FILE SHARING:

WHAT IS IT? IS IT LEGAL?

If you own a PC and have high-speed Internet, you probably have heard of or wondered about file sharing. Almost everyone has had a “friend” recommend or at least tell them about a way to download music (or software) for free. It is my intention to clear up some misconceptions about file sharing and what may or may not be legal about this type of activity.

In order to understand file sharing and music downloading, one must understand what is referred to as MP3 technology. MP3 is basically a way to compress music files without losing much in the way of sound quality.

MP3 compression explained in detail:

A CD stores a song as digital information. The data on a CD uses an uncompressed, high-resolution format. Here's what happens when a CD is created:

l Music is sampled 44,100 times per second. The samples are 2 bytes (16 bits) long.

l Separate samples are taken for the left and right speakers in a stereo system.

So, a CD stores a huge number of bits for each second of music:

44,100 samples/second * 16 bits/sample * 2 channels = 1,411,200 bits per second

Let's break that down: 1.4 million bits per second equals 176,000 bytes per second. If an average song is three minutes long, then the average song on a CD consumes about 32 million bytes of space. That's a lot of space for one song, and it's especially large when you consider that over a 56K phone modem, it would take close to two hours to download that one song.

The MP3 format is a compression system for music. The MP3 format helps reduce the number of bytes in a song without hurting the quality of the song's sound. The goal of the MP3 format is to compress a CD-quality song by a factor of 10 to 14 without noticeably affecting the CD-quality sound. With MP3, a 32-megabyte (MB) song on a CD compresses down to about 3 MB. This lets you download a song in minutes rather than hours and store hundreds of songs on your computer’s hard disk drive without taking up that much space.

What can be done with MP3’s?

You can download MP3 files from the Internet and play them on your computer, listen to them on a portable MP3 player or even burn your own CDs. The problem that arises is usually associated with the problem of “where to obtain the MP3’s?”

In early 1999, Shawn Fanning began to develop an idea as he talked with friends about the difficulties of finding the kind of MP3 files they were interested in. He thought that there should be a way to create a program that combined three key functions into one. These functions are:

l Search engine: Dedicated to finding MP3 files only

l File sharing: The ability to trade MP3 files directly, without having to use a centralized server for storage

l Internet Relay Chat (IRC): A way to find and chat with other MP3 users while online

Fanning, only 18 at the time, spent several months writing the code that would become the utility Napster. He uploaded the original beta version to download.com, where it quickly became one of the hottest downloads on the site. Napster is the original “file-sharing” type of software program. Many others have followed in Napster’s footsteps, including Kazaa, Morpheus, LimeWire, BearShare and a host of others.

Piracy Issues – Is file sharing legal?

The problem that the music industry had with Napster was that it was a big, automated way to copy copyrighted material. It is a fact that thousands of people were, through Napster, making thousands of copies of copyrighted songs, and neither the music industry nor the artists got any money in return for those copies. (This type of piracy is still happening now through sites other than Napster.) Many people loved Napster because they could get music for free instead of paying $15 for a CD. The music industry, however, was against Napster because people could get music for free instead of paying $15 for a CD. Napster's defense was that the files were personal files that people maintained on their own machines and, therefore, Napster was not responsible.

Napster was shut down by a court order because the court found in favor of the recording industry; stating that Napster was distributing copyrighted material. As previously stated, this continues to this day with some of the sites listed above among many others.

Besides the fact that file sharing users can be sued by the recording industry, one of the main reasons that I do not recommend file sharing is due to the fact that the files that you download are coming from another user’s hard drive. This is one of the main reasons that people have problems with Spyware and viruses. The files that you download are not scanned for infections and may infect your PC as you download them. Because most file sharing sites make you install some sort of software to use them, their installation software sometimes installs other programs with them without your knowledge (including Spyware programs).

The lure of free music and software is sometimes too much for users to turn down and they continue to use these types of sites regardless of the risks. If you are looking for MP3’s, I recommend legal sites such as iTunes, Rhapsody, and even the newly revised LEGAL Napster. Most sites charge $1 per song or $10 per CD.