Recent Development in Fight against Peer to Peer File Sharing: Legal Issues and Alternative Solutions - Assignment Example

According to the paper intellectual property piracy especially in software sectors and music industries are really the biggest challenge in today's world. In the year 2008, ninety five percent of the music was down- loaded illegally1. In order to address this problem, the entertainment industries have started their litigation against the file sharing problems. The first litigation was started a year after the first generation of P2P software was introduced. Napster (music focused on online service) has enabled its users to search and to download protected work, therefore, the entertainment industries sue the web provider under the secondary liability principal for vicarious and contributory liability, for providing access and hosting of protected work infringement to the users.

Initially this act was effective and protective for the technologies which facilitated infringement, however, the application of law against the new generation of the p2p application with decentralized severs like Grokester and Bit Torrent were difficult, hence the secondary liability on new generation right holders was announced about the litigation against the direct infringer with 30,000 litigations against individuals in United States2. Nevertheless, it is not the fault of p2p applications for these infringements, instead it is the greedy individuals who are involved in the law infringement.

As the study declares if the property holders blacklist one p2p application, the intruders will go for an alternative application. This paper examines the technological difficulties and the legal barriers faced by the right-holders in their fight against the p2p file sharing, with a comprehensive focus on the defendants of p2p infringement such as: web providers, individuals and ISP. This paper also attempts at showing the ineffectiveness of legal litigation against these defendants and at providing alternative solutions to prevent the P2P file sharing infringements.

Software Provider From Sony Safe Harbor To Open End Secondary Liability: Secondary liability is a common law principal, imposed on the parties who have some level of involvement in copy right infringements but who are not considered as the primary infringers3. The standard for secondary liability of technology providers was started by the sony v. universal in 1984. With an innovation of time shifting ability of VTR to record and to revise copyrighted TV programs, the Supreme Court of US held that the technology provider with an “ Substantial non-infringement use” are not liable for future infringement use.

This decision made de-facto standard and brought the safe harbor for technology innovation. However this safe harbor has been left in 2001 a year after the Napster was sued for vicarious and contributory liability. Shawn Fanning, an eighteen-year old college drop-out looking for a better way to find music on the Internet, created the source code, or underlying program, for what would become known as "Napster," the first generation P2P file sharing technology. The Napster program enables the users to access and to download individual songs or entire albums through Napster.

There was no apparent limit on how many files the user could share through the system.