Copyright Infringement Today, in the digital world

With the ease of a few clicks, music is quickly and easily copied across the globe on today's internet. Without much more difficulty, movies, books, TV episodes and software can be copied the same way. Today, 60 million AMERICANS, let alone other nationalities use one of the many methods to obtain copyrighted material - P2P, that's more than the number who voted for the current President of the USA.¹

Closer to home, at UQ there is a rather large amount of material available to be copied. For example, on the college network this year, there is 2.6TB of shared files, 133,444 music files and 6,647 movies.² While this may seem like a large amount, last year, 36.2TB of files were made available by students, so in reality, it is an immense decrease, most likely for legal reasons.³

So how do people pirate today?

Since the demise of Napster, the most common software used to pirate today is Kazaa. Other possibilities are the following:

• WinMX
• iMesh
• GNUtella (BearShare client)
• Morpheus
• DirectConnect
• Grokster
• WASTE
• EarthStation5

Most of these are really simple and easy to use, even for novice users. Please note that it is illegal to infringe on copyright.

WASTE and EarthStation5 are interesting examples, as these both promise complete privacy and anonymity, and hence freedom from legal threats. WASTE is suitable for small networks of up to 50 people, while EarthStation5 is designed for large scable networks such as Kazaa.

On a local university level, we have both ICSN and Big Cowboy which index all resources available on the network, just like Google - these are legal because their primary purpose is legal. Another method of finding infringing files to download is that of Google - Britney Spears, U2, and so forth.

So with Copyright Infringement so common, what are the recording companies doing?

In a nutshell, suing people, and many of them (1,663 at time of writing).

Unfortunately, it doesn't seem that it is much of a deterrant, as more people download music than buy it! (Analyst: Internet file-sharing bigger than record business) The suing, however, does have the effect of annoying music fans a lot. Any company that sues its customers probably won't be in business much longer.

It remains to be seen whether the record companies can survive.

Next -> So with everybody doing it, who are the real thieves?

Footnotes:

1. http://www.eff.org/share/, visited 04/10/2003
2. Statistics provided for October 2003 by the Big Cowboy Development Team, who wish to note that "[They] do not advocate or condone copyright infringement by any means." - Link is internal to colleges only.
3. See this letter, sent by the Principal of one University College.