Isn’t there too much Fuss over p2p File Sharing?
Thursday, February 28th, 2008During the last couple weeks there’s been much noise over the BBC Newsnight show on Friday 24 February in which BitTorrent was accused of being a harbour for terrorists and pedophiles. Debatable as it is, it caused a surge of anger on the part of p2p users that can be seen on the BitTorrent forum. Ultimately the BBC officials had to appologize. Certainly no technology can be judged upon only by behaviour of a small portion of users and one should be careful choosing words. Moreover if we continued the line we could end up banning the Inernet itself, so the outrage of BitTorrent users is quite reasoned. However what’s more important and what both sides seem to have forgotten is the so-called sensitive legal issues concerning peer-to-peer file sharing. On one hand the technology was created for sharing all kind of music video and text files by allowing other users to copy your files and thus participating in a file sharing community. This technology can not be called illegal as it is capable of substantial non-infringing use, i.e. it does not necessarily imply acquisition and distribution of copyrighted material. While on the other hand the BitTorrent file sharing protocol is a perfect tool for acquiring next to any music or video file without paying a cent which no doubt causes losses to copyright holders. According to the U.S. Justice Department the total loss caused by internet-piracy exceeds hundreds millions dollars. And if we consider reliable the data provided by BBC that Torrent traffic accounts for more than a third of the internet, it becomes evident that the losses are more than substantial enough to be talked about.
