Copyrights

Torrents-A New Threat to Copyrights

There has been a renewed push recently to crack down on film piracy. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jackie Chan produced a public service announcement to advise Chinese consumers to not buy pirated movies and other goods. [1] The public service announcement was released in Hong Kong, were a week earlier, a Chan Nai-ming was given a three month jail sentence for sharing three movies on the Internet. [2]

File sharing has gone through an evolution; from back in the early days of the Internet, users could find files on bulletin board systems (BBS). At this time, in the late 80s and early 90s, the Internet as we know it did not exist. In order to get on a BBS, someone had to be computer savvy. In those days we were lucky to have a 2400 baud modem, to manually dial into the BBS. Now we have DSL or cable Internet connections at home. Once we were on the BBS, we had to navigate using text commands, instead of the graphics rich environment of the Web.

As the Internet evolved, it became easier to share files. Napster allowed us to share music files with a program that even novice computer users could understand. Now torrent files allow for the sharing of large files, like movies and software. Chan Nai-ming used torrent files and a program called BitTorrent to allow others to access movies on his computer.