Intellectual Property Rights Online File Sharing Brett Colbert Wendi Jardin Victor Cortez Brett Colbert Wendi Jardin Victor Cortez

 Legal Issues  Cases  Organizations  Strategy

 Copyrights, patents, trade marks, etc.  Provides the legal protection upon which authors, inventors, firms and others rely to protect their creations

“In Canada, the government has made it half- legal...Canadians can download music, but not upload it. In other parts of the world like the USA, the UK, Australia, and Europe, file sharers will get sued in class-action lawsuits, often for tens of thousands of dollars.”

“The great controversy is over copyright and money: that music and movie artists claim that they are not paid rightfully when users share files without the artists' express permission.”

 Record Industry Association of America (RIAA)  Formed in 1952  Goals:  To protect intellectual property rights worldwide and the First Amendment rights of artists;  To perform research about the music industry;  To monitor and review relevant laws, regulations and policies.

 Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA)  Leadership began in 1922  Film Rating System  Goal:  Limit the reduction in profits caused by file sharing and other types of copyright infringement

Tired of the entertainment industry treating you like a criminal for wanting to share music and movies online? We are too--EFF is fighting for a constructive solution that gets artists paid while making file sharing legal.

 Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)  Founded July 1990  EFF fights to preserve balance and ensure that the Internet and digital technologies continue to empower you as a consumer, creator, innovator, scholar, and citizen.

 EFF has spent the past year evaluating alternatives that get artists paid while making file sharing legal. One solution has emerged as the favorite: voluntary collective licensing.

 The concept is simple: the music industry forms a collecting society, which then offers file-sharing music fans the opportunity to "get legit" in exchange for a reasonable regular payment, say $5 per month. So long as they pay, the fans are free to keep doing what they are going to do anyway— share the music they love using whatever software they like on whatever computer platform they prefer—without fear of lawsuits. The money collected gets divided among rights-holders based on the popularity of their music.

 In exchange, file-sharing music fans will be free to download whatever they like, using whatever software works best for them. The more people share, the more money goes to rights-holders. The more competition in applications, the more rapid the innovation and improvement. The more freedom to fans to publish what they care about, the deeper the catalog.

 On December 7, 1999, the RIAA sued Napster for providing a service which enabled users to download MP3 files off other users machines. The RIAA claims that Napster "facilitates piracy of music on an unprecedented scale." In 2002 the RIAA also sued Aimster, which provided a similar service. Napster became bankrupt during the case; and has since been taken over by Roxio and provides a download service which is sanctioned by the RIAA.

 Verizon  Patricia Santangelo  Tanya Andersen  Capitol Records v. Debbie Foster  AllofMp3.com  Elektra v. Barker  Jammie Thomas  Sony v. Crain

 Napster pioneered the concept of peer-to-peer file sharing.  Your machine connected to Napster's central servers. It told the central servers which files were available on your machine. So the Napster central servers had a complete list of every shared song available on every hard disk connected to Napster at that time.

 There is no central database that knows all of the files available on the Gnutella network. Instead, all of the machines on the network tell each other about available files using a distributed query approach.  There are many different client applications available to access the Gnutella network.

 Unlike other download methods, BitTorrent maximizes transfer speed by gathering pieces of the file you want and downloading these pieces simultaneously from people who already have them.

 Leeches - People who download files but do not share files on their own computer with others  Seed or seeder - A computer with a complete copy of a BitTorrent file.  Swarm - A group of computers simultaneously sending (uploading) or receiving (downloading) the same file. .torrent - A pointer file that directs your computer to the file you want to download  Tracker - A server that manages the BitTorrent file- transfer process