Peer to Peer Technology and Copyright

Peer to Peer Technology and Copyright

Recently, there has been a series of copyright infringement litigations against Internet businesses that are involved with unauthorized distribution of music files. The US recording industry claims to lose three million dollars per year because of piracy. A report predicted an estimated 16 percent of all US music sales, or 985 million dollars would be lost due to online piracy by 2002 (Foege, 2000; cited from McCourt & Burkart, 2003) Even though this claim has to be taken with caution, as it is based on false assumption that if copyright laws were strictly enforced, audio pirates would become buyers, it is apparent that audio piracy grew to a worrisome level for the record industry. (Gayer & Shy, 2003)

It is not unusual to find hostile response of audio-visual industry against a new copying technology. Every time when a new copying technology was invented and introduced into the market, the industry responded argued that the new technology would cause significant damage to them by promoting piracy; It was true with the cases of Xerox, audio tape recorder, video tape recorder, compact disc (CD), and finally with the online file sharing through Peer-to-Peer (P2P) service. Usually, introduction of new copying technology led to series of legal disputes just like what we are witnessing in the current case of the Record Industry Association of America’s (RIAA) lawsuits against KaZaA and its individual members. Quite contrary to the industry’s usual arguments, however, new technologies eventually have proved additional revenues of profit for them so far. (Bettig, 1996)

Will we find a replication of this history in P2P technology? Even though we will have to wait qui...

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...don't share it, don't talk about it," read one message.

"The record companies have made billions off the consumers," read another post. "They have overcharged us for years. Why not boycott all new music and watch their attitude change?" (RIAA to sue individual file sharers, Benny Evangelista, The San Francisco Chronicle, June 26, 2003)

9[9] IUMA (Internet Underground Music Archive) is a pioneering site that established direct meetings between the artists and the customers. Born in 1993, this site introduced new artists and distributed their works, who could not distribute their works thru conventional market. The band pay annual fees the operator and the users download songs for free. With a thousand registered bands, it attracted a quarter million users a day earning a million dollars per year within 3 years after the launch. (Bloom, 1997, cited from Nam, 2003).