New media has enabled us to share files over the internet, this is called file-sharing. There are many file-sharing sites which enables
us to upload or download things on the internet. However, an illegal trend has been spotted. Threat report says the number of new
file-sharing sites are hosting illegal copyrighted material ever since a Swdish judge ordered an ISP to cut off bandwidth to BitTorrent tracker site The Priate Bay 3 months ago.
Such trend could be due to the economic downturn, or technology is so advance that it is easier to download a movie for free rather than
going to the cinema to watch it. Having a decent boardband in all homes are easy these days, thus with the magic of BitTorrent, people
can download a 700MB nXVID movie to their desktops not more than 20 minutes. People will only go to the cinema if only the movie is worth
the money to pay for. The movie tickets being 10 dollars and above does not help the situation. In fact it even worsen the problem as people
sees as paying for the boardband fee over the year is much more worth it than going to the cinema.
The Pirate Bay proves how difficult it is to remove copyrighted material once it is up on the internet. Even if the website is down, database
of content can be kept in the HDD’s of BitTorrent users around the globe. This enable them to restore the database after they found another ISP.
Even if the website is down, the users can upload what they have on another website, thus the copyrighted material is still on the internet.
On the other hand, The Pirate Bay was able to relocate quickly and was up and running within 24hours after its down.
BitTorrent was not the only way for file-sharing. FTP sites are capable of file-sharing too. Someone on an FTP site can post copyrighted material,
then another person can directly download from that FTP site. This is an never ending cycle of file-sharing. Even usenet operates on a
multi-server basis where content is populated over several servers around the world. Copyright holders are fighting a losing battle against
file-sharing sites as they shut down a site and many more appeared to replace that site.
The article was taken from http://www.zeropaid.com/news/87203/mcafee-number-of-illegal-file-sharing-sites-up-300/
