File Sharing: A Tool for Innovation, or a Criminal Instrument?
Andrew Eichner The dawn of peer-to-peer networks and the subsequent rise of file sharing over the Internet have proved to be a considerable threat to the revenues of the Recording Industry Association of America (“RIAA”) and the international music community. While early music downloading across peer-to-peer networks on the Internet was largely limited “to college students with access to fast pipes and techno geeks sufficiently driven to search the Net for the latest Phish bootlegs,” the market for illegally downloaded music taken from file sharing websites has expanded to astronomic proportions and continues to do so even at present. The...