Debate: File Sharing & Piracy

Internet transactions are more apt to commit a copyright offense than their offline equivalents. That's because every transaction on the Internet involves copies. The Internet is a system for efficiently making copies between computers. Whereas a conversation in your kitchen involves mere perturbations of air by noise, the same conversation on the net involves making thousands of copies. Every time you press a key, the keypress is copied several times on your computer, then copied into your modem, then copied onto a series of routers, thence (often) to a server, which may make hundreds of copies both ephemeral and long-term, and then to the other party(ies) to the conversation, where dozens more copies might be made.

Copyright law valorizes copying as a rare and noteworthy event. On the Internet, copying is automatic, massive, instantaneous, free, and constant. Clip a Dilbert cartoon and stick it on your office door and you're not violating copyright. Take a picture of your office door and put it on your homepage so that the same co-workers can see it, and you've violated copyright law, and since copyright law treats copying as such a rarified activity, it assesses penalties that run to the hundreds of thousands of dollars for each act of infringement.

There's a word for all the stuff we do with creative works — all the conversing, retelling, singing, acting out, drawing, and thinking: we call it culture. (Doctorow, 2008)

Today on my networked media workshops we had a debate: File Sharing & Piracy.

The motion under discussion was:

This house believes that File Sharing should be legal and culture on the internet should be free.

My group was pro-motion – For file sharing

The benefits of file sharing are:

"In a file sharing environment, a large number of users can access a program as though it were on their local machines, when actually the program resides on a single file server. This is a great benefit to small workstations, where disk space is at a premium. A user can have access to a much larger program repertoire than could fit on a private disk.
By having a resource reside physically on a single server, then distributed throughout the network, you can greatly simplify administration. First, you reduce the number of copies of various programs that need to be maintained on the network. Second, you reduce the problems involved in performing backups for a number of machines dispersed over a wide geographical area. By keeping files in a single location, this task becomes comparable to backing up a single machine."


Reference:

Doctorow, C. (2008) [WWW] http://www.locusmag.com/Features/2008/11/cory-doctorow-why-i-copyfight.html [Accessed 23/04/13]

[WWW] Available from: http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_are_the_advantages_and_disadvantages_of_file_sharing [Accessed 23/04.13]