network, roughly 3 to 4 million individuals like Eve are sharing some 650 million files.
File-sharing is nothing new of course. Back in the heydays of computers, file sharing between computers, was done by physically copying the files to a diskette and moving and installing it to another computer. Today, with exponential growth of the Internet and increasing popularity of high-speed Internet connections, moving and copying digital files has become easier and quicker. Files transferred by individuals, today, are not restricted to your standard office documents. Everyday, hours of full-length movies, commercial software and millions of music tracks are routinely transferred by millions of users all around the world.
Today, there are several Internet file sharing tools that are predominantly used by your typical downloader – IRC (Internet Relay Chat), Newsgroups, and Peer-to-peer (P2P) share programs. All the types of the aforementioned programs and tools work pretty much the same way. The most widely used technology is peer-to-peer file sharing programs. Unlike some of the other file-sharing technology, peer-to-peer sharing programs allow multiple computers to share and transfer files simultaneously. Currently, these programs have been a “great” big pain in the butt for a lot of software, music, movie vendors and publishers. Not only are millions of people around the world downloading and sharing movies, music, and software free of charge, but shutting down P2P file-sharing networks has also become a lost cause. Every time one of these networks is shut down another, seemingly, pops up in its place. Furthermore, P2P networks today are technologically designed to be unstoppable.
HOW P2P WORKS…
So what is this P2P business? The idea is simple. Individuals around the world that would like to share personal files stored on their hard drive needed an internet connection and software that would facilitate the transferring of files. In the beginning, P2P technology was very similar to the old card catalogues for books in the school library. All the files that individuals wanted to share were indexed by the software on their individual machines and send to a centrally located computer called a server. Anytime anyone wanted to look for a particular file, the software would go to this server and locate the machines that have this particular file and return the results to the individual searching for the file. After the individual chooses the file he or she wants, the computer than requests the file from the individual that is sharing it. Once the request for download has been accepted, downloading of the file begins (see
Figure 1, courtesy of
HowStuffWorks.com). Since the central index server is key to facilitating the sharing of files, shutting the network down is as simple as pulling the plug on the server and all file sharing will stop.Presently, the P2P networks work pretty much the same way as before but without the central index server. Each client (i.e. your computer) of the P2P network serves two purposes: (a) stores all the files the individual wants to share; and, (b) stores an index of what files are being shared by the individual. To locate files on the network, the computer requesting the file may have to ask several thousand computers on the network before results are returned. The returning result does not guarantee that there will be any results that match the initial request. Furthermore, the new P2P networks take a little longer to return search results than its predecessor (See
Figure 2, courtesy of HowStuffWorks.com). Shutting down a P2P network would require pulling the plug on all computers around the world connected to this network.
Because of inherent differences in interpretation and enforcement of copyright laws in countries around the world, plus the realization that the laws will always be playing catch up to technology, both the industry and government are changing the way they are attacking the problem of Internet piracy.
INDUSTRY SOLUTIONS…The music and movie industry have begun to offer legitimate downloads of music tracks and select movie titles. Most services are generally subscription based and individuals pay a small monthly fee to access the limited library of music online. Individuals, depending on the service he or she subscribes to, can either download the tracks to their personal computer or have the music streamed to their machines. The latter is similar to the broadcast of radio signals to your AM/FM radio; the music is not actually downloaded, but broadcast to the individual’s machine whenever he or she goes to the website and logs in. Some subscription services allow their subscribers to download music tracks and transfer them to blank CDs and/or portable digital music players called MP3 players, while others only allow the downloaded files to be played on the individual’s computer using a service-specific music player. Furthermore, time and play limits have also been used by some of these services to further control the illegal spread of the files. If you plan to subscribe to one of the music download services on the web, you should be aware of: (a) any restrictions; and, (b) the cost of the service.
Sites for Legal Music Downloads (Updated April 2005):
Sites for Movie Downloads:
Online DVD Rental Services are available, click here to read more about them.
A UNIQUELY CANADIAN GOVERNMENT SOLUTION…
In the US, most of the remedies to the problem of stopping piracy of intellectual properties on the Internet have been done primarily through the judicial system. However, in Canada, copyright laws are a little bit different and thus require the government to tackle the same problem differently. Under Canadian copyright laws, “private copying” for “personal use” is legal and does not infringe copyright. The Canadian government uses a tariff mechanism to compensate musicians, record labels, songwriters, and music publishers. Basically, each and every time you go out to buy blank CDs, audio tapes, recordable DVDs, etc. you have paid the hidden tariff or levy included in the retail price of the blanks. The tariff is collected directly from the manufacturers and importers, by the Canadian Private Copying Collective and redistributed. At time of writing, the new tariffs for 2003 and 2004 are still being debated and have not yet been ratified. The current tariffs on blank audio media are: 29¢ for each audio cassette 40 min and longer in length; 40¢ for each CD, CD-RW; and, 77¢ for each CD-R Audio, CD-RW Audio, Minidisc. Since the writing of this article, the tariffs have been amended:
- Audio cassettes (of 40 minutes or more in length): 29¢ each
- CD-R and CD-RW: 21¢ each
- CD-R Audio, CD-RW Audio and MiniDisc: 77¢ each
- For non-removable memory permanently embedded in a digital audio recorder: $2 for each recorder that can record no more than 1 Gb of data, $15 for each recorder that can record more than 1 Gb and no more than 10 Gbs of data, and $25 for each recorder that can record more than 10 Gbs of data.
In the end, no amount of policing, curbs, and enforcement by the government, industry trade groups, or companies will ever fully shut down these networks. Stemming the proliferation of file-sharing networks would, perhaps, require nothing less than the changing of individual morals and values.
See you soon,
~ GeekBoy
If you have any comments, questions, or suggestions, you can drop me an e-mail me at: gb.technobytes@gmail.com
Posted by Geekboy 
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