File sharing has become a huge part of everyday life for everyone from college students to business professionals. It is important to understand because there are many regulations involved that should be followed, but sometimes aren't. The downloading and sharing of music and videos is especially relevant to college students who, like me, download on a daily basis. Surprisingly, there is a history regarding file sharing and it isn't just recent history like you may think.
The timeline of file sharing dates back as far as the 1970's when the floppy disk was invented. File sharing was simply putting files on disk and carrying them around. File Transfer Protocol (FTP) was established in 1985. This allows a client's computer to connect to the central FTP server to upload, download, and manipulate files. This is the basic concept of file sharing. While living on camps last year, it was nice to be able to connect to UB's network and have access to a huge selection of music that was available from other's library.
The most important topic relevant to file sharing today, and one that impacted the high school or college aged student is the development of Napster in 1999. It was the first peer-to-peer file sharing which allowed 2 personal computers to connect and share music MP3 files through a central server. The library of music became huge and college networks became overloaded. People could download free music, sometimes unreleased material, and burn it onto a CD. Hurting record sales and music leaks made some artists file legal material against Napster and demand their music be removed from the service. In 2001 Napster was shut down and ordered by court to pay millions in damages to music copyright holders. They then filed for bankruptcy but were eventually bought out and turned into a subscription service which is still available today.
In addition to the legal issues, there are many ways to damage your computer with peer-to-peer file sharing. Viruses can easily be spread especially on computers with no firewalls or protection. Today, there are many ways to easily obtain music, and the pay services like iTunes for example, are relatively inexpensive and cheaper than buying an actual CD. Buying on iTunes is legal and proceeds still go to the artist.
File sharing has developed over a long period of time all the way from floppy disks in the 70's to peer-to-peer sharing of MP3 files in the 90's and 2000's, and will surely continue to develop in the future.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
Nice post and interesting history. What do you think prompted the p2p music sharing phenomenon? After all, filesharing technologies had already been around for decades. We'll be discussing this topic next week, as well.
Post a Comment