Copy Locally, Share Globally: A Survey of P2P Litigation around the World and the Effect on the Technology Behind Unauthorized File Sharing

摘要

The advent of peer-to-peer file-sharing. technology (P2P) has made it easy for people to freely distribute, download, and copy audio and videos in digital format anywhere in the world. While the original concept behind P2P was to empower peers within a network of computers to share resources, the rise of many P2P services such as Napster and Grokster and the dramatic decline in music and video sales have prompted the recording industry to take aggressive legal actions on a global scale to curtail unauthorized distribution of copyrighted materials.